LOCATION: Edison Place Gallery, 701 8th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001
JUROR: GLENN HARPER, editor Sculpture
SCULPTURE UNBOUND was juried from digital images and slides by Glenn Harper, editor of Sculpture magazine. Mr. Harper was former editor of Art Papers, and has written for Artforum, Public Art Review, and other journals, as well as contributing essays to books and catalogues on the works of artists John Van Alstine, Athena Tacha, and others.
WORK CONSIDERED: Three-dimensional freestanding sculpture, wall and ceiling hung sculpture, installations, and new media. No pedestals will be provided. Gallery has 8 feet high ceilings, loading dock with standard double door to enter the gallery, movable walls and track lighting. All work accepted and exhibited must remain on display for the full duration of the show.
THE WASHINGTON SCULPTORS GROUP is a volunteer, nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting awareness of sculpture and fostering exchanges among sculptors, sculpture enthusiasts and the public. Organized in 1984, membership has grown to almost 400. WSG sponsors frequent public programs and organizes professional sculpture exhibitions juried by prominent curators. Recent projects include an electronic bulletin, an image bank of members’ work, a regular newsletter and the website www.washingtonsculptors.org
THE WASHINGTON PROJECT FOR THE ARTS/CORCORAN is an independent, nonprofit 501-c (3) organization whose mission is to promote excellence in contemporary art in the region by presenting experimental exhibitions and performances, stimulating dialogue between emerging and established artists, and involving artists in educational programs that benefit local residents.
When the exhibition title “Sculpture Unbound” was first proposed, two ideas of the show occurred to me: the first a simple joke (I’m the editor of a printed, bound magazine on sculpture, and the exhibition would be the “unbound” presentation of sculpture in the gallery rather than the magazine’s pages); the second a reference to the Greek plays about Prometheus, first bound (for his Mephisophelian crime of bringing
knowledge to mankind) and then liberated, unbound. But what bondage is sculpture released from? Historically, sculpture descended from the pedestal, moved from its link to architecture and the figure, and began to flow in new directions, into the “expanded field” of polyvalent, contemporary art-making.
E.H. Gombrich described the history of art, in his book Art and Illusion, as a process of “making and matching,” in the service of an increasing realism in artists’ depiction of nature—just as a scientist employs a schema and subsequent modifications in the process of experimentation. Gombrich ends his history with the separation of making and matching, as the Modernists shifted toward making in itself, not in the pursuit of the matching or representation of nature but the revelation of psychological realities. But throughout the past 100 years, making and matching have continued to shift, “matching” having turned into the representation (or even direct presentation) of the things of consumer culture and everyday life rather than the depiction of nature; and “making” leaving behind even the realization of inner realities to become a way of thinking or working directly in materials. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift proposes a universal language of things: people should carry around a big bag of objects and when they need to refer to something, pull the thing itself out of the bag. Contemporary artists have taken Swift’s philosophical joke seriously, attempting to think and speak in things, to directly employ the stuff of our world, whether natural or cultural.
This art of “making” does not portray, it embodies, and is thus the natural milieu of the sculptor rather than the painter. The art in this exhibition isn’t “like” something in the real world, it is the same stuff, after passing through the hands of the maker, the artist, using a rhetoric of synecdoche or metonymy, not metaphor: ooperating through proximity or participation, rather than by similarity. The material is from nature, from the streets, from the factory, even from the art store (paint or pigment becomes substantial stuff rather than a medium for representing something else). These sculptures do not depict something, they are a direct, messy incarnation of the process of making art.
- Glenn Harper, December 2005