A short and free ferry ride will take Manhattanites and Brooklynites to an island wide exhibition of the work of over 150 international independent artists and galleries. The Second Annual Governors Island Art Fair will be open to the public every weekend September 5-27 from 11am to 6pm. Ferries to Governors Island are available from Manhattan Friday to Sunday and from Brooklyn Saturday and Sunday only. A schedule is available here. The opening reception is on September 5 from 3pm to 6pm. Last year the arts group 4heads Collective filled a fifty room army barracks on the island with art done in a wide range of media. This year the barracks will be utilized again, along with several other interior spaces, and work from several local and international art galleries will be exhibited along with the work of independent artists. There will also be live music and dance and performance art. (9/7/2009)

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Exhibition Two
Fort Zachary Taylor State Park
March 1 – April 18, 2009

Strong, spirited, and brought to life with industry and intelligence, this year’s Sculpture Key West exhibition offered an engaging sampling of contemporary works. Held for the past nine years in its current form, this ambitious outdoor exhibition occurs in two main exhibition sites on the tropical island of Florida’s Key West and features the work of local, national and international artists. This year’s head curator was Shamim Momin of the Whitney Museum, who worked closely with Exhibitions Director Karley Klopfenstein and a small jury to shape what proved to be a diverse show of 32 works from 37 artists. Sculpture Key West’s approach has always been brave: the artists have only a few days – working in the heat, wind and rain – to execute their pieces, which are then expected to remain intact, or at least onsite, until being dismantled two months later. The drama inherent to such a logistically challenging process is palpable in the final result, and lends the show an energy, unity and sheer like-ability foreign to most group exhibitions.

This is not to say that every piece was a success. Some sculptures suffered in the elements, a small few were not able be on view for the duration of the show, and a couple of the pieces seemed indicative of nothing so much as an artist cracking under  pressure and leaving the site in a tantrum. Within an otherwise overwhelmingly successful exhibition, however, these minor setbacks served as material proof of Sculpture Key West’s admirable acceptance of risk as a necessary factor in the creation of serious, exciting work.

One of the strongest elements of the show was the considered placement of works within the very different main sites of the Gardens at West Martello Tower and Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. Although both venues center around nineteenth-century military fortifications, the Gardens are a series of cloistered green spaces set amid meandering brickwork, and Fort Taylor Zachary Park is a treeless plain by the water’s edge. The contrast in setting was used to exceptional effect, literally doubling the possibilities of an already broadly defined medium.

The visual competition of the Gardens at the West Martello Site, with its profusion of outrageous tropical flora,  was so intense as to have necessitated, for most artists, an unconventional sculptural approach –  that of camouflage and surprise. Looming in the treetops, Ludwica Ogorzelec’s Space Crystallization (all works 2009) is the result of impressive technique of woven plastic film. This curious structure extends and falls into space, held in tension with knots and weights that exploit the flex and pull of an unexpected material. Densely translucent, Ogorzelec’s piece requires a slow looking-into in order to be properly seen, and defies instinctive attempts to assess properties of mass, material and contour. The oversized crocheted patterns of Liliana Crespi’s Captured, slung amid the garden foliage, similarly challenge conventional readings, constituted as they are by rope and holes, and having little in the way of weight and form in any regular sense. Bringing to mind the toils of a modern-day Arachne, Crespi’s piece elegantly alludes to the tense relationship between the natural and man-made, all the while echoing the concentrically unfurling patterns of the buds and blossoms close-by. Jamey Grimes’ carefully crafted, corrugated plastic work Between Space,which would almost be too smooth a read in a gallery space, is set here to magical effect under the latticework of a bower where it is forced to do all-out battle with the brilliance and shadow-silhouette of tropical light.

The impact of these works is intentionally subtle, but sufficient for sharpening the senses. Pay attention could have been the curatorial mantra for this section of the show, and the directive was acted out in the work of Karen McCoy and Robert Carl, whose “listening trumpets” randomly prompt visitors throughout the site to tune-in to the sensorial possibilities of their fantastical surroundings.

The Fort Zachary venue, bordered by brick and ocean, is infused with that potent blend of the paradisiacal and militaristic encountered throughout the tropics in places of past dispute and defense. Many of the works on this site responded to the sense of threat intrinsic to the presence of the fort, other to the site’s identity as a landing place for immigrants arriving by sea. Even the more lighthearted works suggest – like the landscape that is both holiday-like and vaguely ominous – that things are not always as they appear. The sculptures are here set out along what felt like and emotional scale and viewers making their way along the windswept space encounter a progression of play, puzzlement, unease and awe in what amounted to a very moving experience.

Towards the beginning of this trek are a number of pieces that delight and startle with a mischievous sensibility. Diana Shpungin’s work Perfect Disconnect appear s to be two ordinary payphones, except that they are impossibly fused, and emit the clicks and dial tones of a doubly-confounded communication. Jackson Martin’s Rooted is a northern evergreen dwarfed within an enormous burlap root-sac, and while looking like a bit of landscaping gone wrong, the piece acts as a succinct expression of the anxieties surrounding issues of upheaval and belonging. Anja Marais’ False Security is just that: a hot-pink trailer suggestive of a life-size Barbie at play, until a peek inside reveals a surreal alternative. Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick’s curved mirror placed against the dazzling shoreline takes the form of a light-apparition, a teasing mirage.

Moving out from the populated section of the park, the works become more structured, almost monumental. These pieces are bold enough to stand up to the starker surroundings, and don’t shy away either from tackling themes of beauty, message and form. Paige Pedri’sEmancipation, placed right against the water’s edge, is a statement of strength both in the abstract and the actual. A soaring tower of corresponding forms, Pedri’s work spoke simultaneously of patterns of flight, a struggle against gravity, and the tangible ambition of an artist truly engaged. Equally expansive, thought oriented along the horizontal plane, was the reflective 250’ ramp engineered by Steven Durow and Jessica Cappiello that charted a slow and steady ascent towards the blue it mirrored above. Lori Nozick built an irresistible, if somewhat arbitrary, structure from pure salt bricks, and Nathaniel Hein and Jennifer Gonzales fashioned a heart-wrenching piece, in which the plastic-bag panels of a greenhouse allowed tender young shoots just enough air to sprout, only to then suffocate.

The most successful sculptures stood out in their ability to draw complex emotional resonance from simple material statements. Lauren P. McAloon’s Threshold is a hauntingly beautiful gathering of tall bamboo “flutes” that sing, whistle and sigh almost unceasingly into a relentless sea-wind. Completed with the worn-rudders of Cuban chug boats, the plaintive cry of McAloon’s work isn’t subtle – but its effectiveness is undeniable.  Julia Handshue’s piece,Release/Recovery, involves the dissemination of exquisite, serial-numbered, porcelain pods throughout both sites for the purposes of discovery and re-documentation. Though cooly-executed, the piece presents in perfect miniature an object-cycle of lost-and-found, stirring unexpected associations of delight and regret.

Karlis Rekevic’s work consists of white plaster structures that allude, obliquely, to nearby architectural features. In a sophisticated play of multiple forms, Rekevic’s piece simultaneously builds up and subverts an individualized system of construction, in which the forces of assertion, recession, weight and support are in constant play. More than any other artist in the show, this work seemed involved with sculpture as a fully three-dimensional phenomenon, as opposed to a sophisticated form of communication through object means. It is remarkable, however, that nearly all of the works in the show seemed to possess their own internal dignity; expressing within these challenging conditions that the act of sculpture is one that is uncertain, vulnerable, and at its best heroic.

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Karlis Rekevics is at the beginning of his career, and yet his work doesn’t bring to mind any other artist. His complex white plaster sculptures, cast from molds made of plywood, masonite and blue foam, are multi-part forms with neon tubes and/or light bulbs attached to them. They are intuitively composed amalgamations of anonymous objects found in the urban landscape or other places the artist has visited throughout his life and products of his imagination and drawing process.

“Rather than having a dialogue with artwork, I think my job is to try and do something different. I really tried not to have my work become commentary on the art world. I feel that an artist has to find another way.” He recently had the largest exhibit of his work to date at Triangle Studios in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The Triangle Artist’s Workshop, founded in 1982 by the British sculptor Anthony Caro and Robert Loder, a collector, has become a very important residency program for young artists. It brings artists from around the world together under the same roof.

“What I love about Triangle is that it is dedicated to people who make things, whatever medium they work in. It is not about conceptualization, it is actually about getting your hands dirty and making something.” I had the opportunity to speak with Rekevics on the last day of the exhibit. This is a busy time for him. When I entered the exhibit he was seated at a table and examining slides of his work with an intense expression on his face. He had a lackluster undergraduate experience. He made the wise decision of foregoing graduate school and started to work in theater design, working as a master carpenter at the Manhattan Theatre Club for five years. He discovered his true calling while he attended the New York Studio School up until 1996.

The son of an architect, Rekevics started to build things early on. “I helped my father build his house starting at the age of 10 and it was completed when I was about 16.” Surprisingly, he feels uneasy about having his work referred to as architecture. “It is too easy to say that I do architectural work. To me that is almost too obvious and I do not think that is what is driving it. I think about the little things in between the buildings and on the streets. I’m not really thinking about architecture.” Rekevics is completely unfazed about the fact that he has not sold any of his work yet. He will be facing a dilemma when the first interested buyer comes along because he dismantles and destroys all of his sculptures after an exhibit ends. The sculptures in the Triangle exhibit take up a huge room and consist of “six tons of plaster.”

Memories of specific forms or the arrangement of forms are the inspiration for these sculptures. They come into existence through the process of drawing, which Rekevics does constantly. “I draw, remember, draw some more, then some dominate images start to reveal themselves.”

Rekevics’ sculptures draw attention to banal, often ignored aspects of the urban environment. The forms he models his shapes on are familiar to viewers, but the whiteness of the plaster emphasizes a self referential quality. The separate components are connected with a screw gun or glue gun and conjure forth images of city streets, highways, buildings and sidewalks, but at the same time, they refuse to gel perfectly. The fragmentary quality of these sculptures and Rekevics use of light sources call our attention to the details and surface textures, the interaction of lines and the odd angles formed by the placement of the sculptures. Forms overlap and suck the viewer’s gaze and wandering body into the physical spaces between sculptures. Rekevics is more about poetic fragments than tableaus.

The mimetic aspect of Reskevics’ work is entirely the product of memory. “The work started to come out of my life. Then it became a choice. I am going to make things out of my daily existence. The things I see, the things that effect me, the things I remember, the things that are curious to me, the things that make me laugh. Whatever it is I get excited about. When I started to work that way, I didn’t have time to go out in the landscape and draw anymore. So I started to remember things, to do things out of memory, which changed my perspective. One of my earlier pieces was just about driving to work everyday. I would go home to my studio and I’d start to draw. What did I remember? Then I would build things and play with them as a whole object. Then I would think about what the thing I am making needs. I would see something that would help me solve a problem.” He never casts shapes from real objects.

The shapes his sculptures refer to, payphone shells, store facades, doorways, signs and billboards, construction scaffolding, I-Beams, cement dividers found on highways and city streets, cinder blocks, and ramps leading to nowhere are registered unconsciously by city dwellers. Every sculpture he makes is the product of a specific memory. But his work is also about the fragmentation of memory. He does not want to create a specific locale top to bottom, but is interested in marginalia or isolated shapes or structural passages. His sculptures are somewhat disjointed – I-beam shapes are set at odd angles forming a roof, cinder block shapes are strewn across the ground, the skeleton of a billboard is illuminated by yellowy lightbulbs. This transforms the homogenous into something contemplative.

Rekevics invents forms, such as the supports for the large ramp and the pillars that hold up an interesting block shape in the Triangle installation. Sometimes these invented forms solve technical problems but they are also pure invention. The parts of the sculptures which resemble familiar objects are different from the actual objects in subtle ways, so that remembering how something looks becomes a creative act. Rekevics is not interested in making replicas of the real, but in capturing the often ignored Spartan and ephemeral beauty of the non-commercial aspects of the urban landscape. Rekevics also self consciously includes billboard and sign shapes in his sculptures which are blank, missing what is essential to their being, the advertisement. The sculptures are therefore also concerned with the way the gaze of the pedestrian is manipulated by the systems we pass through in urban settings, how our eyes are drawn to certain things which we barely register on a conscious level. The invented forms and the forms closely based on real objects blend together. The viewer is placed in a quasi-real place that relates to the real, has an aura of the familiar, but also subtly diverges from it, and inevitably refers to itself.

Plaster is the perfect material for Rekevics because of its transformative power. “I love plaster’s inertness, its intrinsic beauty. Plaster has been around forever. It is a very affordable material. I love the fact that plaster is strong and fragile simultaneously, and that it’s ephemeral. I can take one of these things, bust it up and put it in a bucket of water and pour it into another mold. Basically I can transform it into whatever I want it to be.” Using plaster allows Rekevics to emulate any industrial material; glass, corrugated steel, cement, plywood. Plaster has traditionally been used to make copies of existing forms, or to patch or even out surfaces. Rekevics builds three dimensional forms with plaster and he likes to incorporate accident and contingency into the work.

Rekevics closely examines the world we live in. He wants us to think about the systems we entrust our daily routines and movements to. He combines imaginary forms with perception based forms and invites us to explore the terrain he builds and the terrain outside the walls of the gallery. “I want to reinvigorate the art of just looking around, without ideas, judgment or purpose, to enjoy the fact that we can see, hear, feel, and touch.” Rekevics sculpture is powerful because it is perception based. The sculptures are self referential but they constantly call to mind our everyday experience, and we begin to explore what was once invisible or ignored once we leave the exhibit. “Life will fail the idea because life isn’t about ideas it’s about living.”

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