EXHIBITION

Passing Index

Hometown, New York, New York, 05/01/2016 - 06/19/2016

1002 Metropolitan Avenue, #21, Brooklyn, New York

ABOUT

Hometown is proud to present Passing Index, an exhibition of new work by Lilian Kreutzberger and Yasue Maetake. Please join us for an opening reception with the artists on Saturday, April 30, from 5:30–8 pm, taking place at the gallery, located at 1002 Metropolitan Avenue, #21, Brooklyn, New York.

An index is an indicator or measure of something, a sign that denotes an external reality, be it material or cultural. Kreutzberger and Maetake’s works display indexical traces of extensive working over, with marks that reflect process and hint at former states of being. Employing a visual vocabulary that is abstract yet suggestive, these works intimate systems which may be architectural, social, technological, or ecological. 

Lilian Kreutzberger creates image-objects featuring repeated abstract, rectilinear forms. Her recent wall reliefs are made from laser-cut wood and plaster, often dyed with acrylic paint. At once familiar and strange, they evoke unfinished diagrams, fossilized computer motherboards, unreadable hieroglyphs—systems once ubiquitous and essential, now in varying states of disuse and decomposition. In her sculptural “mouldings,” Kreutzberger creates networks of domestic wall or corner mouldings that adapt to their surrounding architecture. Oddly shaped borders with no interiors, these constructions gesture toward an absent center and, in effect, toward their own obsolescence.

This engagement with the built environment stems from Kreutzberger’s interest in early-to-mid 20th century architects, who envisioned architecture as capable of fostering happiness and social progress. Reconsidering this utopianism with canny historical awareness, her wall reliefs function as inscrutable floor plans that map unbuildable spaces. Attention to surface and its material properties recalls the legacy of Modernist painting, and with it the desire to distill painting to a pure expression of universal truths. Acknowledging the ill-fated nature of both Modernist projects—in architecture and in painting—Kreutzberger works within self-imposed rules designed to govern unruly materials, simultaneously demonstrating the impossibility of mastery.     

Yasue Maetake’s sculptures, made from both raw and found materials—including polyurethane resin, metal, earth, paper, plexi-glass, and oil paint—conjure a range of associations, from the human to the zoological, industrial construction to natural growth. They resist categorization, evoking as-yet-unknown hybrid organisms, perhaps emissaries from a post-apocalyptic future. Maetake incites extreme transformations in her materials through casting, welding, burning, oxidization, or exposure to chemicals. As a result, both her sculptures and her wall reliefs appear to exist in arrested states of degeneration, their surfaces burned, stained, and rusted.

Yet Maetake describes her process as one of “reverse entropy,” suggesting that these objects defy the logic of decay and other natural factors—and indeed, there is a palpable tension between gravity and structure in Maetake’s sculptures, which, although freestanding, can still appear to struggle with—and to be bounded by—the force of their own weight. This reckoning with gravity also imbues the works with a temporal quality, suggesting the effect of time passing on objects of an indeterminate age. Additionally, in both Ascending Industrial Bouquets and Pedigree of Industrial Bouquets, for instance, Maetake salvages fragments of old invitation cards from one of her early exhibitions, incorporating these materials into the works’ translucent resin bodies. This repurposing is a potent metaphor for artistic production as life cycle, with obsolete material resuscitated into new and unexpected formations.

As we currently stand to witness seismic shifts in our environment—both political and ecological—Kreutzberger and Maetake’s considerations of failure, decay, and transformation, resonate as both elegy and world-wise reassurance, opening up possibilities in the face of an uncertain future.

-Text by Paula Burleigh

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