4.28.2013

Upcoming Exhibition: Surfacing

Erin Curry, News, Newspaper drawings with  sail-like installation
News [wherever the wind blows us]
graphite on translucent mylar, wood, string
2013
SURFACING
May 4th - June 15th
reception May 4th 4-7pm

alt_space gallery

Atlantic Center Downtown

123 Douglas Street

New Smyrna Beach, FL



My exhibition of recent work opens next weekend at alt_space gallery, The Atlantic Center for the Arts' new downtown space to showcase contemporary work in New Smyrna Beach, FL. It is my first out-of-town solo show and the work reflects my first year of graduate school research. Really this show should be called resurfacing as I feel like I'm emerging from hiding. My work is shifting quickly these days, though it still feels tied strongly to my thread work. If you are in the area, please come by to say hello and see what I've been up too.


alt_space Press Release :
"Atlantic Center for the Arts features a storyteller who finds language “unreliable”.  “Surfacing” is an intriguing exhibition that combines the two and three dimensional works of Gainesville, FL artist, Erin Curry. Pieces included in this display are the result of her fascination with marks, traces, and codes drawings can contain, as she grapples for means to decode the space around her.

Curry’s work is a combination of drawing and sculpture with a consistent reference to storytelling.  Within her art, she expresses her fascination with language and the difficultly in translating experiences adequately.  “The fullness of experience is too complex”, says Curry, “the present moment, memory, and our expectations all intersect. Try as we might, something is always lost in translation.”

 “Surfacing” is the third exhibition within the newly created alt_space gallery. The gallery name, short for alternative, was formed to feature Florida artists working in the genres of installation, emerging media and other non-traditional art forms.  The exhibition includes two recent series: “what I might have said” and “News”.  Both collections derive their forms from paper objects: the first from origami balloons, the second from the Arts section of The New York Times.

On her process, Curry explains, "What I might have said, responds to a paper origami balloon I kept in my pocket over several weeks. The paper balloon functions as vessel for breath, as well as potential container for words and phrases that cannot be adequately articulated. The air in them becomes pregnant with possibility. The drawings borrow their compositions from the creases left in an unfolded balloon. The marks found in each panel are systemized codifications of text from an old book never read. The marks become asemic, suggesting story and cadence, but denying specifics. They abstract into constellations, map-like and star-like at once.”

News is a collection of tracings of the arts sections of the newspaper onto translucent mylar. The pages fill with empty boxes and only navigational cues remain. Text directs the viewer, but where? The remade newspapers hang perpendicular to the wall and shift slightly in the currents of a room like boats in harbor. How might these emptied pages suggest orientation in a sea of information? Like the newspapers once found in libraries these objects are meant as reference material to be handled and with repeated viewings the pages will pick up smudges from readers reflecting the reader’s activity back to them”.

Erin Curry is a current MFA candidate in Drawing and Sculpture at the University of Florida. She is a Florida native and founding member of Art Lab, a collective for emerging artists in Gainesville, FL.

The exhibition “SURFACING” will open with a reception on Saturday, Saturday, May 4, 4 - 7 PM. Erin Curry will be present for the reception. This exhibition will run through June 15, 2013 and is free and open to the public.  Atlantic Center for the Arts alt_space Gallery is located at 123 Douglas Street in New Smyrna Beach, FL.  For details visit www.atlanticcenterforthearts.org or call 386.423.1753.  For additional information on the artist, visit her blog at www.sculptress-studio.blogspot.com or follow her on Facebook www.facebook.com/ErinCurryArt

In Partnership with the monthly Downtown Arts District Gallery Walk, the Food Trucks will be rolling in.  20 Food Trucks will arrive for the event to draw new attendees and bridge the art organizations participating.   The caravan of savors will be stretched from Arts on Douglas on Magnolia Street to The Hub on Canal Street.  Items to be served rage from Tacos to Lobster and will be available for purchase from 3 PM to 9 PM. "

link to press release here

Acknowledgements
Though most of my work is made alone in the studio, I depend on a whole community (including you all!)  and am thankful for each person's presence in my practice. As my work attests, words tend to fail me, but I will try anyway. I'd like to extend particular thanks to The Atlantic Center for the Arts and Arts on Douglas for carving out a protected pocket in your community, and Meghan Martin for hosting my work and working with me to put this show together. Thank you to the staff and volunteers who make the space possible. Thank you to Lauren Lake for your tireless feedback and support as always; I'm going to miss you terribly. Thanks to Ed Valiant for your labor and joy and to Tommy for always being present when I need a little extra help, even if I don't realize it.

Erin Curry what I never said, graphite drawing on duralar, developed from origami paper balloons
what I never said no. 2
graphite and gesso on duralar
14" x 11"
2013
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4.20.2013

4.19.2013

scratching at the surface


scratching the surface
graphite, tape, whiteout tape, scratches on translucent mylar
2012

Thinking about language and how difficult it is to translate experience adequately. 
What power does ambiguity hold?
What's lost when we place words on something? 





4.16.2013

after Agnes


Agnes Martin
Faraway Love (1999)
Acrylic and graphite on canvas
Estate of Agnes Martin/DACS
as we left New York, Agnes followed in the window of the airport

Erin Curry
after Agnes (2013)
photo



4.14.2013

I went to DIA to see Agnes Martin

the light is perfect, the space is seductive on its own
the perfect place for a chapel of minimalism

I walked through Serra
Sol LeWitt
and Smithson
and Richter
and Bueys
and and and

I saved Agnes for nearly last.

Several years ago I came here and fell in love. Her surfaces are subtle, but rich. Grids, but the making is so present, so careful, and human. Seeing her work in pictures is difficult -like trying to see someone's fingerprint in a snapshot of them waving goodbye.
Agnes Martin
Morning (1965)
Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas
So I sat with her awhile.


and headed for the exit when I learned I had really come to fall for Robert Ryman. Even more subtle, more quiet, and more difficult to find in pictures.
Robert Ryman
Versions I (1992)
91 x 84 inches, oil and graphite pencil on fiberglass with waxed paper, staples, and nails
Collection of SFMOMA

It was startling to see how his work is often hung with just masking tape, almost provisionally, it's all very much based in the material and ever so quiet. Some of the other minimalists feel like they are so much about exerting power and machismo. These are powerful, but not overtly so. The ones that were the most effective to me seemed as if they were still growing.
Completed, but not executed.
and playful too . . .
There's a sense Ryman takes joy in making these things, as if they are a kind of game.



p.s. Sol LeWitt had a collaborator at DIA.

Sol LeWeb

4.13.2013

strips

The dull heat of summer is creeping in and reminded me I have work to post from the fall. The blue marks mimic that of the silkworms I raised last spring.

untitled no. 2
mylar, whiteout tape, encaustic, graphite, and gesso
3" tall
2012







4.10.2013

catch and release


catch and release
indigo silk
2013

4.07.2013

vessel for the unspoken


This little paper balloon lived in my wallet for a few months. When a quiet moment was needed, I took it out to play. There's something sweet about how it's a vessel for breath and the unspoken. A new series of drawings is in works based on its form.Reading Gwarlingo this morning, I stumbled seeing this quote:
"Erase everything you have written,’ Mandelstam says, ‘but keep the notes in the margin."
sparity culled from overabundance
and then after pushing around the topic in the search bar, this gem:
There are two kinds of obscurity; one arises from a lack of feelings and thoughts, which have been replaced by words; the other from an abundance of feelings and thoughts, and the inadequacy of words to express them.” -Alexander Pushkin
Perhaps I should pursue a poetry class soon.

4.03.2013

found abstract comix

honeycomb (from wiki)

blackout (misbehaving web app)

meter reader 

pallet

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