“Rites of Passage: 1995-2009” at Cooper Union Gallery

By:  Jeremy H. Polk

 

Ryan and Trevor Oaks, Infinityscape, 2010, 19’ x 19’ 8”. Courtesy of Cooper Union.

 

 

  Rites of Passage  is a group exhibition, organized by guest curator Thomas Micchelli, that considers the multiple paths taken by new forms of expression at the turn of the 21^st century, specifically those found in the work of alumni of The Cooper Union who graduated between the years 1995 and 2009 from The School of Art, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, and The Albert Nerken School of Engineering.    The exhibition is shown at 41 Cooper Gallery at 41 Cooper Square.   These artists’ explorations range from the intangibility of light and sound to the poetry of infrastructure, autobiographical reflection to political outrage, naked terror to absurdist humor. 

  This was my first visit to the new Cooper Union building and 41 Cooper Gallery.  It opened in 2009 and designed by LA architect Thom Mayne, with New York collaborator Gruzen Samton, and like many of the new glass and concrete structures going up on college campuses everywhere, the space itself seems somewhat cold and sterile.  But after a walk down a flight of stairs, I found myself in a warm, intimate gallery space located on the lower level of the building.  As I descended the concrete steps, I was greeted by Salman Bakht’s Cooper Union: Nodes and Passages, a sound installation I can only describe as Gregorian like chants combined with the sounds of cricket-like clicking or chirping.  After descending the last step and moving my way into the main gallery the sound seemed to dissipate as I entered into a more traditional white walled space.  The gallery itself was quite overwhelming at first as the space seems packed to the brim with some 42 participating artists.

  The works are strung, hung, tabled, and stacked on every wall and surface available.  The quality of the work is, as one might expect from Cooper Union’s esteemed alumni.  Having students represented from the schools of fine art, engineering, and architecture strong concepts are presented with beautifully controlled designs within sound construction.  However, as most exhibitions go there were works that locked me in while others left me with no clue or no need to care and others I will continue to think about for days to come.

  Upon entering the gallery there was several large pieces that grabbed my attention.  However, since I am particularly interested in fabrics, I gravitated towards Laura Lee-Georgescu’s Untitled painting installation.  Three large sheer rectangular pieces of fabric suspended one behind the other from the ceiling almost reaching to the floor.  Treated with dye or paint, I am unsure.  The color took on a very non objective form of vibrant reds, blues and yellows.  Lee-Georgescu then seemingly went in with a brush and painted the most beautiful and delicately sparse areas of crisp lines.  The piece has a very unassuming presence at first.  Because of the sheerness the size does not draw you.  There is no visual weight to the color necessarily.  It is the delicate nature of the treatment of the cloth that draws you in and begs you to look for more.   The boldness of color in certain areas counterbalance the softness of others and the treatment of the painted lines move you all over the composition.

  One of the other attention grabbers in the room, one because of its size, and the second because of its dimensionality is We Have Never Been Modern by Rush Baker + Sam Vernon.  A wham! bam! boom! three dimensional story of war in an almost comic context made of acrylic on canvas, cardboard, and paper collages of pen and ink drawings.  The piece molds itself around two entryways leading into the back section of the gallery.  It is built from many layers of smaller strips of wide paper, some raw, and others covered with a seemingly laminated like surface.  From the front there are what seem to be people running within explosions and though the overall piece is black and white there are shapes of color coming even further out of the piece that add even a further dimension.  The beauty of Never Been Modern is even if the content doesn’t entice you, the textural and drawn elements will.  Once inside either entryway the story is no longer literal; on the contrary, the drawn textural elements become like primitive drawings in black and white with no representation at all.  It is as if I had discovered the first Paleolithic cave.

  As I walk through We Have Never Been Modern I came upon Discovering Eudaimonia by Gaurav Namit, a straight from nature sticks and stones with digital images and found objects.  I didn’t see this piece as a piece of visual art but more a documentary because of its literality.  It is presented with a message board laying out the trip to Eudaimonia and visual images documenting the people that live there it seemed to be something that should have been in an issue of National Geographic rather than an art exhibition.  On the floor down below projected images is a large bowl of sand with sticks lying across it.  Though I found a quiet enjoyment in the story I couldn’t quite figure out the purpose of the installation bowl and sticks.  Though the story is intriguing and the piece is about the native people’s needs for wood within their culture, I wasn’t quite sure if I was to look at it as a personal experience or a general documentary.  

  There is so much great material in this show I could write a book, but will forgo to say these creative individuals have strong concepts and marvelous execution allowing for a very precise show.   The exhibition does what any group showing should do, it converges a dichotomy of ideas while creating a consistent flow of quality design.  Because of the limitations of the space some pieces seem too much to take in from certain angles but a dramatic moment occurred as I was walking through the space from a different angle, through We Have Never Been Modern, which was a comic printed explosion from one angle but had become a cave structure from another.  And through it revealed before me were multiple pieces that at that angle acted as a larger installation.  Infinityscape by Ryan and Travor Oaks is a long blue and white paper tapestry giving the visual of sea to sky.  As a final impression, it was a grand experience.

 

“Rites of Passage: 1995-2009” at Cooper Union Gallery runs through  February 11^th

 

41 Cooper Gallery

41 Cooper Square (Lower Level)

Take the 6 train  to Astor Place or the N or R train to 8^th and Broadway

Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat, 11-6pm

Exhibition Website: http://cooper.edu/rites-of-passage

Comments

[Simmy Swinder]

I loved Sam Vernon and Rush Baker's collaboration! The drawings on xeroxed paper and shards of painting on canvas really came alive in a captivating way.

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