Parklife

Brooklyn, NY - Public Art Fund and the Commons Associates are proud to present a new exhibition of contemporary art at MetroTech Center. Parklife continues MetroTech's commitment to supporting the work of emerging New York artists. Each year artists are asked to respond to the Commons, the public spaces surrounding the vibrant downtown areas of MetroTech Center and Brooklyn Polytechnic. The artists selected for this year's exhibition - Isidro Blasco, Liz Craft, Peter Gould, Elke Lehmann, and Franco Mondini-Ruiz - have each created new works that react to the area's landscaped surroundings.

Liz Craft - Lasso of Love Lasso of Love, a cast bronze sculpture, is characteristic of Liz Craft's playful yet accomplished approach to art-making. A thick rope, rising upward from its coiled base to form a lasso loop, dangles with twelve larger-than-life charms. Each charm represents a different zodiac symbol-the Gemini twins, Taurus's bull, Virgo's maiden, and so on. Made entirely of bronze, Lasso of Love rises six feet into the air, a paradoxically vertical position for a length of rope. Referencing astrology, psychedelia, and childhood toys, Lasso of Love is a topsy-turvy view of the cosmos, prompting speculation as to whether Craft's charmed work is reaching upwards or has fallen from above.

Craft, a Los Angeles-based artist, creates large-scale sculptural works full of pop culture references and dreamlike appeal. Working in a variety of materials-including polyurethane, fiberglass, bronze and wood-Craft depicts recognizable objects or creatures in unusual ways that exaggerate and complicate their everydayness. Death Rider, a recent cast bronze sculpture depicting a skeleton and a woman on a motorcycle joyride, brought to mind not just bikers and 1960s counterculture, but also pirates, cowboys and other rebellious antiheroes. Her works, which often draw upon familiar cultural iconography and archetypes, do so with mischievous sophistication rather than nostalgic allure.

Elke Lehmann - Black and White Tree Elke Lehmann, a German-born artist living in New York, produces sculpture, video, and site-specific installations. In her work, Lehmann often responds to the physical and historical dimensions of the sites she selects for her installations, intervening with business-as-usual and encouraging awareness of one's surroundings. "I extract details from the site, magnifying their potential for suggesting meaning," Lehmann says. In several recent projects, she has focused on the subject of animals and nature, introducing elements of wildlife into contained gallery spaces or other public venues in a way that prompts simultaneous amusement, wonder and unease.

For Black and White Tree, a site-specific project at MetroTech Center, Lehmann has focused on a single tree, one of the dozens of trees that line the perimeter of the Commons. Lehmann made black-and-white photographic reproductions of the tree's leaves, undertaking a meticulous process of cutting the leaves and affixing a wire stem to each one. In autumn, before the leaves begin to drop, every natural leaf on the tree will be paired with a black-and white duplicate, creating leaf clusters that resemble x-ray versions of the real thing. As the natural leaves fall, the reproductions will become increasingly dominant and, in the winter months, the tree will be a shadow version of itself, covered only with colorless leaves.

Peter Gould - The Crooked Mile Peter Gould, a Brooklyn-based artist, creates sculptural works that consider the ways that suburban planning and corporate landscaping affect our relationship to nature. "From strip malls and business parks to off-ramps and well groomed bedroom communities, nature is used to soften these hard mundane and repetitive designs," says Gould. Often employing pre-fab materials to create recreational landscapes-a plywood picnic table amongst a grove of Formica trees, or a park ranger's station made from bricks and particleboard-Gould suggests that people are most at ease with the natural world when it is not threatening or raw. His works, artificial and precise, echo the controlled and orderly environments in which we spend our free time, where nature is a comfortable backdrop rather than an active force.

After visiting MetroTech on several occasions, Gould noticed an unpaved walking path cutting across a lawn, not far from the paved walkways in the Commons. For The Crooked Mile, Gould has exaggerated this rather mundane interaction with nature-the everyday foot traffic of people short-cutting across the lawn-by upgrading the casually worn path to a fully landscaped element. His meandering path has white pea gravel, a ranch-style fence with pastel details, new shrubbery, a footbridge, and a gate. Although functional, this "improved" passageway is a colorful riff on the constructed environment of the Commons, one that prompts viewers to experience a familiar place anew.

Franco Mondini-Ruiz - Polvo en el Viento (Dust in the Wind) In the early 1990s, artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz abandoned a successful career as a lawyer and purchased a botánica, a Mexican folk-healing shop. He transformed the traditional space into a contemporary boutique, art installation, and salon. The store, entitled Infinito Botánica and Gift Shop, offered products used for spiritual cleansing and folk remedies such as candles, potions, and herbs alongside ancient and Spanish colonial antiques, and contemporary art from Texan and Mexican artists. Since moving to New York, Mondini-Ruiz has re-created the botánica in gallery spaces and museums, exploring the intersection of art, commerce and globalization in his installations and performance-based projects.

For the lobby of MetroTech Center One, Mondini-Ruiz has created Polvo en el Viento (Dust in the Wind). Working with a local Peruvian-Ecuadorian band, he made a life-size, photographic cut-out of an Andean flute band in concert. For three days in early September, Polvo en el Viento toured New York City, appearing briefly in Times Square, Astor Place, the Chelsea gallery district, and elsewhere. During that time, viewers approaching the two-dimensional cut-out heard a recording of the band, Agua Clara, playing their rendition of popular songs like Kansas' Dust in the Wind and Frank Sinatra's My Way. Playing up the fact that bands of this sort sometimes seem ubiquitous, Mondini-Ruiz's humorous and engaging exploration of art and societal issues addresses cultural globalization and appropriation, political correctness, high versus low art, and recent Latin American history.

Isidro Blasco - After the End Spanish artist Isidro Blasco combines architecture, photography, and installation to explore themes of vision and perception in relation to physical experience. His past work has consisted of large scale sculptures that reference the realm of private or domestic space. Blasco often begins by selecting one angle in a room and then constructs a new space from the perspective of that particular vantage point, a fragmentation of a single line of sight that is reminiscent of cubist collages by Picasso, Braque and other early 20th-century painters. Blasco's three-dimensional sculpture results in an elliptical succession of multiple angles and produces a space that is at once recognizable and entirely new.

For the Lobby at MetroTech One, Blasco transforms the notion of a "tree house" into a literal endeavor. Taking the shape of a tree as a basis, he has substituted the trunk, branches, and leaf canopy with pine wood palettes and photographs that depict several rooms in his apartment. Exploring the limits of everyday space, After the End disassembles the familiar and reconstitutes it as a baroque visual experience, one in dramatic contrast to the smooth marble walls and floors of MetroTech One. Spontaneous and vigorous, the lines of After the End sweep upward and around, creating multiple vistas and a cohesive composition. Pressetext

Parklife
Five new commissions for MetroTech Center by Isidro Blasco, Liz Craft, Peter Gould, Elke Lehmann, and Franco Mondini-Ruiz