Sculpting Gravity 2017
As an artist, gravity is my material.
Description
Sculpting Gravity assembles works by Allan Wexler that explore the daily irritants caused by gravitational pull, the irregularity of the natural world, and how the built environment an act as a method of levitation. Gravity is a natural phenomenon, where all things with mass are brought toward one another. Not only does it cause the Earth and the other planets to orbit the Sun, and the moon to orbit the Earth, but it causes an orange to roll off a sloped table.
Included in the exhibition are works from across Wexler’s career, ranging from large constructions – Slanting Table/Re-slanting China, Coffee Seeks its Own Level, and Eye Contact On a Hill – to intimate drawings, small sculptures, and models for public art. Additionally there are some works from Wexler’s recent series Breaking Ground – large, hand-worked, multimedia images that incorporate sculpture, photography, and drawing – that investigate our first marks on the primal landscape, our relationship to the natural world, and the forms, functions and meanings of what and why we build.
Artist Statement
As an artist, gravity is my material. Trained as an architect, I have long been drawn to the effects of gravitational pull and the un-level surface. Architects fight gravity – and form and function is their response. Art-making is another way of knowing – revealing hidden significance of the outward appearance of things. Questions are more interesting than answers, and when meaning is perfectly clear we stop looking.
Allan Wexler, a self-described “artist in an architect’s body,” was an early member of the late 1960s “non-architects” or “paper architects,” who questioned the perceived divide between art and the design discipline. Wexler has worked in the fields of architecture, design and fine art for forty-five years. He has been represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City since 1984 and has exhibited, taught and lectured nationally and internationally since 1972. Wexler currently teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, winner of a Chrysler Award for Design Innovation and the Henry J. Leir Prize from the Jewish Museum in New York. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.