NEW YORK, NY.- Benrimon Contemporary announced Love Me, a group exhibition featuring site specific installations, sculptures, and works on canvas created by Adam Bateman, Piper Brett, Michelle Carollo, Travis Childers, Alastair Levy and Hyungsub Shin. Their works demonstrate the varied effects manipulating the banal can achieve.
Michelle Carollo and Piper Brett each give their selected subjects friendly and even funny connotations. Carollo inserts rubber hoses and nozzles, shiny air-conditioning tubes, grates, and sheet metal into elaborate scenes comprised of shapes stacked on multiple plains. The industrial materials snake through their fantastic environments like happy inhabitants. Brett similarly does not disguise her chosen objects, but plays with them for a humorous or nostalgic effect. In My First Name (in lights) and My Phone Number, she has written her name and phone number in lights like an old-fashioned Hollywood starlet.
Alastair Levy, Travis Childers and Hyungsub Shin barely alter their objects or their accompanying environments, but they instead change an item’s identity through title and assembly. Levy finds the beautiful in his found material. In Someone Else’s Painting (ours), Levy elevates a simple white shower curtain into an ethereal abstract “painting.” Likewise, Childer’s constructs near-natural phenomena, from a ‘slump’ stump made of #2 pencils to a ‘spore’ comprised of ball point pen tops. Hyungsub Shin’s current series of work focuses on the use of vinyl to reinvent window panes to look as if the glass has been shattered by bullets. Utilitarian, man-made objects breathe new life as organic formations purposeful only in their assumed will to exist.
Adam Batemen uses found objects for abstract installation and only loosely correlates his result with the fragments making up the form. Instead of subverting the identity of the objects softly or more obviously, he treats them literally as material.
All six artists give their found objects new fates, although that fate differs in its relationship to the object’s past. The objects- however transformed or static- have abandoned their usefulness, and instead ask to be appreciated in their new roles as anthropomorphic inhabitants, nostalgic triggers, poetic symbols, or mere artistic material.
**The books used for Adam Bateman's work were contributed by WorldWide Book Drive. Their mission is to reduce illiteracy through the redistribution of used books.**
