WHITNEY LYNN
Sculptures Involontaires
JEFFREY AUGUSTINE SONGCO
Public Displays of Affection
January 7 – February 18, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 7, 6-8pm
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Friday 10:30-5:30
Saturday 11:00-5:00
Steven Wolf Fine Arts
2747 19th Street, A
San Francisco, CA
415-263-3677
stevenwolffinearts.com
Whitney Lynn continues exploring psychological spaces of containment, desire and control at Steven Wolf Fine Arts with a group of new sculptures that take their inspiration from traps.
Traps are made to deceive, ensnare, capture or kill and Lynn makes use of their functionality as the starting point for works whose intended prey shifts depending on how they are considered.
Some of the sculptures are loosely based on well-known works by Eva Hesse, Carl Andre and other pioneers of the 1960s. They are at once a withering critique of the specific object—sculpture unrelated to the outside world, which emerged from that tumultuous era—and discursive metaphors for the way viewers relate to artworks in a gallery situation. Other works inspired by Martin Puryear and Haim Steinbach explore the trap for its relationship to the body and the wallet.
"The sculptures speak directly to issues of function, form and context, " says Lynn. When those are changed and we find ourselves no longer in a forest but in a gallery, “new questions can arise regarding what is the bait and what is the prey."
In the second space, Jeffrey Augustine Songco risks being accused of massive over-sharing with his first solo exhibition, Public Displays of Affection. Displaying extraordinary powers of negative capability, Songco constructs a world in which his two great passions, Queerdom and the Catholic Church, not only peacefully coexist but thrive on each other. Songco constructs his art from objects and images that go both ways, as it were, such as Peace Poles, spears of wood with uplifting slogans that began to show up in the yards of liberal churches in the 1980s.
Like a sex-crazed sleuth searching for the gay Da Vinci code, Songco turns those phrases and the phallic forms they were painted on against their original intention to illuminate their queer subtext. In Body Shots, an ordinary table of jello shot containers such as might be found at a college fraternity party is transformed into a tabernacle for what appears to be the artist's seed. And in Scumbags, a series of surrealistic sculptures dramatically presented as luxury objects, Songco makes the case that balloon animals aren't the only forms you can make from over-the-counter latex.
Steven Wolf Fine Arts
2747 19th Street, Suite A
San Francisco, CA 94110
Traps are made to deceive, ensnare, capture or kill and Lynn makes use of their functionality as the starting point for works whose intended prey shifts depending on how they are considered.
Some of the sculptures are loosely based on well-known works by Eva Hesse, Carl Andre and other pioneers of the 1960s. They are at once a withering critique of the specific object—sculpture unrelated to the outside world, which emerged from that tumultuous era—and discursive metaphors for the way viewers relate to artworks in a gallery situation. Other works inspired by Martin Puryear and Haim Steinbach explore the trap for its relationship to the body and the wallet.
"The sculptures speak directly to issues of function, form and context, " says Lynn. When those are changed and we find ourselves no longer in a forest but in a gallery, “new questions can arise regarding what is the bait and what is the prey."
In the second space, Jeffrey Augustine Songco risks being accused of massive over-sharing with his first solo exhibition, Public Displays of Affection. Displaying extraordinary powers of negative capability, Songco constructs a world in which his two great passions, Queerdom and the Catholic Church, not only peacefully coexist but thrive on each other. Songco constructs his art from objects and images that go both ways, as it were, such as Peace Poles, spears of wood with uplifting slogans that began to show up in the yards of liberal churches in the 1980s.
Like a sex-crazed sleuth searching for the gay Da Vinci code, Songco turns those phrases and the phallic forms they were painted on against their original intention to illuminate their queer subtext. In Body Shots, an ordinary table of jello shot containers such as might be found at a college fraternity party is transformed into a tabernacle for what appears to be the artist's seed. And in Scumbags, a series of surrealistic sculptures dramatically presented as luxury objects, Songco makes the case that balloon animals aren't the only forms you can make from over-the-counter latex.
Steven Wolf Fine Arts
2747 19th Street, Suite A
San Francisco, CA 94110
