Five Openings Planned For May Day At The Aldrich Museum

RIDGEFIELD — The public is invited to join exhibiting artists for the opening receptions of five exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum next weekend.

Receptions will run concurrently on Sunday, May 1, from 4 to 6 pm, for “Contemporary Erotic Drawing,” “Mark Dion: Memento Mori (My Glass is Run),” “Orly Genger,” “Pipilotti Rist” and “Roman de Salvo: Main Street Sculpture Project.”

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and DiverseWorks of Houston have co-organized “Contemporary Erotic Drawing,” an exhibition by 34 artists which encompasses the subject of sexuality and erotica.

Exploring and defining what is erotic and titillating on their own terms, these artists display a diversity of sensibilities and approaches that range from the humorous, raunchy and abstract to fetishes, the personal and intimate. The traveling exhibition (which was most recently at DiverseWorks) will be on view at The Aldrich until August 7.

The personally-charged process of drawing, combined with the subject of sex, follows ancient traditions in both Western and Eastern art. Expanding and commenting on these traditions, artists in the exhibition offer works that are personal, political, beautiful, startling, reflective, and biographical.

The exhibition was been organized by Harry Philbrick, director of The Aldrich; Sara Kellner, executive director of DiverseWorks; and independent curator Stuart Horodner.

Artists, who work on paper, animate hand-drawn images, and utilize other nontraditional materials, are Stephen Andrews, Alice Attie, Joseph Biel, Ion Birch, Cecily Brown, Scott Burns, Jacqueline Cooper, R. Crumb, Simon English, Heyd Fontenot, Leon Golub, Juan Gomez, Tom Knechtel, Joan Linder, Cristina Lucas, Gina Magid, Georgia Marsh, Ruth Marten, Kim McCarty, Jean-Francois Moriceau and Petra Mrzyk, Tracy Nakayama, Chris Ofili, Danica Phelps, Chloe Piene, Paul Henry Ramirez, Huston Ripley, Anita Steckel, Scott Teplin, Lynne Woods Turner, Mark Dean Veca, Ruth Waldman, Su-en Wong and Gang Zhao.

A fully-illustrated hard-cover catalogue, distributed by Distributed Art Publishers, will accompany the exhibition. It will feature essays by noted author Wayne Koestenbaum (author of The Queen’s Throat, Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics and Andy Warhol: A Penguin Life) and Art in America writer and Hans Bellmer scholar Sue Taylor. The curators have contributed brief texts on each artist as well as an introduction.

Mark Dion’s Installation

“Memento Mori (My Glass is Run)” is an installation by the artist Mark Dion that will be presented in The Aldrich’s Cornish Family Sculpture Garden through October 10.

Mr Dion produces artwork that consistently blurs the boundaries between natural history, art and science. A recipient of the Larry Aldrich Award in 2001, his works both critique and celebrate the cataloging and presentation of art, historical and natural materials by museums, exploring themes as diverse as archeology, consumer culture, ecology, environmentalism and political activism.

“Memento Mori (My Glass is Run)” takes the form of a mock cemetery dedicated to significant American naturalists of the 18th and 19th Centuries who had worked in the greater Philadelphia area. The installation was originally commissioned by the Main Line Arts Center in Haverford, Penn., as part of the exhibition “Past Presence: Contemporary Reflections on the Main Line.” Reconfigured for presentation at The Aldrich, the work will be suggestively installed in The Aldrich’s inner courtyard, creating the moody atmosphere of a history-laden churchyard.

Mark Dion lives and works in Beach Lake, Penn. He attended the University of Hartford, The School of Visual Arts in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. In 2001, he was the ninth recipient of the annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award and his award exhibition, “Full House,” was presented at The Aldrich in 2003.

Also in 2003, Mr Dion was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford Art School in conjunction with the exhibition “Mark Dion: Collaborations, 1987-2003,” which was presented at Joseloff Gallery in Hartford.

Orly Genger

Also on view until October will be the first solo museum exhibition by the New York City-based artist Orly Genger.

Ms Genger conceived her monumental new sculpture, hand woven from multicolored nylon rope, especially for The Aldrich.

Ms Genger transforms knitting’s intimate, homespun aesthetic into large-scale works that relate more to post-Minimal sculpture and the color fields of late modernist painting than to craft projects. Her technique, which dispenses with needles altogether, deliberately narrows the distance between original idea and final object.

Ms Genger weaves thick strands of rope, elastic strapping, yarn, and metallic ribbon with only her fingers. The resultant objects are indexical traces of her unique process and directly convey the painstaking labor that goes into their creation.

Her sculpture for The Aldrich, comprised of thousands of feet of nylon rope typically used by rock climbers, continues the museum’s tradition of exhibiting unconventional outdoor sculpture and will stretch from the museum’s historic “Old Hundred” building to the recently opened new museum facility.

Ms Genger’s sculptures frequently lie on the gallery floor or on the ground; in her performances, they become a landscape through which the artist moves. The work becomes a literal extension of her body, as maker becomes object. She will perform during the exhibition’s opening reception.

Orly Genger has exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; and at Stux Gallery and Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York.

Video Installation

The Aldrich will present an installation by Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist through October 10.

Known internationally for her innovation within the medium of video art, Ms Rist’s videos posses a visual language all their own, filled with saturated colors, grainy or distorted images, and wide, sweeping motions through landscape and space.

For The Aldrich, Ms Rist will install Grabstein für RW, a gray tombstone strewn with maple leaves. At the center of the tombstone, a round video screen seen through a half-lens depicts the artist herself, lying in the grass, with her red tongue thrust out. Sexually charged and ethereal, Ms Rist’s performance confronts the boundaries of two distinct states of being: the ghostly with the flesh.

Born in Switzerland in 1962, Pipilotti Rist lives and works in Zurich and Los Angeles. She studied graphic design and photography at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, then video at the School for Design in Basel, and was the recipient of the Premio 2000 Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

She been featured in solo exhibitions at MUSAC, Centro Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon in Valladolid, Spain; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw; with an exhibition planned for Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in 2006.

Main Street Sculpture Project

The museum will present “Liquid Ballistic” by artist Roman de Salvo, the fourth sculpture in the Main Street Sculpture Project series, on its front lawn through October 10. Blending a fascination for machines and craftsmanship with an interest in language and wordplay, Mr De Salvo’s work is imbued with wit and playfulness.

“Liquid Ballistic” is the first Main Street Sculpture project to invite visitor interaction. The sculpture of a life-size cannon resembles old artillery, but it playfully comments upon outdoor recreation, roadside Americana, and idyllic pastimes and pleasures.

The cannon, made from mahogany, is actually a seesaw that discharges a gentle stream of water from its muzzle when two people teeter-totter. In giving the cannon this function, Mr de Salvo blunts its perceived function as a weapon, and instead finds a friendlier application for this piece of history. Perfectly paired with Ridgefield’s historic 18th Century Main Street, “Liquid Ballistic” will surprise passersby as a humorous, absurd and poignant sculpture.

Roman De Salvo lives and works in San Diego, Calif. He received his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, and his MFA from the University of California, San Diego.

“Liquid Ballistic” was originally created for an exhibition in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. In 2003 he exhibited his work in “American Idyll” at the Public Art Fund in New York, and “Baja To Vancouver: The West Coast in Contemporary Art” at the Seattle Art Museum. In 2001 Salvo had a solo exhibition, “Woods,” at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, Calif.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is at 258 Main Street in Ridgefield (Route 35); telephone 203-458-4519.