MR. SOFTY
ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM
May 1 — October 2, 2005
__________
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presented the first solo museum exhibition by New York City-based artist Orly Genger, on view from May 1 through October 10, 2005. Genger conceived her monumental new sculpture, hand woven from multicolored nylon rope, especially for The Aldrich.
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. 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. 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.
A painter and filmmaker, Morris’s recent body of work focuses on the aesthetic, architecture, and psychology of Los Angeles as a sprawling, de-centered urban location. She describes her films as “condensed manifestos,” in the sense that they are a compendium of images and situations. These films investigate both the city’s surface, as well as its inhabitants and key players. Employing different types of cinematography from a documentary-like approach, as well as narrative sequences, her approach distracts the viewer to allow for a closer observation of issues of social power.
Orly Genger has exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, NY; the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; and at Stux Gallery and Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York.