DISRUPTURE
Multimedia project installations, featuring works by
C. Ree
Heather Sparks
Jenifer K. Wofford
icTus Gallery is pleased to present Disrupture, a collection of multimedia installations by C. Ree, Heather Sparks and Jenifer Wofford. Please join us on Saturday January 7th, from 6-10pm for the exhibition opening.
In the wake of Arab Spring and its waves of revolt, and Occupy movements in every corner of the country, the topic of political disruption has hopefully entered our daily dialogue. The artists in Disrupture take the conversation further, disfiguring the very spaces in which we live, upsetting the cherished ritual of shopping and depicting the greatest ruptures of all: the explosive volcano.
By inflecting everyday spaces with both specters of past trauma and a presence which resists the rational, C. Ree’s new installation work Overhead explores the monstrous underbelly of the heroic, and troubles the real into a space that is unexplainably urgent. She uses suspended ceiling components often found in mass produced spaces – both commercial and domestic – and incorporates dripping leaks from horror movies, fibrous tiles which sag over time, or mirrors which confuse vision and location. C. Ree filmed an accompanying video, Aimless Bullet, which documents a large-scale ceiling’s complete destruction, single-handedly sabotaged by an unknown figure.
As a meditation on consumption and desire, Heather Sparks developed the Big Return Project, a collective performance with participants across the US and parts of Europe. Inspired by her experience within the fashion industry, which she says “de-mystified the lure of luxury brands”, Heather invited participants to shop and then return their purchases as performative actions, a binging and purging of a desire to consume. Documentation of actions, including a collective ‘workshop’ shopping experience, were uploaded and shared through social media, and were included in the performance series Capitalism is Over. The project continues, attracting new contributions and dialog. http://
Moving from the disrupture of the material realm to one of the natural realm, Jenifer K Wofford focuses her sights on rendering volcano plumes in ink and acrylic works on paper. Part of a very new body of work begun this year, Wofford has been constructing a global history of volcanic eruption columns—or rather, the depiction of eruption columns, and the ways in which these have been documented or retold in centuries of media ranging from imagined paintings and etchings of the AD 79 Mount Vesuvius catastrophe to hyper-contemporary photography and video of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption. In part a formal challenge to render the ephemerality of smoke and ash in a line-based drawing, Wofford’s Volcano project is also an enquiry into pressure, change, cataclysm and consequence, and a study of natural phenomena on a global scale, focusing on historic and recent eruptions in the Philippines, Iceland, Indonesia, Japan and Italy.
