How important is it for artists to be working out of a specific city? And how much does living in an art-world metropolis influence the kind of art one produces? These questions and more are some of the issues considered in the current exhibition “New. New York” at Essl Museum, which opened in conjunction with the Vienna Art Week.
The show offers insight into the work of 19 young artists based in New York, all at very different stages in their careers, while placing a special focus on the vibrant young art scene hailing from Bushwick, Brooklyn, with the numerous ateliers, culture initiatives and alternative art spaces that dot its landscape. Curator John Silvis mentions the “honesty and directness” of the works on view as a unifying characteristic. They also share, though with various techniques, a certain economy of material, in that many use and re-use found materials and media in an often surprising form, and in doing so produce “something new” in order to develop their own forms of artistic expression.
Hawaiian-born artist Letha Wilson, for example, mixes photography with metal, wood and concrete in her multi-media explorations of landscape. Brent Everett Dickinson fuses language and theology with found materials to funnel into his sculptural installations psalms, biblical references, and considerations on the representation of complex metaphysical and religious ideas in popular cultural, from nursery rhymes to school education. Sarah Lee, the youngest artist in the show, works with discarded books and old paper as her medium to create site-specific work. It’s probably the cheapest material available to a young artist – a consideration which becomes an integral one to this and many of the other works on view.
And this could be the most important point of reference when making an attempt to contemplate all the various artists on view in the framework of this show: resourcefulness is a necessity, and it leads to innovativeness, both in terms of technical uses of material as well as in forming an artistic position. And this, the show seems to argue, is a condition informed by the financial struggles artists face in New York.
New. New York
Essl Museum
Until April 1, 2013.
Participating artists:
Jude Broughan, Vince Contarino, Brent Everett Dickinson, Rob Fischer, Ryan Ford, Egan Frantz, Rico Gatson, Robin Kang, Steven and William Ladd, Sarah Lee, Christopher McDonald, Ann Pibal, Lisa Sigal, Shelly Silver, Reid Strelow, Siebren Versteeg, Letha Wilson, Tamara Zahaykevich