Parts and Labor
November 4 – December 23, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday, November 4 | 6-8pm
The Abrons Arts Center is proud to present Parts and Labor, an exhibition presenting the work of five New York City-based artists – Daniel Bejar, Cecilia Biagini, Juanli Carrión, Jonathan Durham, and Noah Loesberg. These artists allude to machinery, technology and architecture through a series of geometric and non-objective compositions, tracing back to the Suprematism and Constructivism movements by the Russian avant-garde at the time of the fall of the tsarist regime. Through the use of industrial materials and motifs the artists salvage the wreckage from a years-long global recession and explore a promise of utopia and utility.
The radical change following the October Revolution inspired a rational, social function for art, emphasizing the artist as engineer. This exhibition adopts those principles, referencing the calls for democracy and economic reform in the social uprisings across the Middle East, Europe and the United States. Formally engaging the Brutalist architecture of the Abrons gallery and adjacent amphitheater, the artists yield essence over representation and process over product.
In his Realistic Manifesto Naum Gabo saw the Revolution as the beginning of a renewal of human values. As demonstrations flourish in Manhattan’s Wall Street and across the globe demanding economic reform, Parts and Labor looks to Constructivism and its examination of the fundamental properties of art and its place in the coming society.
Parts and Labor is curated by Adrian Geraldo Saldaña and part of the series Prized Vernacular, a platform for three exhibitions opening concurrently at the Abrons Arts Center that deconstruct a vernacular “everyday.” In light of the global economic recession, ordinary objects are presented as radicalized—prisms to a common unequally shared or realized. Reflecting cultural and economic difference, Prized Vernacular investigates this “new normal.”
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt St.)
New York, NY 10002
www.abronsartscenter.org
