“False Space and Time of the Apartment”
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 19, 7-9 pm
Exhibition dates: April 19 - June 3, 2008
Gallery hours: Wed. - Sun., 11 am- 5 pm
Featuring work by 10 U.S. and European artists, the show takes its title from J. G. Ballard’s 1969 novel Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. A chronicler of the urban imagination, Ballard gives voice to Centraltrak. Taking its cue from the novel’s media-scape, the inaugural show is spatially bold and ambiguous, with work that is neither art nor architecture but somewhere in between. Projects will be shown by the San Francisco architecture firm Anderson and Anderson Architects, Dutch designer Dadara, Dallas sculptors and installation artists Lily Hanson and Tim Stokes, Houston installation artists Dean Ruck and Dan Havel, French architect Nathalie Wolberg, and German sculptor and installation artist Stefan Eberstadt.
Stefan Eberstadt, a German sculptor, installation artist and artist in residence at Centraltrak in 2009, has designed "Loop," a space within a space within a space that extends from inside the project room in the front to the collective exhibition space outside in the gallery.
Dallas sculptor and installation artist Lily Hanson shows work that mirrors real interior spaces in an uncanny fashion. Hanson makes small, felt- and Naugahyde-covered objects in bright pastels that are influenced by organic form from different eras: a combination of artists Jan Arp's Surrealist three-dimensional collages and Joep van Lieshout's bulbous architectural objects.
Dallas sculptor Tim Stokes makes large-scale objects that unite household ready-mades and industrial lighting. Bathroom tiles and dining room chair legs next to subtle fluorescent and bright Klieg lights make peculiar adjacencies. Bringing to mind the sculpture of Robert Gober and the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Stokes makes quasi-hygienic spaces that center on the shower drain.
Based in Houston, Dean Ruck and Dan Havel make sculpture out of abandoned real estate in order to lay bare the whim and flux, boom and bust, of the housing market. Ruck and Havel have brought carefully cut portions of an abandoned house in Houston into the gallery space of Centraltrak.
"Checkpoint Dreamyourtopia" by Dadara, the Dutch graphic designer, sculptor and artist in residence at Centraltrak Daniel Rozenberg, is a small-scale model of a much bigger piece he will build at Centraltrak and unveil at this year's "Burning Man," an annual eight-day celebration of Surreal art and self-expression in the Nevada desert. Rozenberg’s model interrogates the nature and purpose of borders in a world where the new global order set forth by free trade and the internet makes old notions of territorial restriction hard to abide by.
Another artist in residence at Centraltrak, French architect Nathalie Wolberg has installed a large representation of "Sens dessus dessous," a series of undulating modular floor plates that brings the curving irregularities of the outdoor landscape indoors.
After a long, rich, and heartfelt road trip taken by the Director, Charissa Terranova, and artist Tim Stokes, "Lifebean” and “Hot White Orange” have arrived hot off of the truck from the San Francisco architecture firm Anderson and Anderson. “Lifebean” is a collapsible disaster shelter shaped like a bean pod, It is placed outside on the open patio, the former loading dock of the old post office. “Hot White Orange” is a pneumatic amphitheater for nine people shaped like an orange that sits in the parking lot of Centraltrak.
