27 February – 27 March, 2010
Exhibition
Opening Saturday, February 27th, 6-8pm
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—
-Emily Dickinson
Spencer Brownstone is pleased to present a tandem exhibition featuring the work of Tara Sinn and Rafaël Rozendaal.
Winter is a time marked by hostile weather and driven by extremes. Functioning as an immersive environment, this exhibition descends into a realm where the altered psychological state of winter operates as the norm, -the artworks simultaneously reveling and reviling in conflicting symptoms of indulgence and depravation, anxiety and detachment, mania and depression.
A full-fledged participatory installation, Rafaël Rozendaal’s Broken Self was also originally concocted for the Internet (brokenself.com). Using a minimal approach, the site consists of a blank browser window acting as a brittle medium that can be shattered with the mere click of the mouse. Whether interpreted as a release from an overly wired world or attributed to the continual breaking-down of the Self, the effect is one of blissful violence and purgative joy. In the installation version the screen is simply painted onto a concrete wall lit only via a rapid strobe. Participants engage by projecting glass bottles at the painted screen, creating a euphoric crash and a rain of broken glass. On the floor, the shards remain as they fell, accumulating and leaving a shiny residue of the creative destruction.