Fall 2014 exhibitions
Thea Djordjadze
Hayden Gallery
Open Tunings
David Grubbs and Eli Keszler / Brendan Fowler / Hannah Weinberger
Reference Gallery
October 10, 2014–January 4, 2015
Opening: October 9, 5–8pm
Performance: David Grubbs and Eli Keszler, October 10, 6pm
MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames St.
Cambridge, MA
Thea Djordjadze
Creating installations of sculptural objects, Thea Djordjadze situates traditional mediums such as plaster, clay, and wood with everyday materials like steel, foam, and linoleum. Linking the mass-produced and the handcrafted, she assembles steel and wood constructions that draw on modernist interior architecture and design together with handmade clay and plaster shapes. Djordjadze arranges her work on the floor, leaning against walls, with larger works enclosing smaller ones, such that the work and the space in which it is installed are mutually informed.
Djordjadze’s work often gestures towards museum display furniture, such as pedestals and vitrines. However, she resists the categorical separation of artwork from its means of presentation, stating “there is no holder of the thing and no thing itself.” For the List, the artist has created five structures composed of wood and steel that enclose other objects and further her investigation of the relationship of artwork to its display.
The artist’s installation also introduces a sense of domesticity to the museum, through sculptures suggestive of tables and mattresses, and with part of the gallery’s floor and wall covered with linoleum. These juxtapositions explore tensions between form and content, as well as between strands of male-dominated modernism and associations of the domestic and the handmade with the feminine.
Thea Djordjadze is curated by Paul C. Ha, Director, and Alise Upitis, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Open Tunings
David Grubbs and Eli Keszler / Brendan Fowler / Hannah Weinberger
Sound art dates back to the avant-garde experiments of Futurism and Dada, but it has until recently received sporadic attention in museum and gallery exhibitions. Inherently about time and change, invisible and uncontainable, sound overlaps with both the performing and the visual arts. Open Tunings presents three consecutive projects in sound by David Grubbs and Eli Keszler, Brendan Fowler, and Hannah Weinberger, and seeks to provide an experimental platform to explore the various ways in which the ephemeral forms of sound and performance can inhabit the exhibition space. Each one originates with a performance, followed by the presentation of recordings or objects used during the event. In both live and ongoing formats, the works variously examine the relationships between architectural space and spatial sound, presence and absence, liveness and recording, improvisation and script.
David Grubbs and Eli Keszler
Performance: Friday, October 10, 6pm
Exhibition on view from October 10
Brendan Fowler
Performance: Thursday, November 6, 6pm
Exhibition on view from November 7
Hannah Weinberger
Performance: Thursday, December 11, 6pm
Exhibition on view from December 12
Performances are free and take place in the Reference Gallery. Capacity is limited, first-come, first-served
Open Tunings is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Support for these exhibitions has been generously provided by Julian and Barbra Cherubini, the Embassy of Georgia to the US, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and the Friends of the List. Special thanks to Sprüth Magers Berlin London.
