Corey McCorkle
April 9th - May 22nd 2005
Kunsthalle Bern
Helvetiaplatz 1
CH-3005 Bern
T +41 31 350 00 40
F +41 31 350 00 41
Monday to Sunday 10 am – 5pm
Tuesday 10 am – 7pm
www.kunsthallebern.ch
The work of American artist Corey McCorkle connects obliquely through architectural interventions and resuscitated objects of a specific cultural import. The contextual shifts the work engage in offer the viewer unique collisions of information – here possible in a variety of different mediums. Inciting meditation on conceptual curiosities in urban studies, architecture, industrial or graphic design, his objects and interventions describe the anatomy of revelatory experience through an investigation of transitory space.
The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern consists of a series of situations where craft is given considerable concern. Many of the new works focus on existing situations in the Kunsthalle. The large skylights have been altered in two ways. The first enhances in one spot the skylight’s valency – the foyer being altered with rays of distilled sun through a volumetric intervention of blown plastic panels which rest in the existing skylight armature. By contrast, though through similar means, Crystal Chain Letter Complex (Dark Episode) blackens out the skylight in the main exhibition hall. These volumetric black panels, reminiscent of so much 80s design, resituate the vogue of much contemporary art in an already existing, and epic, gothic frame work. The monumental span of this piece in particular inverts the elegiac celebration of the diffuse light, of a cathedral for instance, with something sculptural, opaque and not unrelated to the astonishment, or menace, of the sublime. Each of the panels were blown with maximum amount of air that could be pushed into molten plastic. All of the glass from the existing skylight having been removed.
Two other works that reflect one another are Rising Sun and Dandelion Wine for a Tokyo Blonde. The first is looped DVD animation consisting of hundreds of small images taken from Japanese magazines stocking advertisements for self-employed call girls. All of the images present demure, usually blandly dressed office girls with there hands covering only their eyes. This presentation and this gesture, at obvious odds with one another, pit vivid availability against anonymity in a salute, over and over, to the sexually suggestive. The second is an object made from the cross-grain of industrial plywood. It exists as something between a sprawling coffee table and a flying carpet. This “table” consists of thousands of pieces of faceted wood which have been assembled into a number of different patterns of hard geometry. The final area of the work equals that of a standardized plywood sheet. The crystallized patterns are derived from the Edo-era Japanese art of Yosegi which the artist spent a portion of last year learning outside of Tokyo.
Solar Wind Setting is a work related to Bern specifically. The artist’s on-going concern with the transmission of light brought him to the discovery of a famous moment in the history of research at the University of Bern’s Science department. The scientists there developed a foil used to collect the direct rays of the sun, gathering with it isotopes unaffected by the Earth’s atmosphere. This information reflected on this sun-kissed paper, collected during the first Apollo mission to the moon, was then used to measure the chemical make-up of the rays more accurately. The artist has taken this material and reconfigured Andy Warhol’s seminal balloon piece of 1966. Also, in an adjacent room a great portion of the herring-bone floor has been removed and rotated 23.5.
Corey McCorkle (Born 1969, La Crosse, USA; lives and works in New York). This is his first solo-exhibition in Switzerland. His work will also be featured this spring at The Sculpture Centre, New York; The Middelheim Museum and Sculpture Park, Antwerp; with solo exhibitions at The Marres, Maastricht; and The Suburban, Chicago. Recently he has exhibited at PS1/ MOMA, New York; The Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; Gallery Speak For, Tokyo; objectif_exhibitions, Antwerp; Galeria Fortes Vilaa, Sao Paolo; maccarone Inc., New York; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Triple Candie, New York; Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles; MurrayGuy Gallery, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Arnolfini Museum, Bristol; and The Drawing Center New York. Last year he was awarded the US Artist Fellowship from The Japan Foundation, New York and Tokyo.