Curve of a hill like the curve of a green shoulder at Mary Mary / Glasgow


Curve of a hill like the curve of a green shoulder

with: Aleana Egan, Mary Heilmann, Judith Hopf, Amanda Ross-Ho, Erika Vogt

28.01.2017 — 11.03.2017

Mary Mary
Suite 2 / 1  6 Dixon Street
Glasgow   G1 4AX  

                                      


























Taking its title from a 2015 work by Aleana Egan, ‘Curve of a hill like the curve of a green shoulder’ focuses on sculptural work which leans towards an idea of the object, the studio, the interior and our experience of artistic environments and performative elements. Each work included provides a focus on sculptural objects offering multiple standpoints beyond the traditional idea of the sculptural canon.

Aleana Egan’s work looks to texts by the modernist writers Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf and how they describe talk and silence, using interiors, objects and clothes to discuss and project ideas. In her newest work included here, Egan presents a vitrine filled with sculptural arrangements surrounding a garment designed and made from written descriptions of people’s clothes in found texts, as well as notes on her personal style and observations.

Egan often looks to literary descriptions and a vast archive of photographs, notes and sketches that catalogue her everyday and remembered places and emotions. There is an immediacy in Egan’s practice to make experience, descriptions and responses into solid and material forms and to set out an alternative time frame for these responses by transformation into sculptural arrangements. It is the intangible moments, layering of conversation, thoughts, reading and looking which echo in the work, isolating moments in literature, an architectural detail or a description of a character’s outfit and translating these into form, shape and colour.

Mary Heilmann’s works are in many ways meditations on the experience of looking and experiencing. Many of her paintings are ruminations on recollections, architectural details and dreams as well as references to music, street fashion, film and numerous aesthetic influences. Works merge between each other, with her paintings rendering both two and three dimensional imagery and sculptural elements, incorporating prints, videos and photography. Heilmann executes ideas in series or repetition, processing abstract thought into solid object and imagery. As part of this, Heilmann installs tables, chairs and ceramic bowls and cups, inviting the viewer to contemplate and experience her work communally and in time. Heilmann produces work around the idea of seeing and experiencing it and as a result it occupies a social space, presenting her experience as one that is generously open to our own experience.

Judith Hopf’s work employs humour and a deliberately naive aesthetic to subvert and poke fun at social and political conventions and modernist, minimalist aesthetics. Her very deliberate and specific use of simple materials, allows Hopf to play with sculptural expectations, often using animals such as serpents and sheep etc to describe and symbolise human behaviour, however limited it may be. As with the snakes included here, Hopf investigates an idea of limitations in relation to human physical behaviour and in our relationship to the internet and a society built on continuous flowing information. Here the snakes represent a stagnation in this, a frozen animation, illustrating Hopf’s deft hand at utilising sculptural material to illustrate the comedy and ludicrosity in our day to day existences.

In the work of Amanda Ross-Ho, we are presented with an intimate image of the studio and of the objects of production. Each object holds vast swathes of intimate knowledge and reference and through the processes of Ross-Ho’s production, they are stripped of their utility, presented as gargantuan versions of themselves, becoming both tragic and comedic. In becoming more object like, they are more loaded, more intimate and symbolic, with Ross-Ho presenting theatrical environments with forensic gazes. In line with, Ross-Ho mines the idea of time as material and often investigates ‘the space inbetween’. Her works seem to present an impression of vigorous and painstaking processes, whilst others seem to be held in time, once utilized and needed, now frozen as image and object, an idea of something seemingly performative, ever constant, yet faintly removed from grasping.

Included here are two large scale sculptures by Erika Vogt, which are based on a collection of images Vogt has gathered of knives, from numerous time periods and sources and which are a re-working of props used in a recent collaborative performance work as part of the Artist Theater Program. These objects therefore are at once sculptural pieces and post-performance re-enactments with each given the name of a friend or fellow artist, some of whom participated in the theater works. These works were used as costume, directing tools for choreography and sightlines as well as being political sculptural symbols; their colours though referencing a quick, rough production are taken from a series of protest posters whilst the knife image itself, often used as a symbol of revolution.

Within her practice Vogt makes a point of her ever shifting alliance to any one medium and is interested in having an experience with her work which is unknown and unexpected, moving between performance, film, drawing and sculpture. The work aims to be increasingly physical and endeavours to be numerous entities and experiences all at once.

Born in 1979, Aleana Egan lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Egan graduated from Glasgow School of Art BA Hons Painting in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘shapes from life,’ The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; ‘light on a leaf,’ Galerie Konrad Fischer, Berlin (both 2015); ‘There are all sorts of lives,’ Mary Mary, Glasgow (2014); ‘day wears,’ The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2012); ‘At intervals whilst turning,’ The Drawing Room, London (2011) & ‘We sat down where we had sat before,’ Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2008). Group exhibitions include ‘Out there, that away,’ CCA Derry, Londonderry; ‘Contemporary Drawings,’ Kettles Yard, Cambridge (2015); ‘The Line of Beauty,’ Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2013); ‘The Alchemy of Materials,’ Landesmuseum Munster; ‘Leopards in the Temple,’ Sculpture Center, New York (2010). Upcoming shows include ‘Intelligent Touch,’ Project Space Tilburg, The Netherlands and a solo exhibition at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin in March 2017.

Mary Heilmann was born in 1940, San Francisco and lives and works in New York. Selected exhibitions include ‘Mary Heilmann. Looking at Pictures,’ Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); ‘Sunset,’ Whitney Museum of Art, New York; ‘Mary Heilmann,’ 303 Gallery, New York; ‘Mary Heilmann & David Reed,’ Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (all 2015); ‘Mary Heilmann. Good Vibrations,’ Neues Museum, Nueremburg; ‘Another Green World,’ Hausler Contemporary, Munich (both 2013); ‘Visions, Waves and Roads,’ Hauser & Wirth, London (2012); ‘Weather Report: Drawings and Prints,’ Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2010).

Born in 1969, Judith Hopf lives & works in Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions include ‘Up,’ Museion, Bolzan; ‘!Hear Rings!,’ kaufmann repetto, Milan (both 2016); ‘More,’ Neue Galerie, Berlin (2015); ‘Untitled (1-4),’ Praxes Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014); ‘A Line May Lie,’ Kunsthalle Lingen; ‘Testing Time,’ Studio Voltaire, London; ‘From Down, From Up & in Between,’ Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (all 2013); Malmo Konsthall; ‘end rhymes and openings,’ Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (both 2013). Selected group exhibitions include ‘Le Grand Balcon,’ La Biennale de Montreal; ‘Carpet for a Lord,’ Supportico Lopez, Berlin; ‘Surfaces of You,’ FRAC Ile de France, La Plateau, Paris (all 2016); ‘Duh? Art & Stupidity,’ Focal Point Gallery, Southend on Sea; ‘The School of Kyiv,’ Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2015); Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2014). Hopf will have a solo show at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2017.
Born in 1975 in Chicago, Amanda Ross-Ho lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘UNTITLED PERIOD PIECE,’ De Vleeshal Centre for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, The Netherlands; ‘Eternal Flame,’ The Pit II, Los Angeles; Michael Jon & Alan, Miami, Florida (all 2016); ‘How to remove dark spots,’ Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2015); ‘Who buries who,’ The Approach, London; ‘The Suburban Opening: Amanda Ross-Ho,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (both 2014); Gone Tomorrow,’ Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; ‘Cradle of Filth,’ Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; ‘The Character and Shape of Illuminated Things,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (all 2013); ‘Amanda Ross-Ho: Teeny Tiny Woman,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Selected group exhibitions include ‘New Wave,’ The Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas; ‘Good Dreams, Bad Dreams – American Mythologies,’ The Aishti Foundation, Jal el Dib Lebanon; ‘HET KAT SALON,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; ‘Ordinary Pictures,’ Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (all 2016). Ross-Ho’s solo show at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany opens at the end of January 2017.


Erika Vogt was born in 1973 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Eros Island: Knives Please Rise,’ Overduin & Co, Los Angeles (2016); ‘Slug,’ Simone Subal Gallery, New York (both 2016); ‘Speech Mesh – Drawn Off,’ The Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire & Triangle France, Marseilles (both 2014); ‘Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll,’ The New Museum, New York (2013). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection,’ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015); ‘Warm Side of Zero,’ Overduin & Co, Los Angeles; ‘Spheres of Glass,’ The University of California, San Diego (both 2014); ‘End Things,’ Portland Institute of Art, Portland; ‘Made in LA,’ Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (both 2012). Vogt will have a solo show at Mary Mary, Glasgow in May 2017

*All images courtesy the Artist; Mary Mary, Glasgow
Photographer credit: Max Slaven