Indeterminate Activity

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Indeterminate Activity, an exhibition that investigates the use of postminimalism as a conceptual reference point in the work of six contemporary artists. This exhibition includes work by Talia Chetrit, Patrick Hill, Sam Moyer, Virginia Overton, Sara VanDerBeek and Lisa Williamson.

Indeterminate Activity, a title borrowed from Glenn Branca’s 1982 postminimalist composition, unites these artists by their ever-fluctuating relationship between object and materiality. Mapping the intersections between process art, site-specific art, art which evokes the body and aspects of conceptual art, the exhibition considers the apparent freedoms and pluralisms that stand at the heart of postminimalist temperament.

Converging the history of photographic imagery and ideas surrounding abstraction, Talia Chetrit’s pictures engage in a myriad of minimalist strands.  Each photograph in the exhibition integrates a traditional photographic prop (either a vase or human body) with the grid, an emblematic structure of modernism. The objects refuse the stringent presence of the grid, lending to compositions that are introspective and idiosyncratic.

Welcoming the figure into his work, Patrick Hill uses Carrera marble to represent the body, in this case, a set of legs in the balletic pose of plié. Supporting the figure, in such a way as a dance partner might, are two sets of wooden crosses that have been dyed and saturated in blue, pink and black. Blocky and industrial, these wooden elements offer a sense of rigidity and tension to this otherwise graceful gesture.

Further referencing the grid, Sam Moyer’s constructions go beyond the flattened, geometricized paradigm, translating gesture and the handmade into this ordered mathematical model. Allowing for heightened spatial reconsiderations of the grid, these simple monochromatic forms question the nature of the art object both materially and as a fixed, categorical term.

Virginia Overton considers sculptural and spatial tensions within everyday objects and simple forms. For this exhibition, Overton repurposes two acrylic wall mirrors as floor sculpture by cinching them with ratchet straps into variants on the curve. The mirrors, one allowing for a concave view of the gallery space while the other a convex, evoke the temporality and spontaneity of her practice.

Photographing architectural details in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Sara VanDerBeek’s pictures address the complexities and mechanics behind time and entropic change with expansive and vanguard compositions of decaying building foundations. These images reflect a subtle and transcendent purity to an otherwise subject of deterioration and decline.

Oscillating between the choreographed staging of objects and tangential compositions, Lisa Williamson exchanges the formal elements of minimalism for a free aesthetic in which she invests her objects with a strong material presence. Double Lapel with a Visible Seam and Peg Legs and Club Feet (Props), the two works by Williamson in the exhibition, use vertical lines as a recursive tool to inform and mirror across divergent mediums.