ART+SPACE SUMMER EXHIBITION at Project 4

Project 4 presents :

ART+SPACE SUMMER EXHIBITION
Sharon Louden
Jeanne Quinn
Foon Sham
Katy Stone

June 5, 2010 - July 10, 2010
Reception, Saturday, June 5, 2010 - 6:30pm - 8:30 pm

Project 4 presents a group show linking the gallery’s exhibition programming with its art consulting service, ART+Space.  This ART+Space Summer Exhibition features four artists creating sculptural works and installations that emphasize the space they interact with and showcase the artists’ ability to adapt their work to any site.  Each working with an adept and responsive hand to their materials, these artists create complexes and structures where their lyrical, sculptural forms coalesce with the environments they inhabit.

In Katy Stone's work “Wavescape,” intricately cut pieces of aluminum flow over the walls of the first floor gallery.  Stone’s forms are stretched and repeated, evoking man-made fabrication while expressing a harmony found only in nature.  Within the serenity of these forms the merging of Stone’s influences, such as Chinese landscape paintings, modern materials, and gestural repetitive marks, reveals itself. With a similarly complex process and aesthetic, local artist Foon Sham's 10-foot tall, stacked wood sculpture sits on the balcony behind this first floor gallery, swelling from the well-ordered contemporary gallery into unfettered space. Sham is primarily interested in investigating the materiality of wood during in art-making process.  In this new work, Sham borrows vocabularies from architecture and line-drawing to create a work suggestive of naturally occurring form, deliberate design and intuitive mark at once.

Jeanne Quinn and Sharon Louden each create immersive sculptural installations in separate niches of the gallery’s second level.  Louden's installation "Merge," made of hundreds of individual aluminum forms, exemplifies the whimsical and gestural linearity characteristic of all of her work.  The physicality of "Merge" is a result of both Louden’s animated arrangement of her aluminum elements as well as the effect of light bouncing from their surfaces. In Quinn’s neighboring installation, “Everything Is Not As It Seems,” the artist also organically employs several visual forces at once, to create a complete environment.  In this work, porcelain, ornamental forms and electrified bulbs hang in a crimson room, creating an expression of the artist’s fascination with the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk: the complete work of art.  Quinn seeks to create work that is “sensually encompassing,” and uses domestic space as a site to do so in this particular work, referencing the pervasiveness of the decorative arts in everyday life.  The effect of an interior space on an aesthetic experience and vice versa is the focus of this work and of this exhibition.

1353 U Street NW, 3rd floor, Washington, DC 20009
202 232 4340 
http://www.project4gallery.com/