Opening Reception for Rafael Domenech and In Practice
Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 6:30–8:30pm
SculptureCenter is pleased to present Rafael Domenech: Model to exhaust this place (SculptureCenter Pavilion) and In Practice: Total Disbelief. Join us to celebrate the opening of both exhibitions on Thursday, January 16, 2020, 6:30–8:30pm.
For his new commission at SculptureCenter, Rafael Domenech creates a large-scale modular installation in the ground floor gallery. Responding to the conditions of the exhibition space as a former trolley repair shop, Domenech uses the building’s existing structure, in particular the tracks of an industrial gantry system, as a machine to produce and facilitate the work. Working with materials typically destined for construction sites, the work engages with the urban vernacular of the rapidly growing neighborhood of Long Island City. Depending on the time and purpose of encounter with Domenech’s exhibition, the installation functions simultaneously at multiple levels: as a sculpture, a decentered architectural model, a pavilion, and a venue for public programs and gatherings.
In Practice: Total Disbelief considers artistic engagements with dimensions of doubt as they contribute to the formation of social life. Across media, the works in the exhibition engage formal tools that uphold belief and produce what we consider to be true – narrative and cinematic tropes, photographic technologies, empiricism, and others – and use them to make any number of other truth claims. While characterized on one hand by the clean slate of a baseline lack of faith, an active engagement with disbelief also means taking stock of astonishment, navigating defense mechanisms, and pitting skepticism against a real desire to be convinced and to know. In Practice: Total Disbelief posits that artworks are the products and by-products of these dynamics, appearing as objects, images, and activities that sustain uncertainty.
The exhibition features newly commissioned works by: Qais Assali, Andrew Cannon, Jesse Chun, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Ficus Interfaith, Laurie Kang, Devin Kenny and Andrea Solstad, K.R.M. Mooney, sidony o’neal, Mariana Silva, Jordan Strafer, and Andrew Norman Wilson.