 Xanadu (world trade center 2), April 2001 "Architecture as Landscape" Series, C-Print on Aluminum 40 x 102 inches Patrick Meagher Blandscape and Photage Blandscape: "object in space"; photographic series of existing and implied landscape forms, drawing from planned space to interstitial vegetated spaces. Photage: Found resonance between sequences; Collage that is not overlapping or cut-up, but wholly placed in communication on a single plane, compositionally related in various patterns based on layout and content; the interplay of "the space between objects and the objects between space". Blandscape and Photage marks 28-year-old New York based artist Patrick Meagher’s first solo exhibition. After receiving his Masters of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1999, Meagher returned to his art practice, having previously studied at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and Carnegie Mellon University in the early-to-mid nineties. As a result, he works fluidly across various genres within the fields of art and architecture, developing innovative strategies towards working hybridically, while dissolving categories of artistic practice. His larger production lies under the auspices of ANE Media Arts Collective, founded in 1993, a collective enterprise engaged with syncretism between art and commerce under the aegis of a business model. This construction is both a business practice and a performative. Meagher’s video, photography, and sculptural installations have been formerly exhibited at PS1, Artists Space, World Views, The Carpenter Center, and are soon to be featured at The New Museum and Lombard Freid Gallery in Spring-Summer 2002. The Riva Gallery exhibition features disparate bodies of work, including a collaborative video with Dave Shim entitled Autobahn3, however the show largely focuses on Meagher’s redefinition of photographic strategies. Negotiating inventive strategies for approaching space and its representation through found forms and quotidian subject matter in order to investigate the dialectic of unmediated, natural environments versus artificial and constructed ones, Meagher deems himself a “digital sculptor and virtual space photographer.” His photography focuses on the obscuration of the banal, and flattening of the object into an abstracted minimalist field of unintelligible space. His manipulation of cropped minimalist architectural facades or hyper-detailed EPS styrofoam packing material through the lens of a low-grade camera provides for an archive of highly abstracted surfaces - steel, glass, concrete, fluorescent light, rehearsing the interplay between architecture, design and technology. The artist’s interest rests in the interface of digital arts and landscape urbanism. His panoramic visions of ungrounded placeless environments collapse the virtual with the real through a highly formal and elusive lens. Meagher’s mode of cropping, coloration, and distillation of an image produces a synthetic flattened planar field of pure surface and sign, often collapsing into the realm of the critical-decorative. This gesture of reduction and optical play often renders his visual lexicon nearly indistinguishable. Meagher is obssesionally prolific, invested in the confluence of disciplines, and constantly creating new taxonomies for his production -- styroforms, still animation, implied video, depornedscapes -- forming an endless number of possibilities and potential for new models of image making. (© Lauri Firstenberg) Exhibition from February 23 - March 30, 2002 Riva Gallery 529 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 T +212/ 242 34 34 F +212/ 242 33 22 |
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