Вирджиния Овертон

Today I Made Nothing

source: etodayru

Художница Вирджиния Овертон (Virginia Overton) создает собственный мир поэтического искусства при помощи смешанной техники.

39-летняя художница родилась в Теннесси и выросла на ферме, и именно поэтому, как утверждает она, ее работы отличают грубые материалы – гипсокартон и деревянные балки. Овертон живет и работает в Бруклине.
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source: whitecube

Virginia Overton’s work comprises installation, sculpture and photography, often beginning intuitively as a direct response to her physical presence in a particular space. Through a process of trial and error, she creates sculpture that is performative, sometimes obstructing, bisecting, dividing or joining the architecture of a space with works that are dramatic and minimal in feel.

Infused with an ethos of economy, Overton’s practice favours elemental materials, frequently recycled objects that are found on site or things discovered in the environs of the exhibition space. More commonly associated with architecture, construction work or farming, materials such as wood, metal, plexi and fluorescent lighting are cut, bent and hammered into works that evince the power and sensory quality of their own materials. ‘I like for the work to act as a marker of its own history – letting accrued defects show in the pieces – that talks about the ways in which the materials have been used’, she explains. In the work Untitled (juniperus virginiana) (2013), Overton used cedar planks from her family farm in Tennessee to neatly line the gallery wall, creating an installation that operated visually, spatially and sensorially since this distinctive wood has a remarkable grain and colour as well as a highly evocative smell. For a recent large-scale outdoor sculpture commissioned by the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, Overton created a 500-foot brass tube which stretches out, like a line in space, across the landscape. Delicately raised on struts above the grass that grows beneath it, the tube carries ambient sound and is designed to colour and patternate over time as its material responds to the change in weather and the swift passing of seasons.

While Overton’s work is clearly in dialogue with minimalist sculpture, and, in particular, with the work of both Donald Judd and Richard Serra, it also deals with the transformation of architectural space. Notions of equilibrium, weight and gravity are foregrounded in her carefully balanced assemblages, which harness what she has described as the ‘natural push and pull in materials’. A recent exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, for example, was conceived as a series of spatial echoes, with works that intervened in and recreated elements of the museum’s architecture such as Untitled (Hauptstaal floor) (2013), a floor-based sculpture which copied the pattern of the gallery’s glass ceiling, and a series of parquet wood panels hung on the wall which mirrored the actual parquet of the gallery floor.

In other works, the artist deals with the visual iconography of working class America incorporating pick-up trucks (both inside and outside of the gallery space), decal trucker’s motifs and lightbox signage in her work. In Chevy Deluxe (2012), a work made for The Power Station in Dallas, she exhibited a faded blue pick-up truck with a bright blue tarpaulin covering its bed, which, when viewed from the gallery’s second floor, became distilled into a floating monochrome. In a sculpture commissioned by the High Line, Untitled (2012), she bricked-up the bed of a black pick-up truck and located it on a raised parking lot, viewable from the elevated park. The work both incorporated and reflected on the urban surroundings, as well as on American car culture in general, transforming a vacant parking lot into a pedestal for her sculpture.

Overton was born in Nashville, Tennessee and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2014), Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munster (2013-4), Kunsthalle Bern (2013), The Power Station, Dallas (2013) and the Power House, Memphis (2007).
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source: artnewsorg

Virginia Overton’s sculptural constructions are both a reflection and a product of this precarious existence — one that negotiates a contingent context of temporary relationships and incorrigible spaces. Where Overton’s practice may intimate a social terrain, it is wholly enacted in the physical register. These are heavy-duty yet teetering analogs that depend on its surrounding conditions (dimensions, gravity, temperature, moisture, tension, pressure, time, etc.) and its provisional relationships for stability.
The material elements that comprise Overton’s sculptural work must then be able to withstand constant displacement and renegotiation while holding its own position long enough. For Overton, the possible usages – both creative and functional – of construction materials and commercially produced objects lend itself to this task as well as carry a visual valence.
The wood beam, light bulb, plastic mirror, ratchet strap, chair, and metal ladder among others are part of a specific inventory of materials Overton uses to create her elegantly spare sculptures and temporary arrangements. In a recent exhibition at the Sculpture Center in New York, Overton presented two works in the catacomb-like spaces of the building that exemplified this approach. In one area, Overton wedged an orange utility ladder brought from her studio into a concrete space with same corresponding size, leaving the ladder dangling horizontally off the floor unmoored from its usual function — it is now a temporary art object until deinstallation.
In the choice of materials and their ad hoc configurations, Overton locates artistic practice continuous with the creative problem solving, or what she describes as ‘fixing’, that occurs in daily life. These are provisional solutions done with limited resources usually outside of any formal skill set. These are solutions to prop up; to hold together; to illuminate; to move things; to keep things going; to make something out of it. Overton continues these operations in her art production; however, nothing is necessarily broken that needs fixing here. For her, these are situations and spaces that give rise to the generative possibilities created from the need to figure things out.
A recent invitation for Overton’s exhibition in Basel, Switzerland, features a snapshot that she took in passing of a maroon flatbed pickup truck parked in a rustic setting. A single thin ratchet strap holds down an impossibly tall stack of wooden shipping pallets to the truck — perhaps just long enough for the unwieldy payload to reach its destination.
Similarly a few years earlier, Overton drove a borrowed pickup truck down South for her VA4398UV, (2006), project, collecting discarded objects in the cargo space along the way. When she arrived in Memphis from New York her truck resembled the one she would find later capture in a snapshot along the road. It is no coincidence that wooden pallets, utility straps, heavy machinery, and other materials occur in Overton’s work. These elements make up the pared-down, rugged aesthetics that characterizes her work.

By nature of their basic physical attributes and placement, these objects can also be a source of displacement and negotiation. The work is not only subject to surrounding conditions but can be a producer of it — they reflect, block, light up, and hold down. The centerpiece of her exhibition at Dispatch, Untitled (2010), featured two large sheets of slouching plastic mirror propped up on opposing walls by a wood beam, creating a reflected infinity from repurposed materials. As the mirror pieces buckled from the pressure of the supporting beam, multiple spaces proliferated in its imperfect, scratched reflections beyond the confines of the small gallery space.In her photographic work, Overton handles images much like physical material: to be manipulated, repurposed, put under pressure, and transposed. This includes representations of visual displacements such as images of reflections and illuminated liminal spaces.

Virginia Overton was born in Nashville, Tennessee and received her BFA, University of Memphis, TN. She lives in New York.
Recent exhibitions and projects include (selection) : Mitchell-Innes and Nash, NY (g), White Columns, NY (g), Republique-Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris F (g), Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NY, (g), Basel 41, Basel, CH (g), PS1 MoMA, NY (g), Dispatch, New York, NY (s), Cheekwood, Nashville, TN (s), , Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscon AZ (g), le Magasin-CNAC, Grenoble, F (g), Artlab at AMUM, Memphis, TN (g), Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, NY (g), Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (g), Powerhouse, Memphis, TN (s), Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, NY (g), Brooks Museum, Memphis, TN (s), Powerhouse, Memphis TN (s).
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source: artthehighlineorg

Virginia Overton is known for sculptures and installations that incorporate raw materials, found objects, and often reused and recycled elements. Based on simple gestures, her work calls attention to the inexorable demands of scale and gravity in its attempts to fit into the surrounding environment. Pickup trucks have always played an important role in Overton’s work. The artist has frequently used trucks by turning them into platforms for artistic creativity including photographing trucks loaded with various found objects in their beds.

For the High Line, Overton transforms her own pickup truck into a sculpture installed on the stacked parking next to the High Line. The stacked parking is one of the sites next to the High Line that attracts the curiosity and amusement of passers-by for its unusual structure, and now it serves as a plinth for the artist’s work. By completely filling the bed of the truck with bricks, Overton references the now closed-off passageways on the High Line, which originally allowed trains to pass through the upper floors of warehouses and factories to drop off goods. Unable to transport goods itself, the pickup truck pays tribute to the history of the High Line and becomes a temporary monument to American car culture and life in today’s metropolises.