fivesevendelle project space presents:
The Echo as Original Sound: The Self-Made Man in the American Landscape
Featuring the works of Gina Siepel and Christopher Carroll
May 14 – 28, 2010
Events: Artist Reception May 14, 2010. 5:00-8:00 PM
Gallery Hours: Tuesday, May 18. 2:00-6:00 PM; Saturday, May 22. 1:00-5:00 PM; Friday, May 28. 2:00-6:00 PM; or by appointment
Address: 57 Delle Ave, Mission Hill, Boston MA 02120
In The Echo as Original Sound, artists Gina Siepel and Christopher Carroll explore and delight in ambiguous collisions of nature and culture. Their works echo, commemorate, and re-frame iconic cultural images and actions of Americans in nature. This exhibit features sculptural works, video, and photography by both artists.
In The Boy Mechanic Project, Gina Siepel builds objects from a series of books called The Boy Mechanic, published between 1913 – 1925. Siepel has examined this period in American history, transplanted this series of historical exercises into her own contemporary life, and inserted them into a paradigm of fluid gender identity and a post-industrial ecological reality. Siepel’s Boy Mechanic Project seeks to recontextualize the Boy Mechanic, both celebrating and ironizing his origins.
Christopher Carroll’s Trophy series echoes his struggle to engage with the natural environment that he encounters as a result of urban life. Performing as an iconic but not-quite-right hunter/soldier/explorer character in urban natural sites such as the Fenway, Carroll both engages in and parodies particularly American stereotypes of masculinity in nature. His works explore humor, failure, and ultimately Romanticism as they enact an urban fantasy world of an almost unreachable Nature.
The exhibition takes its title from a passage in Thoreau’s Walden, in which he described the sounds of church bells from nearby villages reverberating through the woods. He noted that the bells became as much part of the trees as of the man-made steel bells from which they originated. Through their work, both artists echo Thoreau’s observation that nature and culture are inseparable. The works by Siepel and Carroll explore and complicate the American relationship to landscape and identity. These explorations are simultaneously joyous and critical, nostalgic and ironic, romantic and irreverent.
Contact:
Gina Siepel: ginasiepel@earthlink.net
Christopher Carroll: chris@christophercarroll.org
