The Rotunda Gallery, at 33 Clinton Street, Brooklyn Heights, welcomes spring with Water, Water, an exhibition of artists fascinated by the spray, shimmer and allure of water. Water, Water opens on Thursday, April 3, 2003, with a reception from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, and remains on view through May 17, 2003.
Guest curator Lilly Wei has assembled a group of artists who navigate water as both subject and medium. Works in many media evoke water in all its forms, from rushing bubbles and ethereal floating objects to crashing waves and melting ice cubes. The utilization of water as medium range from Simon Lee’s wall projections through water that submerge viewers in a liquid environment, to Claudia Schmacke’s mesmerizing, spiraled tubes of circulating water. Some of the artists explore human interaction with the water of the world in ways both playful and symbolic, from the New York surfers of Drew Heitzler’s film The Subway Sessions to the video image of artist Patty Chang lapping water from the surface of her own reflection in a mirror. Other artists in Water, Water engage the theme through video, photography, painting and sculpture.
Artists include:
Burt Barr’s pristine video of an ice cube melting in real time, wittily titled Slow Dissolve, is a gorgeous, succinctly matter-of-fact meditation on transience.
Katherine Bradford’s painting Swimmer Man, depicting a buoyant figure in a serene blue-green field, is from an ongoing series in which she explores human interactions with water.
Sebastiaan Bremer weaves a dense web of dots and lines over his sparkling underwater photographs of a swimming pool that, following the hypnotic currents of the water, coalesce into the rhythms and images of memory.
Mary Carlson’s Ice is a gleaming, glassy smooth, trompe-l’oeil sculpture that looks as if it were beginning to melt. Its message is about the enigmas of appearance.
Patty Chang’s video Fountain takes on Duchamp’s urinal and gives it a feminist gloss as she licks water from a mirror placed on the floor in a public lavatory. An impudent and subversive performance that makes us squirm and laugh at the same time.
Drew Heitzler’s Subway Sessions, a half-hour documentary on Greater New York surf culture, is not an oxymoron. Filmed entirely on Super 8, his first film captures a glimmering sequence of late summer days that abruptly ended on September 11, 2001.
Michael Krondl’s replicated image of water makes a moat around the gallery’s stairs and forces you to pause before you enter the main exhibition space. It creates a divide between the real world and art, a comment on illusion and the viewer’s complicity.
Simon Lee projects light through a tank of water filled with disparate objects to create a mysterious and marvelous tableau that utterly transforms its source.
Susan Rabinowitz’s small, luminous paintings both depict seascapes and do not, depending on how you read her limpid, flickering surfaces and sea-tinged palette.
Claudia Schmacke’s translucent, coiled tubes of flowing water are the antidote to sculpture as fixed, opaque and hard. In her bio-feminist interpretation, the lyrical coursing of liquid in organic shapes imitates the body’s forms and circulatory systems.
Arlene Shechet’s Casting Water is a project influenced by her daily crossings of the Brooklyn Bridge. She literally imprints East River water on wax, then rubber, creating a map of the moment.
James Sheehan’s tiny paintings magically squeeze whole worlds into little more than four square inches. His water series include fully realized scenes with scores of figures.
Guest curator Lilly Wei is an independent curator and critic who writes frequently for Art in America and is a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific. She is currently curating several other exhibitions, including "Twisting and Turning, Abstract Painting Now" for Blue Star in San Antonio and "The Invisible Thread: The Influence of Buddhism in Contemporary Art" for Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island.
The ROTUNDA GALLERY, housed in an award-winning space designed by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, showcases the work of Brooklyn artists. The ROTUNDA GALLERY’s educational programs reach 6,000 students each year with gallery visits and in-school art making projects. Janet Riker is the Gallery Director; Meridith McNeal is Associate Director. The ROTUNDA GALLERY is a project of the not-for-profit BRIC/Brooklyn Information & Culture, Inc.
Located in Brooklyn Heights, just over the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the Gallery is also easily accessible by public transportation. It is a short walk from the 2,3; 4,5; M; N or R trains at the Court Street/Borough Hall station; or the A, C trains at High Street.
