White Columns Online #6:

World Holes

curated by Jesse Greenberg

June 29, 2018–September 15, 2018 Online

A gray, vaguely rectangular sculpture detailed with grids and small rectangular pockets filled with glazes of varying colors. There are two circular cutouts that have been left empty.

Elisa Soliven
Untitled, 2018
Glazed ceramic and aluminum leaf
17 × 15 × 3 in.
Courtesy of the artist

A gray, vaguely rectangular sculpture detailed with grids and small rectangular pockets filled with glazes of varying colors, including crimson, mustard and turquoise.

Elisa Soliven
Untitled, 2018
Glazed ceramic and aluminum leaf
17 × 15 × 3 in.
Courtesy of the artist

A standing sculpture consisting of metal and wooden structures wrapped in red and white fabric. Thin lines extend between parts of the sculpture, resembling spider’s webs.

Courtney Puckett
The Listener, 2017
Fabric, metal, wood, wire, string, found objects
61 × 33 × 8.5 in.
Courtesy of the artist

An abstract geometric standing sculpture balanced on a point and leaning against a wall. It consists of thin, interwoven metal and wooden structures wrapped in yellow fabric.

Courtney Puckett
Happy Sad Shield, 2015
Fabric, metal, wood, wire, string, found objects
89 × 48 × 8 in.
Courtesy of the artist

An abstract geometric standing sculpture attached to a base with a central pole. It consists of metal and wooden structures wrapped in black fabric.

Courtney Puckett
The Racer, 2016
Fabric, metal, wood, wire, string, found objects
73 × 35 × 8 in.
Courtesy of the artist

A standing sculpture with the appearance of molten metal. It consists of a drooping rectangular frame bridged horizontally by three drooping lines.

Melissa Hopson
Meet Me on the Patio 1/2, 2018
Cast aluminum
12 × 5 × 2 in.
Courtesy of the artist

A sculpture composed of two X shaped forms joined at all four points. The top and bottom connections are further bridged each by a pillar of stacked bottle caps.

Elisa Lendvay
Shuffle Sometimes, 2016
Aluminum, paper clay, bottle caps, gouache, acrylic paint and medium
6 × 9 × 5 in.
Courtesy of the artist

A sheet of steel leaned against the wall. There are various circular cutouts and indentations on the sheet, resembling bubbles.

Catherine Cullen
Underwater Mirror, 2012
Hammered steel
24 × 16 × 1 in.
Courtesy of the artist

An office with blue walls, blue carpeting and white furniture. There are five people pictured working at computers. One of the walls has a monitor with a video playing on it.

E.S.P. TV
Work, installation shot, 2017
Custom live television studio, gallery staff, custom office partitions, rented office furniture, fluorescent lights, framed photographs, 4 channel glass video conference wall, 4 duratrans prints, blue carpet, 10 foot satellite dish, multi-channel video projection, six live-to-tape 30-minute television episodes, 110 videotape library of past broadcasts.
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist

An office with blue walls inside a larger room with brick walls, large windows and a very high ceiling. TV cameras, white office furniture and office partitions are also visible.

Participating Artists

Catherine Cullen
E.S.P. TV
Melissa Hopson
Elisa Lendvay
Courtney Puckett
Elisa Soliven

Exhibition Description

In this project to curate an online “show” using the 450 artists currently in the White Columns online registry database without a prerogative or a theme in mind, I set out to research and browse through the database with the sole intention to organize a selection of artists who I do not know, and are new to me. Artists I could discover. Skipping through the randomizer disregarding themes, trends, current political relevance or comodifiability. It was odd and almost humorous that my attention kept stalling on works that I realized involved absence, or holes, or lack of material. In one sense this could be seen as choosing the works that were least “there” but it revealed the tenements, traditions, and traits of the substance of what makes Sculpture. I am a sculptor primarily, that is to say I work in materials rather than images. Much of the “job” of a sculptor is to prove the reasoning of the material in conjunction with the form. And yes I do mean, “prove.” Whereas a painter will never have to prove the ready-to-go reasoning behind stretching a piece of fabric on a set of wooden bars and portraying an image in the safe confines of a rectangle. A sculpture is critiqued by a longer process that involves an almost judicial court of material necessity, or material meanings.

It is in this expected chore that I found clever formal decisions on the selected artists’ part that evade this challenge, by creating formal sculptural moves that navigate the absence of material and inherently through that, evade decision altogether.
SO what does this look like?

Elisa Soliven creates grey mattered gridded bejeweled items. Some with absences that appear as deep eyeholes set in alignment with jewel like compartments. The typical human attraction trick of: shiny & colorful, has been superseded by the absence of the glitz. As the “eyehole” (portholes) gain amplified presence.

Courtney Puckett’s sculptures made of conglomerations of skinny lines crisscrossing, like spider-webs building up a scaffold, show the thought process and structural necessities the artist must navigate, much like a buildings armature at a construction site. Like drawings in space these sculptures have a frontal view, where all form disappears into material on side view.

Melissa Hopson’s work looks like the rungs of a ladder made of drips of aluminum. There is a liquid like flow form to the piece. As if the machine or container of the liquids is absent from the work, and we are left to see only the fluids form. The whole piece looks like it could unfreeze and splash into a puddle.

Elisa Lendvay’s work looks like a model for an astro-physics teaching device with some smooth arms reaching in and around itself, while two arms are made of stacked bottle caps. The combination of smooth non-specific material form and found object bare necessity exemplification shows the immediate associations materials can hold or retain.

Catherine Cullen’s piece is a straightforward bare piece of rectangular sheet metal that has been pounded dented and holed. The work exists as a moment caught in time of the fissure of the metal. As if it is foaming and degrading, and we are left with a moment capture in between its dissolvement.

E.S.P. TV has set up a TV production office in a gallery space. This space resembles the now highly popular form of office layout that new tech companies are preferring. No cubicles, no walls, no offices, trying to showcase a horizontal power distributed amongst employees. The point is to try to make all feel as equally privileged, but ends up creating a distributed surveillance system of employees amongst each other. No one can stop working, or take a break, because everyone is plainly in view of each other fearing to appear as if they are continually working.

Jesse Greenberg is an artist and curator, living and working in New York.

This exhibition is the sixth in a series of online exhibitions curated exclusively from White Columns’ Curated Artist Registry.

For more information: registry.whitecolumns.org