DANIEL ARSHAM “Circa 2345”

DANIEL ARSHAM “Circa 2345” September 15 - October 22, 2016 Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm “Blue Calcite Football Jersey” 2016. Blue Calcite, pigment, hydrostone. 41 × 34 × 3 1/2 in / 104.1 × 86.4 × 8.9 cm Daniel Arsham “Circa 2345” Galerie Perrotin, New York September 15 - October 22, 2016 Galerie Perrotin is pleased to announce Daniel Arsham’s In this exhibition Arsham presents on the first floor new first solo show with the gallery in New York. The exhibition works from 2016, such as Blue Calcite Basketball Jersey, will feature sculptural pieces, breakthrough use of color as Blue Calcite Basketball Tower, and Blue Calcite Bulls well as a large scale installation. This will be the artists Jacket amongst others. By using this particular crystalline eleventh show with Galerie Perrotin. calcite, each piece radiates an intense blue, the shock of color opening up Arsham’s artistic lexicon, a byproduct Daniel Arsham’s sculptural works are poetic constructions from his research and results into correcting his inherent made up of juxtapositions of form and material: a 16mm colorblindness. Arsham introduces in this exhibition color film projector rendered in ash and hydrostone, or a 20th in his sculptural work, as well as a combination of different century iconic guitar, formed out of white glacial rock dust, its elements, for the first time. crumbling areas integral to its haunting beauty. Transforming compressed elemental materials such as stone, crystal and On the lower floor of the gallery, the viewer encounters an ash into carefully chosen important cultural artefacts, Arsham immersive architectural installation that hints, like a lot of offers a brief glimpse into our current culture and its signifiers, the artist’s oeuvre, at a participant and potential narrative as if seen far off into the future. through absence. The piece is an expansion on Daniel Arsham’s previous works exploring archeology, fiction and The poignant works reflect back to the viewer issues such the collapsing of time. as the fragility of human civilisation and the ephemeral nature of time, ending up as potentially puzzling and mys- Essay by curator Steven Matijcio from the Cincinnati terious as any rare figurine or pot unearthed at an archeo- Contemporary Art Center logical site. Purposefully making craft a central aspect to his process, Arsham often allows errors from the moulds In the short film Future Relic 02, “The Searcher” (played or casts to come through, adding a layer of meaning, decay by James Franco) bestows a plaster camera to a crystalline and depth to the work. glass figure (cast from/by Daniel Arsham), providing this partial being a lens to see the world. When The Searcher After being chosen to be part of mankind’s first colony on subsequently peers into the prosthetically enhanced eye of Mars due to his “unchallenged scientific reputation,” we Arsham’s avatar we glimpse a roaring sandstorm – in color – meet Devere 35 years after everyone else has left – living as it tears across a desert plane towards us. The scene is in a pressurized igloo and receiving supplies from Earth in so great and terrifying at once that The Searcher recoils in exchange for his ongoing research, reports and meticulous abject wonder, unable to share this mechanical eye one collection of mysterious artifacts. Devere “turned up the second longer, tearing the camera from the figure’s arms first fossil ruins far beneath the desert sand” and hates to as he shatters its countenance. That which is giveth is send back any to his home planet, lovingly polishing esoteric thusly taken away, but that which it opened cannot be objects and ruminating over an ancient Martian scroll – an unseen. Through advances in biomedical prosthesis, the “epic poem” “nearly a million years old” – that he cannot heretofore color blind Arsham began to wear corrective decipher. When Devere is forced into saving the Earth from contact lenses earlier this year that allowed him to see a nefarious agents planning to launch a nuclear weapon from Mars, number of colors for the first time. It was by all fair measures we are reminded of Dr. Matthias Rey – Savior of Mankind – an epiphany for an artist whose personal and artistic identity whom we meet in Arsham’s short film Future Relic 03. has been formulated in/by the tonal values between black Hoping to lessen the gravitational pull on our future planet’s and white. And yet, while augmented eyes have opened a tides and remedy Earth’s increasingly unstable climate, Rey is vast new spectrum of materials for Arsham to employ, the the scientist responsible for excavating the moon – providing world of expanded vision quickly became an ambivalent temporary respite before the storms redouble and his experience for the artist. In the first bodies of work created legacy is left in shambles. since he began to use these lenses as tools, we will see how the widening of perspective has paradoxically prompted Devere is more successful in his actions but less humanitarian Arsham to delve deeper into the psychological infrastructure in his aspirations, caring little for the fate of Earth until the evil of social blindness; of the hermit, the hoarder, the myopic agents threaten his “diggings” and artifacts. He is dismissed visionary. This new dimension of color tints the patina of the as an “old senile nut” but employs his neuroses, marginalized path but does not alter the course of the artist’s anachronistic status and implied alien heritage to thwart the intruders archaeology. It translates an expanded chromatic spectrum and protect that which is ultimately most valuable to him into a two-way lens that also sees backwards, behind the – his isolation. The hermit-turned-hoarder is a recurring trope eyes of the obsessive recluse – the solitary maker of worlds in Arsham’s mythology, even if we most often meet this figure real and imagined – that has become as much a signature in absentia, through his/her archives and architecture. As we of Arsham’s objects, environments and films as a surrogate. warily make our way through the hermetic caverns and cloisters Arsham has fashioned in New York and Atlanta, As we move through the exhibition inside Galerie Perrotin and survey the thousands of crumbling relics he continues – past Brancusi-esque columns of athletic balls and reliquaries to collect and categorize, a psychological cartography is of sports jerseys, hats and jackets – we find our way to a revealed. Author Franz Lidz studied the infamous “hermit culminating cavern in the lower level, constructed entirely brothers of Harlem” – Homer and Langley Collyer – who of balls that fluctuate in size. Floating somewhere between amassed “one of the world’s legendary collections of urban junk” natural formation and the “fruit” of manmade obsession, in the 1930s. And while their legacy is now a cautionary caveat Arsham characterizes this space – which coalesces in/ – of men swallowed by tunnels carved out of neck-deep rubble, around a mirror – as a “hermit’s lair.” In so doing, casting this elaborate boobytraps and their own paranoid pathologies – crystalline arena of self-reflection as the mindscape of an absent, they have simultaneously become the subjects of artistic yet omnipresent author, he anticipates the architecture of re-evaluation as eccentrics exercising “a very pure logic.” his upcoming exhibition in Atlanta. Here we will enter the mind of a secluded figure manifest as a Japanese rock garden, Professor Randy Frost reinforces this observation, arguing where each constituent piece is nebulously described by hoarders are “avoidant” and rarely violent, until their collections a child’s voice without knowing its original intent. Arsham – and the opaque epistemology they represent – are threatened. likens this kind of speculative archaeology to an alien We can never truly know how every piece of detritus contributes cataloging objects that are entirely foreign, unfamiliar and to these overarching lexicons like a cog in the proverbial machine, thereby, fascinating: translating the absence of context into but there is a tantalizing appeal in tracing the uncanny an impenetrable, but no less alluring mystique – one that rationale. The originator’s body is lost in this aggregate but is more sensed than seen. By reconfiguring everyday items his/her organizing logic billows through every passageway into arcane formations he suggests the aesthetics, more like the jackets, hats and jerseys that float across the walls than the exercise of order – evoking the cryptic enterprises of this show. Rippling further through the wind-thrust sands fabricated by the minds of those isolated on the fringes of that both Martin Devere and The Searcher peered into, society. In this light, in concert with Arsham’s continuing mesmerized by their riches and dangers, take pause as we interest in science fiction, Stephen Bartholomew’s 1963 enter the next strata of Arsham’s cerebral excavation. short story “The Hermit of Mars” is an especially insightful foil. About Daniel Arsham Combining elements of a classic Western with Cold War hysteria, Bartholomew tells the tale of archaeologist and New York based artist Daniel Arsham straddles the line anti-hero Martin Devere who argues “the only things that between art, architecture and performance. Raised in Miami, were worthwhile in life were pure art and pure science.” Arsham attended the Cooper Union in New York City where he received the Gelman Trust Fellowship Award in 2003. Jacobs Pillow dance festival in Massachusetts, as well as Architecture is a prevalent subject throughout his work; the prestigious Festival d’Avignon. Arsham’s most recent environments with eroded walls and stairs going nowhere, collaboration with world renowned musician and producer landscapes where nature overrides structures, and a general Pharrell Williams involved the recreation in Volcanic Ash of sense of playfulness within existing architecture.

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