March 22 - May 2, 2009

IN THE MAIN SPACE

Lawrimore Project is pleased to present a collaborative exhibition by artists Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley. The exhibition will occupy all five rooms of the gallery and will include performance architecture, inflatable sculptural installations, a post-gender cast porcelain urinal, drawings and paintings.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Stability., an architectural performance piece that will be occupied by the artists 24 hours a day for the first week of the show. In counterpoint to its name, Stability. is a piece in which balance is a matter of negotiation, and negotiation is the performance.

Like a see-saw, this 25 x 5 foot structure is a shared living space balanced on a central pivot with the two artists living at either end. When occupied the two bodies will need to move in the space in relation to one another to keep the structure straight. Visually separated by a kitchen and bathroom in the center, the occupying bodies will sense each other through displacement of weight. Activities will naturally change (willingly or not) as the house and behaviors shift.

A HISTORY OF COLLABORATION

Shelley and Schweder, who met each other during a year-long residency at the American Academy in Rome, connected over their shared interest in working at the intersection of art and architecture.

The following year they collaborated on a project at New York’s SculptureCenter called Flatland which combined radical architecture and 6 live bodies in an intensive 3 week occupation. While living in this work they came to understand buildings as actions as well as objects, and how architecture initiates a feedback loop of influences between subject and object. Winston Churchill once said, "First we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us." In the case of Flatland, and now Stability., the effect is extreme.

IN THE WHITE CUBE

Our Weight Around Us, 2009 is a new inflatable sculptural installation by Alex Schweder. This piece continues his interest in how objects and bodies or weights and masses share, melt into, permeate, leak, overlap and inform each other. Like his Snowballing Doorway, and aspects of Stability. discussed above, Our Weight Around Us is a two chambered sculpture "sharing" only enough air to fully inflate one side. The piece requires two viewers, or sitters as the case may be, to be fully functional. And like all relationships, presence and absence of one partner affects the other and can be a complicated negotiation.

IN THE HALL

Painting Instructions: Chair Exchange, 2009 continues Schweder’s interest in how, where and what a painting can be.  By moving from one chair to the other, paint is transferred between the two, erasing and adding pigment as the objects are used.  Each chair reads, “Make your neighbor’s painting pinker.”  This piece is part of smlEDITIONS, a new facet of Lawrimore Project wherein artists are asked to create multiples in small editions.  This piece is being offered in an edition of 10 with a starting publishing price of $800.

IN THE BLACK BOX

Extreme might also be used to describe Alex Schweder's interactive sculpture installation in the side gallery, Plumbing Us. Consisting of unique conjoined urinals that share a common drain, male on one side and female on the other - users can mingle their un-needed body fluids. In this fully plumbed installation the bodies of the users will mix as they go down the drain.

IN THE BACK ROOM

WARD SHELLEY

The Paintings

In the Back Room, Ward Shelley will have an exhibition of his timeline paintings -- elaborate narrative works that use illustration, data plotting, and graphical conventions. "Re-Materializing Art" depicts artists and careers in the so-called "dematerialized" or "live" art forms. Subjects include the life and times of Carolee Scheemann, Pat Oleszko, Jack Smith and Arto Lindsay.

As the artist explains, "My paintings/drawings are attempts to use real information to depict our understandings of how things evolve and relate to one another, and how this develops over time. More to the point, they are about how we form these understandings in our minds and if they can have, in our culture, some kind of shape.  Usually I choose topics from art or cultural history, such as the arc of an artist's career and its influences, or the effect of particular ideas in an aesthetic or political movement. They are "wide-screen,” with all information available to the interacting eye at every moment.”

In a sense, once the topic of a painting is chosen, the content is "determined.”  It is history, a matter of record.  But we know this content is mediated in a thousand ways before it takes shape in our awareness.  Moreover, content is also shaped by the receiving mind which, as a pre-existing form itself, exerts a strong shaping influence (contemporary studies of cognitive dissonance are describing this effect). It is the mutually formative effects of subject/mind and object/world that gives shape to the space that exists between them. These paintings are a record of this shaping process. They are about the struggle of form to express content in the cognitive space that exists between the Subject (us) and the Object (the world). If that cognitive space is a territory, these paintings are landscapes of that territory."

CLICK HERE FOR MORE PAINTINGS BY WARD SHELLEY

BIOGRAPHIES

ALEX SCHWEDER is the 2005 – 2006 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture. Since this time, Schweder has been experimenting with time and performance based architecture including Flatland at New York’s Sculpture Center 2007, This Apple Tastes Like Our Living Room Used to Smell presented at Western Bridge in Seattle 2007, Melting Instructions presented at the Tacoma Art Museum 2007, Homing MacGuffin during New York’s Homebase III Project 2008, The End of Endless to be presented at the Santa Fe Center For Contemporary Art 2009. His work has also been exhibited nationally and internationally including Henry Urbach Architecture in New York, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and the Museo d’Arte Contemporane di Roma. Schweder’s projects have been collected by several eminent individuals and institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Schweder is the author of “Stalls Between Walls” included in Ladies and Gents, the Gendering of Public Toilets.  He is a three time artist in residence at the Kohler company.  Schweder has been a guest professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in 2007 for the seminar How to Perform Your Own Building. Alex Schweder holds a Masters in Architecture from Princeton University (1998) and a Bachelor in Architecture from Pratt Institute (1993).

Upcoming exhibitions and residencies include: A Sac of Rooms All Day Long to be shown in at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2009; Gallery Magnus Muller, Berlin, 2009; Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco August, 2009, and will be in residence at the Chinati Foundation in the Fall of 2009.

WARD SHELLEY works as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations defy classification. Over the last five years, Shelley has concentrated on bizarre functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.

Shelley also works on a series of diagramatic paintings, timelines of art-related subjects such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes. The best known of these is the Williamsburg Timeline Drawing and Downtown Body, recently published in Bomb Magazine.

He first exhibited as an artist in Miami. He earned his Masters degree from New York University and has been working and showing in New York since then.  He moved his studio to Williamsburg in 1994 and also began exhibiting in Europe at that time.

Shelley has exhibited in more than 10 countries. Among works from the last 10 years are the interactive video-environment The Cube, the legendary Mir 2 Project, and Voyage Platform.  In 2004 Shelley lived and worked inside the walls of Pierogi Gallery for 5 weeks for an exhibition called We Have Mice.  Shelley also works with the collaborative artist group BBS and talented young artists such as Douglas Paulson and Alex Schweder with whom he realized the monumental Flatland project at New York's SculptureCenter in 2007.

Ward Shelley's work is in a number of museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Last year Shelley received a painting and Sculpture award from the Joan Mitchell foundation, and has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2006. He has received NYFA and NEA fellowships in sculpture and new media categories, a Bessie Award for installation art, as well as private foundation grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is represented by Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York where he will have an exhibition of new work in summer 2009.

Before and during his art career he has also worked in advertising, construction, teaching, special events, theater, rock bands, and built a 37-foot sailing sloop.

The artists would like to thank the inimitable Alan Altman for his indispensable contributions. Exhibition made possible in part by: The Kohler Foundation; The Mayor's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle; 4Culture.