Exhibition: Solid-State

Bureau is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, Solid-State, comprised of work by Barb Choit, Vivienne Griffin, Alex Hubbard, Viktor Kopp and Daniel Lefcourt.

The exhibition takes its title from the rigid and static property of inanimate material. Solid-State refers to the most condensed physical state of matter, characterized by structural rigidity and resistance to changed of shape or volume.

This show is conceived according to an abiding interest in the characteristics of inanimate objects. There are those objects which possess an overwhelming quality of stillness and permanence, those items to which we assign symbolic value and others that remain utterly inert and replaceable. The sheer volume of inanimate objects overwhelms our attempts to enumerate or describe their measure. And while the inanimate object is of great fascination to the contemporary subject, the specter of the urinal or bottle rack overshadows the artist's attempt to capture the ordinary. Can a thing survive its modernistic elevation to the status of icon? And, more precisely, can an object be handled by an artist and simply remain banal?

Solid-State introduces a small sample of works presenting, depicting, and manipulating inanimate objects. In states of remaining, transforming and containing, the object here is exploited for its vacant character and material permanence.

Barb Choit (1977, Vancouver, Canada) methodically collects, archives, and expertly photographs refuse that would normally be swept up and thrown out. The photographs on view are part of the temporary storage archive of her Division Museum of Ceramics and Glassware - a project which interrogates and celebrates the impulse to collect and document a rapidly proliferating glut of disposables.

Vivienne Griffin (1975, Dublin, Ireland) places stock in fortuitous occurrences of incidental beauty. Her elegantly juxtaposed amalgams of readymade items and designed pieces combine the steady stillness of furniture with a gratifying economy of formal intrigue.

Alex Hubbard's (1975, Toledo, OH) static view of videos are often staged on tabletops where the artist tinkers with and maneuvers everyday objects. In Announcement, 2007, Hubbard employs a xerox machine for his surface, allowing multiplying light sources and reproductions to proliferate. Like watching a card trick that has no set up and no reveal, viewers follow Hubbard's gesture and manipulation. The resulting work is both fascinating and deadpan.

Painter Viktor Kopp (1971, Stockholm, Sweden) pushes his subject to the canvas edges and slices the picture plane into the grid of a single bar of chocolate. Kopp's painterly modeling easily gives way to abstraction as the brown monochromes oscillate between representation and gesture. Fanciful delight and surrealistic deadpan, his chocolate paintings shift between delicious and debased.

Revisiting a series from 2005, Daniel Lefcourt's (1975, New York, NY) painting of a voluminous but utterly generic black lump of rock introduces us to his vocabulary of open signifiers. The dense black mass confronts the viewer head-on with an encompassing opacity.