NARS Foundation is excited to present To Assemble, an exhibition featuring the works of our Season III, 2020 Artists in Residence, Amir Hariri, Joseph Wilcox, and Matthew Cronin.
This Residency Season has been one in which we are relearning how to be with each other in the same space, in part due to a global pandemic that to this day is still a threat and in part from the political and social panorama that has taken many people to the street to demand the end of systemic racism, police brutality and overexertion of power.
Inside and outside, we’re re-thinking the ways in which we can reconfigure structures that have been in place for too long and learn new ways to share, take, and make space to assemble.
Wilcox, Hariri, and Cronin have backgrounds in strict disciplines -photography, engineering/ architecture- yet they have stepped away from them and adopted a more disruptive/alternative approach in their work.
Through the recollection of images and materials -from catalogs, construction sites, the internet, or real-life events like protests- they have brought to the gallery a vision of a world that is constantly being dematerialized and have each pieced it together with particular approaches.
Each work threads a series of unseen structures arising from ideas related to the ways in which images are created, distributed, and presented; the ways in which we experience space; and the ways to reconfigure and reveal the layers of an industrial apparatus that remains unknown.
They converge from very different directions, all containing the tensions of erasure, destruction, and transformation, to reveal what’s been concealed and then piece things together.
By looking at structures, they recollect information and ideas that take shape and reflect on current events and more importantly, the ways in which we take in data, and the way it transforms us.