Comfort Potential
MAY 13 – JUNE 17, 2006
Sara Dierck (Brooklyn, NY), Vincent Lamouroux (Paris, FR) and Gabriel Martinez (Washington, DC) observe the built environment and intervene. Whether it is creating "telephone cozies" for neglected public telephones, creating a vehicle for an aborted train track in the fields of France, or the simple comfort of a bench added to a bus stop absent of one, the artists in Comfort Potential intervene with everyday reality, offer insight about the overlooked aspects of life, and create opportunities to find comfort.
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Sara Dierck uses photography to share her interventions, installations and made-up scenes of life with other people. She mainly photographs small objects she has made or found and people interacting with them. She creates interventions by inserting sculptures into the public realm, and uses photography to document any interaction. Though Sara presents both photographs and objects, she is just as interested in any residue, physically left in the open or in the minds of people passing by. She aims to attack and question concepts of waste, communication breakdowns in a fast-paced society, political influence on daily life, and forgotten or dismissed people and objects. Her small sculptures, which are meant to be accessible and borderline functional, if not fully, are created to highlight these larger problems with a careful, loving, handmade touch. One of these projects is "Pay-Phone Cozies." Constructed of recycled knits, each hand-made cozy slips onto a pay-phone handset. Once a common way for all people to reach out to each other, the pay phone has become neglected and is beginning to disappear from our public environments. Sara has attempted to console and add a loving touch to the device, making it more appealing and giving it a sense of protection by adding softness to the cold, hard surface, both for the phone and the person using it.
Born and raised in Washington State, Dierck moved to California to attend the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in photography. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Sara traveled to the nation's capital, formally known only as "the other Washington" many times in preparation for showing her work at Transformer.
At the beginning of the sixties, French engineer Jean Bertin conceived The Aerotrain, an aircushioned vehicle that could reach speeds of 429 km/hour. Two tracks were built for this "future train;" one in between Paris and Cergy, and the other between Gometz and Limours (south of Paris), still visible today, but partially covered by vegetation. Bertin died in 1975 and the government cancelled the project due to lack of interest and funds. "The Aérotrain, like, for example, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car, is not the kind of project to which an artist can add; it is too fascinating by itself. One might say that an artist could bring this project back to the present, give it a new lease on life but this is not our intention," says Vincent Lamouroux who created Pentacycle, a project in collaboration with Raphael Zarka.
"The Aérotrain, like science fiction, anticipates a future which only reflects the technology and yearning of its own time, or even of an already past time. One is constantly reminded of Lawrence Alloway's observation "yesterday's tomorrow is not today," adds Lamouroux. Pentacycle and The Wheel and The Way, a separate text project by Lamouroux for what he calls a "roller coasterless day," will be on view at Transformer. Lamouroux was born in 1974 and lives and works in Paris, France. Solo exhibitions include Kunsthof, Zurich (May 2006), Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris (January 2006), Mercer Union, Toronto (September 2006), Scape, Mamco, Geneva (2005) and Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York (2004). This will be Vincent's first exhibition in Washington, D.C.
Gabriel Martinez, regarding his interventions says, "With a focus on the sphere of reception, I establish a space in which my art can exist with an unknown audience and become an extension of the built environment. This starts as an anonymous, unsolicited charity in which capital is subverted to aesthetic ends. It facilitates a chance encounter with both the gesture behind the work and the forms which arise from its realization.... It is the futility of the minute, nearly invisible gesture which endows the work with any political currency-the trickle up 'micro-politics' of the public park, the bus stop, the city block." Martinez will include photo documentation of several public art interventions conceived and realized in Washington, DC. Martinez is based in Washington, DC and attended the Corcoran College of Art and Design and Virginia Commonwealth University. He will be in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. His work has been exhibited in locations such as Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD, Miami, FL and Havana, Cuba.