PAULA CROWN ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY

PAULA CROWN THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY

25 MAY– 26 NOVEMBER 2018

PAULA CROWN THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY 25 MAY — 26 NOVEMBER 2018 Curated by Peter Doroshenko Presented by Dallas Contemporary as a Partner Program to the American Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia

Entrance

Rio Del Gotto Entrance (from the canal)

Courtyard

CHALICE Courtyard

SOLO TOGETHER Chain Mesh

kinematic.cosmos

CONTENTS

06 INTRODUCTION 08 PAULA CROWN IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER DOROSHENKO 14 PROCESS 22 SOLO TOGETHER 28 INSTALLATIONS 34 STUDIO CANNAREGIO 46 BIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The Architecture of Memory is a focused examination of Paula Crown’s artwork in an international biennale festival setting with architecture as the thematic backdrop. Installed in Studio Cannaregio, a new exhibition space, in the oldest part of Venice, the exhibition runs concurrently with the 16th Venice International Architectural Biennale adding a distinctive and independent voice to the “Freespace” themed festival.

Paula Crown’s cross-disciplinary works incorporate painting, sculpture, video, and installation into an ongoing investigation of memory, markmaking, and the interstitial spaces that define a lived experience. Crown began creating immersive installations in 2013 and has expanded her projects to include complex and advanced interventions. Working out of critical references and advanced studio practices, Crown examines public interactions with significance and wit.

A selection of new artworks created for Venice will form the 2,200 square-foot (220 m2) exhibition and underscore basic critical building blocks such as signs and indexes that form contemporary sculpture and architecture. Crown’s work pushes our conceptions of reality through seminal examinations of critical platforms that are the framework for structures and systems around us.

6

Organized as an institutional off-site exhibition, Crown’s project will reinforce Dallas Contemporary’s overall vision and mission. Paula Crown: The Architecture of Memory is a key component in the desire to engage wider international audiences in the art of our own time and to contribute to the scholarship of recent art in international contexts.

While serving new audiences in Venice, the Paula Crown project expands its reach through catalogue circulation and digital media, marking the artist’s commitment to education and public engagement. The program for the exhibition includes an international panel, a city-wide art professionals lecture series, and regional teacher and professor workshops for students.

Paula Crown: The Architecture of Memory is a program in partnership with the American Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale organized by School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

PETER DOROSHENKO DIRECTOR DALLAS CONTEMPORARY 7

PAULA CROWN IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER DOROSHENKO

8

PD: What is the drive or passion that motivates you to get to the studio?

PC: The “studio” is defined broadly. It is a mental space as much as a physical one. I think of it as a zone of focus and attention that enables me to locate my expressive voice. The impulse to create is uniquely human and the artist’s studio is any place that can foster that instinct. I go into the studio with a capital “s” to inquire, dissent, and provoke. I approach it as a laboratory and my process reflects that experimentation. Like research and field work in the sciences, data is collected and while the process doesn’t always yield the expected results it invariably elevates understanding.

There is urgency in ideas and that keeps me working.

PD: As a laboratory, how do you process ideas and creative bursts into completed artworks?

PC: The way our senses communicate with our brains to produce marks — an index or imprint is fascinating. I keep notebooks recording my experiences. I am interested in the lineage of our marks as humans, which include pre-language markings, cave paintings, and the hashtags of today. Analog and digital methods expand understanding of these marks which link the contemporary and historical. The boundary fades between photography, painting, and new media in a way that reflects contemporary life. Often a drawing is translated into a 3-D model and back into a painting. I take an idea through multiple media and dimensional transitions in order to understand and mine its possibilities.

Working develops rhizomatically with ideas multiplying into new bodies of work that share

genealogies.

PD: Are there systems in place?

PC: Not formal systems. I cast a wide net with my instincts, learning, and curiosity. So often the work comes forth through process.

Experimenting with materials and scale are joyful endeavors. It is all about the imagining.

PD: Do your surroundings or places you visit have an impact on ideas or processes? How did the Solo Cup work come up in your current studio work?

PC: Awareness and empathy are necessary to create a relationship with the environment and with others. My work unfolds from moments of focus and presence. Flying over the South African Drakensberg mountains became the catalyst for years of exploring topologies.

Likewise, SOLO TOGETHER, came to mind after I saw the waste of hundreds of plastic cups, crushed and left after a party. The zombie space of spirits (pun intended) once present captured my attention. What had occurred in that space and what was left behind was an index of human gestures. The red Solo Cup was a conduit material that marked the energy that had transferred from a person to an object.

Our inner lives are externalized in numerous unconscious activities. We also reveal our culture through our collective actions. We enjoy the convenience of single-use plastics

9

and other disposable materials, but our marks and materials will outlast us. The ecological mess we leave behind needs to be considered.

PD: Is the work referencing issues related to sustainability, social interactions or cultural markers?

PC: It deals with the present and the future.

My practice is concerned with a number of things including environmental sustainability or the growing xenophobia that is spreading throughout the world. Our society is at a crossroads where we seek closeness from technology and entrust our connections with each other to mediated experiences. We are lured into a false sense of control that is isolating. We deepen the disconnection with our natural environment. Where does every plastic cup we use go once it is out of our sight? What responsibility do we have for them? These are questions for our culture… “solo” and “together.” The sculptures create a platform for pause, reflection, and conversation. Through their materiality, I investigate interstitial spaces and poke at perceptions. They are intentionally playful and provoke the question “what is real”?

The weight of the plaster cast reproduction takes the viewer off guard with its heft.

Imagine the energy of the person who held it. They overturn your eye’s expectation. The Solo Cup’s reputation for being inexpensive, disposable, and low-hassle, is inverted into a weighty object laden with meaning. The names of each cup are inspired by the projected personalities of their owners, teasing out the private lives behind public personas: Mathlete, Effortlessly Perfect, Failing Out or Keeping

10

Up Appearances. In the individual versus the anonymous, there is a relationship to identity politics, alliances and the tendency to label one another.

PD: Why are those relationships important for you?

PC: Language, labels, and data can be polarizing. We lose empathy in the abstraction.

Teasing out the individuality from the anonymous is about respecting each other— how we uniquely think and exist in space.

Other people matter and we have to think through the consequences of our actions if we are passive or heroic. Relating to each other and finding commonalities will enable us to work together for sake of the future.

PD: Is memory the glue or dark matter that holds the work together?

PC: The red Solo Cup is an icon that is linked to an American style of freedom and represents memories of family, community and college life. The opportunity to show this body of work in Venice provoked a different manifestation of the cup…a mannerist, twisted CHALICE. It introduces a dramatic shift in color and material. The 7-foot fiberglass monument gleams golden, taking a commanding shape.

The form of the Solo Cup is once again transformed at a scale and finish that provoke questions of value, worth, myth, ceremony, and consumption. A material index makes a distinctive memory. Over time, the planet becomes a log of our collective marks. In the case of single-use plastics, our legacy is piling up in landfills and forming bogs in our oceans. Memory is closer to dark matter. Our

associations with these materials in our own lives hover in the room. While they are invisible to us, they are shaping everything.

PD: After the concepts of memory, how important are words and language for the Solo works?

PC: Words are secondary to the forms. We put a lot of weight on language which can be used as a means to separate people. Thousands of years of ideas and perspectives can be flattened and distilled through language lost in translation. Experiences connect us.

Language in SOLO TOGETHER is meant to encourage empathy by showing reflections of ourselves in the sculptures whether those portraits are truthful or forced. Titling each cup evokes a personality, allowing us to see individuals in the collective. Language personalizes them and asks us to become sensitive to a material that we would rather discard and ignore.

PD: Could each cup be viewed as a signifier for many parts that create one message?

PC: Affirmative. The sculptures operate individually and as an installation. The messages in the work can shift through the different identities of the cups while the whole can stand for us all.

Italy’s architectural and cultural history. The shape and color of CHALICE are reminiscent of the twisted Solomonic columns of the baldachin designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City in the 1600’s. These structures typically marked a sacred spot within a church or ceremonial space. I’m most fascinated by the point at which the ancient architecture is connected to cutting-edge technology to create tertium quid—that third thing. Placing a golden vessel at heroic scale in the gallery brings to mind mythic objects; the Holy Grail of Arthurian literature, the Holy Chalice of Christianity. The art object takes the place of the religious in the exhibition playing on themes of reverence and our instinct to seek out a higher meaning.

PD: How does the third art work in the exhibition, the video Chain Mesh address space and tempo for you?

PC: This video work came out of my 2016 sculpture series ANEMOS, which was titled from the Greek meaning wind and has its roots in the Latin animus (breath). I had been sculpting in chain mesh and was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s careful study of nature.

He mapped water breaking in spirals around stones in the river and imagined how to

PD: The art work CHALICE connects to history and scale...is this a direct connection to science or architecture? Or both?

PC: I experience architecture as drawing in space—the dimensionalized line. In this case, CHALICE is my way of acknowledging the context of the work and a homage to 11

represent wind. I capture these formative and invisible forces by freezing the fluid movements of the ring chain in resin. In a way, Chain Mesh is this gesture in The Architecture of Memory but without the limitations of being fixed in time. The sound expands the space creating a meditative rhythm within the exhibit. The material is both metallic and fluid mimicking the motion of water and wind.

PD: When looking over the exhibition, it resonates with building blocks for larger issues and stories...what idealistic platforms and concepts would you like to plant or leave for visitors?

PC: Human connections and empathy are to be prioritized over the efficiency of algorithms and high-resolution images. Our instinctive awareness will provide us with the wisdom to address our social challenges from poverty to politics and the environment. In such a recognizable city as Venice, we easily link art, architecture, and the landscape as our connection to each other across time. If we aspire to be a society with a conscience then we must think about our consumption habits and recognize their effects. Artists, architects, and creatives can all set the tone, promulgate the values, and work to build a more responsible and reinforcing relationship with the world.

12

13

PROCESS

“Process is about looking at the micro to inform where we are in the macro. That comes from a deep awareness.�

14

15

18

19

20

21

SOLO TOGETHER

“SOLO TOGETHER creates a platform for connection.”

22

23

01 full-time student w/ job 02 pre med 03 conformers 04 red shirting 05 drunk drivers 06 on sailing team 07 political aspirations 08 eileen (i lean) 09 jokester

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

09 25

mathlete first generation judging but here anyway sorority girls en route to the bathroom together conformers failing out almost failing out full-time student w/ job secretly gay football recruit hockey player easy self defeating mansplaining secretly pregnant brown noser drug dealer wasp rotcs drunk drivers legacy keeping up appearances dallas debutante gdi god damn independent on sailing team will never be as good as dad jokester alum prof “trojan” horse got hot psych major designated driver couldn’t handle the pressure advisor coder international student dancer dating since high school pre law pre med md/phd skiver red shirting eileen (i lean) grad student local bartender kiss up anarchist bae fidget spinner foodie hype beast dad’s a legacy members only hedonist descarte b4 the horse teaser too (yas) queen bam bam dad bod pro bono ghosted not for profit hoarder jedi master granola mom friend (in loco parentis) black panther gearhead first draft hungover hard hitter houdini empath pissed off exhibitionist sine qua non political aspirations emo almost famous daddy issues loose lipped editor speaks in complete sentences bad feminist de novo sneakerhead outcast comradery pitch perfect gym rat team liquid member old soul peter pan american girl romeo commish nerd yogi spelunker dreamer proustian smokeshow bad dog-e killa mom’s a trustee tryhard confirmation biased spineless mikey (let’s get mikey... he’ll do anything) detoxing problem solver free climber who “nose” admiral undocumented effortlessly perfect that girl drama queen flaneur standard deviation obama baby boss-y psycho cray cray mixologist pope privileged “know” mad idea man fashionista quirky cis-gendered nasty dopamine junkie spatial thinker dudebro gluten free social climber wine-o mad dog heuristic processor full of grace a’ight mayor pointy tweeter classic game changer creep politician yolo baller trust fund baby thought leader icon paleo 26

27

INSTALLATIONS

“Art and architecture create places to pause, reflect, and converse.”

28

29

SOLO TOGETHER, 2017. 10 Hanover, London.

SOLO TOGETHER, 2018. Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois.

IN THIS HOUSE.

STUDIO CANNAREGIO

“Instinct and awareness will provide us with the wisdom to address our social challenges.”

34

35

Prior to installation, Crown prepares by mapping out the space with Solo cups.

36

37

Still from Chain Mesh video installation.

Still from Chain Mesh video installation.

Drawing from kinematic.cosmos series.

Drawings from kinematic.cosmos series.

40

41

Drawing from kinematic.cosmos series.

42

43

Rendering of CHALICE in Studio Cannaregio.

44

45

BIOGRAPHY

Paula Crown is a multimedia artist with a practice encompassing drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Crown rigorously incorporates cutting-edge technology, collaboration and a commitment to sustainability in her studio. Crown has had solo exhibitions at the Aspen Institute (2013), Dallas Contemporary (2014), Marlborough Gallery in New York (2014, 2016), Art Basel Miami Beach (2015, 2016) and the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas (2016). EXPO Chicago featured Crown’s work in both 2014 and 2016. She has participated in several group exhibitions nationally, including For Freedoms (2016), at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, and Mount Analogue (2016), curated by Neville Wakefield, in Aspen. In the spring of 2017, Crown had her first international solo show at 10 Hanover in London, England. Forthcoming in 2018, look for Crown’s work at Masterpiece London Art Fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ivory Press in Madrid, and in collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas’ For Freedoms 50 State Initiative. Crown earned her M.F.A. in painting and drawing in 2012 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Marblehead, Mass., the artist lives and works in Chicago and Aspen.

46

paulacrown.com Instagram: @paulacrown_art #solotogether #thearchitectureofmemory

paulacrown.com Instagram: @paulacrown_art #solotogether #thearchitectureofmemory

PAHC / studio•lab