Support Structures
May 13 – June 18, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 13th, 5-7pm
Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present Support Structures, a group show featuring the work of Lisha Bai, Mike Cloud, Catherine Haggarty, AJ Rombach, and Letha Wilson. The artists in this exhibition consider the poetic interdependency between substrates and the structures that exist to carry them. How do you hold flatness up? Do you lean it against the wall? Do you leverage it against its own weight? Stretch it between stretcher bars? Cast it so that the surface and structure are one? Or does the flat plane recall the idea of support through its embedded representational image? Here, the assisted surface becomes a carrier of meaning.
Lisha Bai’s sculptural works subvert assumptions of traditional painting and support. In an act of material transmutation, cast sand fills the space of canvas and stretcher. The normative front of these paintings lean towards the wall, the shape of their understructures framing the emergence of ethereal vistas and atmospheres.
Mike Cloud interrogates the conventions of painting in his own way, by exposing and reconfiguring the means and mechanics of its construction. Materials - whether they be paint, fabric, or text - are attached to uncovered wood in a conversation between fractious elements and the sharp meanings that come up between them.
Catherine Haggarty’s works included here are sensitive ruminations on physical and familial support, and the relationship between labor and love. These are paintings documenting a single shelf that was built by the artist’s late father; a flat picture representing a form of mechanical and emotional suspension.
AJ Rombach’s ceramic Portraits are inspired by the structures that undergird their paintings. This language of scaffold also becomes an embedded symbolic system; mirroring geometries recall the Magician archetype present in both the Tarot’s Major Arcana and Carl Jung’s Liber Novus.
Letha Wilson’s work formulates new positions between the photograph as sculpture and the sculptural integration of the photographic landscape. Often the material of the print, buttressed by metal, becomes the load-bearing mechanism by which these co-mingled objects stand up. A specificity of place emerges from each dynamic interplay.
The various notions of material assistance presented here straddle the formal, the political, and the psychological. In an echo of the Supports/Surfaces movement’s radical fracturing of painting in the late 1960’s, the artists in Support Structures find their own ways to question the relationship between flat traditions and their underlying elements during a contemporary moment that is no less politically tumultuous.
This show is curated by Jackie Hoving and Norm Paris.
Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. We are also supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
photos by Pacifico Silano
