In her meticulously crafted hand-carved drawings, artist Sarah Bostwick celebrates the quiet poetry of a nearly invisible architecture hiding beneath the surface of the visible environment.
Grand Apartment is an exhibition of drawings carved in dark hardwood, antique ivory, black acrylic, and slate-all of which have been inlaid into minimalist surfaces varying from whole museum walls to blocks of hydrocal resembling sheets of paper. Through laborious re-presentation of existing sites, Bostwick adds yet another layer of meaning to those ready-made sculptural marvels that hide in plain sight all around us-coaxing meaning from them through a hands-on immersion in their spatial properties.
These embedded reliefs can be viewed as elegant abstractions while simultaneously referencing very specific relationships. 3261 23rd Capp Street minimally depicts a grand Edwardian bay window inlaid with the third story view of a church carved in slate. It is a physical re-creation of the original scenario as much as it is a depiction of it - a diorama and a picture squashed together into something that is both and neither, while encompassing at least a century’s worth of history within the depth of a quarter of an inch. On closer inspection, the carved stone church is recessed into the plaster, set into it like a curious relic seen through the frame of a contemporary city apartment.
The result, in the aforementioned piece and in Bostwick’s other works, is a strange game of physical perspective. A sense of understanding of the features and the history of our built environment is accomplished in the pieces not simply through depiction, but through a process of physical demonstration – with the physical work magically transformed into the subject matter itself.
Sarah Bostwick’s exhibitions include: Homecoming, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, 2006; The White Album, Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, California, 2006; Here We Are Here, Cast Drawings, Gregory Lind Gallery, 2004; and Element of the Temporary 3, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, 2002. Bostwick graduated with a degree in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. Her work is in the permanent collection of SFMOMA, and has been written about in art publications, such as Art in America, Artweek and Flash Art. This will be Sarah Bostwick’s second solo exhibition at Gregory Lind Gallery. She currently lives and works in New York.
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