For Immediate Release: February 1, 2011
DAVID OPDYKE
Bit Assemblage
At the Art Show, 2011
Presented by the Art Dealers Association of America, Inc. (ADAA)
Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street, New York | Booth A23
Opening Hours:
Wednesday, March 2 – Saturday, March 5: Noon to 8:00 PM
Sunday, March 6: Noon to 6:00 PM
…Opdyke’s intricately detailed, labor intensive, visually compelling sculptures and installations embody a searing condemnation of a country gone awry: they are anything but child’s play.
Sarah Suzuki, Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
The Feldman Gallery will exhibit sculptures and a new series of black and white drawings by David Opdyke in booth A23 at the Art Fair. Opdyke explores the contemporary American cultural and political landscape from the point of view of systems: the seemingly invisible forces, environmental, rhetorical, political, and corporate, that constitute the orbit of our individual lives. Opdyke plays with perception by transforming the quotidian materials of his sculptures and by obfuscating the vast array of information embedded in his drawings.
Commanding the exhibition space is the Styrofoam sculpture Zenith (2008), a sweeping vision of an ecologically hybridized landscape of industrial and natural forms that includes brownfields and rotting factories. Other smaller sculptures incorporate similar themes, exploiting with wit their diminished scale.
In juxtaposition to his sculptures, Opdyke’s new drawings are abstract, crafted from reconfigurations of scanned paperbacks, textbooks, comic books, maps, and white papers which have been layered and manipulated to scramble their legibility. The vertiginous compositions incorporate shifting perspectives and contrasts in scale and celebrate the properties of ink: graphically powerful when oversaturated and delicate when sharp and clear.
The results are a mash-up of everything that interests Opdyke, as random and significant as one’s Google history. Leveraged Optional Layout, for example, combines do-it-yourself suburban house plans, flavor chemistry, street maps, financial analysis and mortgage terminology, food ingredient labels, and passages from Don DeLillo’s White Noise on shopping in the face of imminent disaster. Balancing composition and content through an intuitive process that involves hundreds of decisions, Opdyke stitches these strands together to discover new meanings.
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Selected institutions that have mounted one person exhibitions by David Opdyke include Wright Museum of Art at Beloit College, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Other institutions that have exhibited his work include White Box, Exit Art, The Brooklyn Museum, P.S. 1, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Sherman Gallery at Boston University, and Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan. Opdyke is the recipient of the Aldrich Emerging Artist Award and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture. He has just completed a permanent sculptural installation in the lobby of a public school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, commissioned through the New York City Percent for Art Program.
For more information about the artist, contact Sarah Paulson at (212) 226-3232 or sarah@feldmangallery.com. |
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