0.00156 Acres and PowerHouse Projects Present Karen Bausman: Manahatta Decompressed
Karen Bausman: Manahatta Decompressed
0.00156 acres art space
April 10 - May 22
114 Smith Street between Dean and Pacific in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn
Directions: F/G to Bergen St. or A/C to Jay St. Borough Hall
PowerHouse Projects in collaboration with 0.00156 acres is pleased to present Manahatta Decompressed, the second exhibition in as many months of post-minimal installationist Karen Bausman’s drawings and assemblages. According to PowerHouse Projects director Astrid Persans the exhibition will overlap with Envisioning the Wall, a show of Ms. Bausman’s work on displaysince March 11 at City University’s Halls at Bowling Green space on its Lower Manhattan Center for Worker Education campus.
Taken together the two shows culminate several years of work conceptualizing The Wall Project, a large scale public installation Ms. Bausman plans to site in Lower Manhattan as homage to the Native American footpaths and village lanes from which the city’s modern grid emerged.
While demonstrating concepts behind The Wall Project, all of the works in both shows are conceived as separate pieces in their own right. Comprised of works on paper, Manahatta Decompressed intimately explores the transition between using lines and cuts to divide and demarcate, using them to represent, and using them both figuratively and literally to project forms into time and space.
Bausman takes the layered strata of pre-colonial Manhattan as a conceptual starting point and renders work that is a meditation on what it means to occupy space. She works in a minimalist idiom yet with sumptuous materials: deep red enamel, nubby paper, graphite marks so obsessively rendered that each is a work unto itself.
0.00156 acres art space is especially apt for these concepts. The pieces question New York’s emergence as we experience it spatially today. Bringing them to this intimate space in the heart of Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn, a place so tied to their point of reference both historically and linguistically, can’t help but add poignance to the issues they raise.
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