SiteParallels

Haw Contemporary presents SiteParallels, bringing together the sculpture of Marcie Miller Gross and the paintings of Armin Mühsam. The title of the show points to the shared conceptual and aesthetic inclinations of the two artists while acknowledging that these affinities have evolved from independent practices.  Each of their bodies of work is characterized by a certain restraint of expression, an insistence on clearly defined form, and an architectural investigation of time and place. In different ways but with similar sensibilities, both artists evoke human presence through its absence, employing stillness and emptiness as a strategy to open up a space for reflection.

Miller Gross’s site-responsive objects, made of materials such as industrial felt, plywood, and vellum, retain a close connection to their organic origins. In an accumulative process of folding, stacking, and cutting, she builds forms that utilize an elemental architectural language. Her new body of work presents sculptural objects together with photographs of specific sites. In this manner, Miller Gross explores the dynamic between the specifics of place as determined by geography and history, and the ephemeral and idiosyncratic processing of place through one’s perception and memory.

Armin Mühsam’s paintings are similarly preoccupied with place and time. He paints landscapes and interiors that reference those genres as well as probe their viability in contemporary contexts. For him, history plays itself out in the dialectic between the modernist conception of autonomous form and the traditional conception of form as a vehicle to express ideas. In his compositions, the geometry of architecture is a stand-in for Western culture’s confrontational relationship with the natural world; the depicted sites are emblematic of our society’s use of the grid as a way to hold the unpredictability of its counterpart in check.

Location: Haw Contemporary Crossroads 

Opening Reception: Friday September 28th, 6-9pm