Lee Boroson, All of the Above
Sara Meltzer Gallery is pleased to present Lee Boroson's All of the Above, the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from May 25th through July 1st with an opening reception on Thursday, May 25th from 6 - 8pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am - 6pm.
Boroson, best known for his inflatable sculptures, continues his interest in architecture and science with three new works that will fill the gallery space and the stairway leading to the second floor. All works in the exhibition address the notion of perception and call into question the ways in which we see the world around us. Boroson physically shifts objects from micro to macro in order to question the subjectivity of scientifically proven data vs. opinions and beliefs.
In the main gallery, Liquid Sunshine (2006) is a cluster of storm clouds that fill the space and hover close to the ceiling. Drawing from romantic landscape painting, religious painting and sculpture, Boroson depicts a heavenly scene complete with crepuscular rays and cherubic formations. Constructed from man-made materials: nylon, air blowers and strands of monofilament, Boroson relates the presence of this naturally spiritual moment to album cover art of the 1970's, where music, mind-altering substances and visual imagery are substituted for a heavenly experience.
Integument (2006) highlights an area of the gallery not typically used for exhibition purposes. Based on the cross section diagram of human skin, Integument is suspended in the bright open-aired stairway leading to the penthouse level of the gallery. Complete with hair follicles that dangle downwards, this buoyant sculpture causes one to take note of things we often pass by.
In his attempt to create a photograph of "nothing," Boroson began to collapse images of the entire visible universe into one image. Using images downloaded from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that included stars, asteroids, and galaxies, Boroson removed the black background (the emptiness) between these celestial bodies and moved them to form clusters. The artist then reorganized these clusters into the shapes of the four suits and three royalty characters of playing cards (king, queen, jack). This series furthers Boroson's interest in perception relating to the way "stars" are present in our culture via the ideas of fame, luck and good fortune.
Lee Boroson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Most recently he was the subject of a solo exhibition at The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Other exhibitions include Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; Artspace, New Haven, CT; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE and The Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris, New York. Boroson has received numerous awards including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Professional Development Grants from the Rhode Island School of Design. He received a MFA from Indiana University, a BFA from State University of New York, New Paltz and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
In conjunction with Lee Boroson's exhibition Sara Meltzer Gallery is pleased to present the second exhibition in our new series entitled Juxtapositions. This series has been initiated to provide gallery artists an opportunity to show their work in tandem with the work of other artists who share formal, material and/or conceptual practices by artists of diverse backgrounds, generations and training.
Presented on the penthouse level of Sara Meltzer Gallery, Juxtapositions (2), View-Vista-Perspective presents works by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Vija Clemins, Anna Von Mertens and others that all approach landscapes, nightscapes and seascapes in a variety of different ways. This group of works extends the dialogue initiated by Lee Boroson's interest in the reconsideration of ways of seeing.