An installation of site specific works featuring Minimalist materials—can tabs, ball chain, steel shot, neodymium magnets, tyvek-parts associated with industrial/consumer functions—and found objects, that are transformed into opulent large scale works, through repetitious pattern. Numeracy looms large in these installations—work hours, number of parts, weight, distance—creating a hybrid aesthetic.
Artist Statement
Alice Hope maximizes the visual effect of a simple process through the dense deployment of a simple palette or repetitive process. Her Minimalist materials — perforated aluminum, can tabs, iron filings, ball chain, steel shot, ferrite/neodymium magnets– fall outside of an artistic context and are most often associated with industrial/consumer functions. She transforms her materials by controlling scale, placement, and pattern. Numeracy – the power of numbers — looms large in her work. She calculates the work hours, number of parts, degrees in scale, weight, and distance; this generates its own hybrid aesthetic. Ultimately, her labor-intensive execution leads to opulent work that seems Baroque — an extreme contrast to the choices that produced it.
Gallery Talk – March 24, 2018.
Curated by Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Museum Director/Chief Curator.
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Alice Hope
Alice Hope works with materials that have cultural references. She intends her materials to be both the object and the subject of her work, while she also aspires to transform the materials to a-materiality, into experience.
For the last seven years she has been immersed in using the used can tab about which she states:
The used can tab can be looked at from a multiplicity of perspectives - that its proportion is in the Golden Mean like the Parthenon; that it’s a tool - a lever; that it’s trash; that it’s an icon; that it’s an anti-phallus with its equal negative and positive space; that as a floor plan it emulates Renaissance cathedrals with its apse and nave; its ergonomics; its timed obsolescence; its demographically democratic use -, but in my work I focus on the used tab as a relic of consumption and as a token for redemption.
She has created numerous site specific public and residential installations. Some highlights include Camp Hero State Park in Montauk, New York for the Parrish Art museum, Pier 92 Lobby for the Armory Show, WNYC’s Greene Space lobby, Queens Museum, US Embassy’s lobby in Mozambique for Art in Embassies, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, and Guild Hall. She shows with Tripoli Gallery in Wainscott, New York and Ricco Maresca in NYC.
