Venetia Kapernekas Gallery is pleased to present Capacity, an exhibition by New York-based artist Lynn Koble opening on Wednesday, October 28th, 5-8PM.

Capacity features a large-scale sculpture that fills the gallery space, as well as a series of small-scale sculptures. The works in the exhibition draw connections between the elements of nature and the elements of science and mathematics, which have a long-standing attachment to formulas, systems, and solutions. Together they point to the complex, interconnected relationship between people and nature.

The exhibition’s main work, Capacity, consists of an upright, eight-foot diameter, felt-covered circle, a collection of liquid-filled laboratory flasks, and the elliptical shadows cast by both. With a reductive clarity in form and materials, the sculpture lives up to its name by referencing two related concepts: physical volume and human capability. Rather than solid, the circle is an open ring whose interior holds only a water-line sliver of mirror. The translucent glass boiling flasks of a bygone method hold varying levels of distilled water hued by different concentrations of blue ink. The materials, scale, and placement of the work within the gallery create formal and conceptual tensions between absence and presence, fragility and strength, certainty and doubt.

Also on exhibit is a series of whimsical, small-scale sculptures, entitled Bellows and Manifold that follow the same theme. Rather than water, here the works address the element of air. Also made from richly tactile felt and glass lab ware, these forms take on an anthropomorphic quality, through posture and personality that includes moments of levity to counteract the brittle glass.

Lynn Koble is a New York-based multimedia artist whose work incorporates sculptural form, interactivity and sound. Her work deals with how we experience, produce, mediate, and simulate our physical, social, psychological, and natural environments — often according to systems, whether scientific or personal, tangible or virtual. At a recent exhibition at PS122 Gallery, New York, Lynn Koble created an installation entitled Tipping Point based on the phrase “tipping point” which focuses us on interactions and systems, while simultaneously zeroing in on the urgent need for humans to understand the impact of our actions and interactions from an integrated perspective and provide an umbrella for considering parallel forces at play. Koble uses art as a means to question the shape and impact of these forces and transformed the space into an environment occupied by Pundit, a human scale sculpture with sound. Pundit has a shrub-body dressed in a skin of green felt leaves that Koble hand cut, folded and nested into forms reminiscent of both artificial flowers and the seductive. This process of production has much in common with the labor intensive, handwork of Post-Minimalist sculptors. Bilateral green cone speakers further develop Pundit’s complex, anthropomorphic, technological, artificially “natural” body of female forms.

Koble has a large-scale public sculpture currently on exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY as part of their Emerging Artist Fellowship (EAF09) program (through March 8th, 2010). Some of her solo shows include The Wolfsonian museum in Miami, Islington Arts Factory in London, and Braunstein/Quay Gallery in San Francisco. Some of her selected group exhibitions include shows at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, PS122 Gallery and Exit Art in New York, the Chocolate Factory, London, and the Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, Texas.

Lynn Koble has received numerous grants and fellowships including Socrates Sculpture Park, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Woodside, California, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, New York, Sculpture Space, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Houston Museum of Fine Art’s Core Program. Koble received an MFA from Rutgers University and a BFA from Alfred University. She lives and works in New York City.