New sculptures and paintings by New York-based artists Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg.

Since their last exhibition in early 2004, Hanson and Sonnenberg have continued to develop a series of sculptures made of pale blue and green polystyrene that faithfully reproduce a compendium of objects as diverse as press conference microphones, loud speakers, a broom and a crashed hockey scoreboard.

This exhibition will include an installation of new polystyrene sculptures ghosting seemingly less spectacular objects: chain-link fences, a vandalized bike, a locked shopping cart, a garbage can and a scattering of Zamboni tires (lifted from a recent piece of theirs: a full-scale Zamboni, apparently parked in the wrong neighborhood, on view in an exhibition at NyeHaus, 15 Gramercy Park South). The show will also include several street signs, stolen and painted to efface their original directive, and photography, similarly opaque, in its attempt to construct a situatedness of sculptural experience.

The vulnerability of the artist’s chosen media, polystyrene, by definition parallels the violation each subject has withstood prior to appropriation by Hanson and Sonnenberg: the bicycle, titled “Bully,” has been vandalized and stripped, the shopping cart has been immobilized with a locked chain. Each object is stripped of its nature and purpose, rendered even more powerless in a flimsy material.

Integral to the artists’ work is a questioning of their own work’s efficacy, their own history, and the ability of art in general to tackle social and cultural topics. Deepening this contradiction, a spectre of violence that hangs over the show is constantly held in check by each object’s visual and formal elegance.

The brilliance of this sustained futility is Hanson and Sonnenberg’s ability to seduce viewers with extremely satisfying objects, simultaneously denying them, and elevating their work beyond the limitations of spectacular technique, to an engagement with conceptual and philosophical traditions.