Featuring Work by Liz Atzberger, Jesse Bercowetz, Ben Godward, Audrey Hasen Russell and Letha Wilson

New Monuments, Gallery 2 Apri 13– May 15, 2011

Sculptor Ben Godward has assembled a group of artists who upend traditional notions of landscape and sculpture, working toward a new set of rules that incorporates the use of industrial discards, construction materials, recyclables and other relics of castoff culture, as well as more traditional media used in non-traditional ways. As the exhibition title suggests, the works shown here are both new and monumental, with an attitude toward the cherished institutions of past practice that is irreverent, but stops short of disrespect or outright dismissal.

Jesse Bercowetz creates sculptures that contain strong elements of chaos and discord. Often working at room-scale, he assembles debris, thrift-store finds and street trash to create sculptures that capture the unease and paranoia of modern life. In a similar vein, Liz Atzberger uses the brightly colored detritus of modern life to explore notions of pattern, scale, and repetitioninspired by natural phenomena such as electromagnetism and emergent growth patterns.

Audrey Hasen Russell rescues a classicist fondness for materials and applies it to found objects and construction materials, drawing inspiration from the physical properties of the media she sculpts and assembles. Letha Wilson’s art represents a new take on landscape photography, bringing it into three dimensions to allow sculptural and architectural vocabulary to attempt - and fail - to make up the shortfall between the photograph and the natural world that photography always, at some level, fails to encapsulate. Wilson’s works point out this failure, but stops just short of declaring the endeavor to capture the inspiration of the natural world fruitless in itself.

“Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem. Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.” Smithson,” Entropy and the New monuments”