Residency Unlimited and the Abrons Arts Center are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in New York by Montreal-based artist David Spriggs. For the last decade, Spriggs has been examining the particular symbolic, perceptual, social, political, and historical connotations of color in the monochromatic installation series Stratachrome.

Blue is a site-specific installation created for the Abrons Arts Center Gallery that addresses the physicality and perception of the color blue. Whilst referencing Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue (IKB) and the Light and Space artists of the sixties, Blue imagines new concepts of hue in space manifesting the color as a graspable physical object. Embracing the spectacle of “blueness,” the installation delivers a destabilizing and powerful experience. As writer John Hampton notes: “Spriggs works primarily in phenomenological experience; he creates stunningly convincing illusions of airy, voluminous objects that we enter visually.”

Blue is created with multiple layers of painted transparent film hung at specific intervals within the gallery. The blue pigment is carried through the space on the transparencies that, once lit, create a blur of three-dimensional color. The result is a field of an intense saturated tint that radiates from the architecture with no defined form or boundaries. A sense of the ephemeral is manifested in the work suggesting the sky. The installation is at once ethereal and concrete. One wall of the gallery is mirrored, creating a reflection so that the blue is not only carried through the room, but beyond into reflected space.

David Spriggs, a Montreal-based artist, was born in 1978 in Manchester, England. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montreal, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University in Vancouver. He undertook student residencies at Central St. Martins College of Art in London, England (1999), and the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany (2006). He has recently exhibited work at the Prague Biennial 5, the Louis Vuitton Gallery in Macau, and at the Sharjah Biennal 9 in the United Arab Emirates. Spriggs’ exhibitions in Canada include shows at Galerie de l’UQAM, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and Rodman Hall Arts Centre. His work is in the permanent collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Museum of Quebec. David Spriggs’ residency with Residency Unlimited is made possible with support from Canada Council for the Arts. Set within the framework of RU’s partnership with the Abrons Arts Center, the exhibition Blue is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.