Roebling Hall is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibitions of the 2007/08 season; Form/Faith by Christoph Morlinghaus and Nothing But Heavy Duty by David Ersser, two exhibitions exploring the use of space as constructed locations, as means of philosophical or spiritual experience.

Ersser’s installation Nothing But Heavy Duty expands his practice of attentive re-fabrication of every day objects; by exhaustively re-creating almost any object in view he builds up still-lifes, then multiplies them into environments, ultimately re-locating rendered places. After recently re-creating sections of his studio in the gallery for an exhibition at Seventeen in London, including the camera recording the re-created view, he morphs the idea for this new exhibition. He literally transforms Roebling Hall into his studio workshop, using it over the summer, constructing an entire worksite in situ. The installation renders the gallery someplace between the literal construct of the white box, a tableau of its own origin in construction that still harkens back to the re-created studio, and the permeating, lingering notion of a memory of the path of the studio/workshop/gallery production and presentation. The experience is rendered by replicating the very tools, means and detritus of its own creation, portrayed in balsa wood as the record of that worksite. The exhibition is an essence of a place, mindful of its own creation; a recording, reminiscent of visiting Brancusi’s Studio re-installed in Paris, or a modern day Studiolo of Gubbio; places, again that are re-created to be remembered as the physical home, the origin of ideas. Ersser freshly posits the artist in his studio, or a craftsman in the workplace, but most unusually as a sculptural installation.

The viewer then, is invited into the site and act of constructing the installation, his presence completing the tableau. Ersser is offering a window into and from his own experience, we perceive from his perspective, the viewer is practically disembodied, entering a visceral replication of Ersser’s mind at work in his studio.