Maccarone gallery is proud to present its first project with Paris-based artist Oscar Tuazon – “A Vow of Poverty” on view from Sept. 13 – Oct. 11, 2008.

The artist’s examination commences with the fundamental query on individual freedom – and how to incarnate such an ideal via architectural form. The conditions for sustainability and self-reliance are called into further question by embarking on a homecoming to the age-old transcendental question if isolation from one’s community could ever achieve a greater objective understanding of it.

His practice results in a mode of sculpture that employs urban fragments – materials usually gathered from the surrounding area of the artist’s studio, or near the exhibition environment at-hand. “A Vow of Poverty” looks to the latter – creating an installation at maccarone composed of concrete, steel and other construction elements of the everyday. Tuazon’s work typically takes on the appearance akin to geodesic domes, fostering a rawness associated with indigenous techniques. Sculptural elements merge into an assemblage where the audience must confront such extremes of DIY architecture, embarking here on a more complex narrative plagued with a sense of instability; the installation mirrors the gallery space, with some areas maintaining a sound structure and others evoking a sense of crumbling failure and decay. We are finally left with an environment in a simple state of the in-between, all the while never compromising a conceptual forefront where an ardor for structural clarity fondly meets poetic anarchy.

Oscar Tuazon’s work is concurrently being shown here in New York at The Sculpture Center’s exhibition “Degrees of Remove: Landscape and Affect” on view through Nov. 30th.

Born in Seattle (1976), Tuazon received his education from Cooper Union and the Whitney ISP in New York. His works have been presented in solo exhibitions at STANDARD (OSLO), Bodgers and Kludgers, Vancouver, and castillo/corrales, Paris. Group exhibitions include “Down By Law”, The Wrong Gallery for the Whitney Biennial, New York; “The Elementary Particles (Paperback Edition)”, STANDARD (OSLO); and “Minotaur Blood” at Jonathan Viner / Fortesque Avenue, London.