Home Depot Home
October 24th through November 30th, 2002
Opening reception: Saturday, october 26th, 2002, 6 to 8 p.m.
Debs & Co. is pleased to present a new body of work by Stefanie Nagorka, her third solo exhibition with the gallery. In Home Depot Home, Ms. Nagorka documents a series of sculptural happenings at various Home Depot stores in the Northeast.
Over the last year, Ms. Nagorka has visited these stores and mined the resources of their home building departments to make sculpture on site, creating guerilla works which reference a number of modernist sculptural traditions. The artist
photographs these site-specific non-site transient monuments to Kultur and leaves them to sit unmarked and
inexplicable until dismantled -- or permanently acquired -- by some unknown agency.In Endless Column, After Brancusi, Ms. Nagorka has erected a series of concrete basketball post anchors face-to-face and butt-to-butt in abbreviated homage to that artist's grandiloquent (and decaying) work of the same name. In the photograph, Ms. Nagorka's $2.95-per-unit work sits alone in its instantly recognizable environment of the orange metal shelving of Home Depot. It is simultaneously artifact, facsimile, formal solution, and goof.
Ms. Nagorka brings Home Depot home to the gallery with the installation of 196-608 Red 18x18 Brickface, a sculpture of slabs piled on each other in a delicate and somewhat harrowing balance. The work is a meditation on the relationships between the four physical dimensions. It is also a continuation of Smithson's notion of non-site, the site in this case being a commercial space, not a "natural" site such as Sanibel Island. Ms. Nagorka's use of Home Depot as off-site site underscores an element of social critique present in the work: which is more suitable as a matrix within which to make works of art, the sublime "emptiness" of wilderness or the relentless "cultivation" of suburban New Jersey?
Ms. Nagorka's work is included in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, the Arkansas Art Center at Little Rock, the Drawing Center, and the Pratt Institute. Recent outdoor sculptures have been exhibited at The Fields Sculpture Park in Ghent, New York, and at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. She recently had a solo exhibition at Rutgers University in Newark. Stefanie Nagorka was born in 1954 and lives and works in New Jersey.
IN THE PROJECT ROOM:
DAVID NELSON
Freeze
In Freeze, David Nelson presents a seemingly odd array of photographs and sculptures. C-prints document to near abstraction the relentless process at the prow of an ice-breaking ferry in the St. Laurence river. On the floor a long, inflated, sentence-like strip of extruded foam records illegibly the overheard conversations outside the artists East Village studio. Three pearlescent bulges on the wall suspend the distended state of fiberglass cloth soaked in epoxy,
hardened into a form like a chest puffed with air never exhaled.Mr. Nelson has exhibited most recently at Merylhurst University in Portland, Oregon, and at the Drawing Center and Artists Space in New York. This is his third exhibition at the gallery. He lives and works in New York City.