Corey McCorkle

Corey McCorkle

Exhibition: Jul 15 – Sep 12, 2010


Using found scenarios and the readily available, Corey McCorkle continues to vary his spatial improvisations, acknowledging the environment he is a part of and creating conceptual alterations to both natural and architectural surroundings. His use of inversion, mutation, and prolonged observation allows for an altered sense of spatial awareness through unlikely transformations.

There are two primary works in McCorkle’s Artpace exhibition. In the first part of his installation, he presents a film featuring the monumental signage of the Robert E. Lee Hotel, located less than five blocks south of Artpace on West Travis Street. The scene, which was captured from the roof of the hotel, displays the hotel sign-filmed from behind-paired with its urban surroundings, including neighboring buildings and the sprawling rooftop heating, ventilating, and air conditioning units. The sign, here extracted, is seen as a cipher, prop, and political prism. Similar to Tower of Shadows (2006), Bestiaire (2007), and March (2008), three earlier films by the artist, nostalgia remains the lining of aspiring social order.

The second part of the installation stretches throughout the interior of the Artpace building. McCorkle articulates the industrial and domestic space by bringing the respiratory system of the structure to the public foreground, reconstructing and rerouting the once inner air conditioning system. The elaborate path of the operational ducts first unfolds in the ground-level exhibition space, ascends through the building’s staircase, serpentines through the Hudson (Show)Room on the second floor, and ultimately finds refuge within the artist’s residential space upstairs. The meandering, organic quality of the formal piece is also a diagram of constant unrelenting circulation.

McCorkle’s work is both reminiscent of and contrasts with Michael Asher’s revealed and displaced radiators at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland nearly two decades ago. The geometric placement of the empty volumes situated here results in a poetic movement of an orchestrated course. The literal system of respiration emulates the impossible act of resuscitation through a certain and fixed distance. The artist’s attention to detail and nod to utilitarian architecture is also aggressively unassertive, providing a sense of humor and romance using the easily overlooked infrastructure. The stretch of conduit is hidden in plain sight, offering the familiar vernacular of the functional as an elusive object of contemplation.

Liberating the air conditioning ducts and hotel signage from prior restrictions, McCorkle’s work provides another layer to each of his featured objects, recalibrating the conventions of accommodation, historic and otherwise. Objects we pass by, or under, are effortlessly brought together, transforming the everyday into aesthetically revitalized emblems.

-Amy Elms, Graduate Intern

Artist

Corey McCorkle

New York, New York, USA

Corey McCorkle creates architecturally inspired installations using a wide variety of mediums. The New York-based artist constructs interventions within existing environments in an effort to incite greater complications of both architecture and urbanism.
McCorkle received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at FRAC Île de France, Le Plateau, Paris (2010); Stella Lohaus Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2009); Maccarone, New York, New York (2007); and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2005). His work has been featured in many group exhibitions, including The World is Yours, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæck, Denmark (2009); Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture, Barbican, London, England (2009); Political/Minimal, Kunst-Werke, Berlin, Germany (2008); Modern Ruin, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2008); Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum, New York; Traces du Sacré, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2008); The Plain of Heaven, Creative Time, New York (2005); and Greater New York, PS1, New York (2004).

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Curator

Patrick Charpenel

Mexico City, Mexico

Patrick Charpenel is an art historian and collector currently working as an independent curator in Mexico City. He holds a graduate degree in philosophy. Charpenel has curated numerous exhibitions including Franz West, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico (2006); Sólo los personajes cambian, Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico (2004); Inter.play, Moore Space, Miami, Florida (2003); Edén, Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico (2003); and ACNÉ, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico (1995). He has numerous critical texts published in catalogues and magazines.
 

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