Items Similar to Spatial Anomaly
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 5
Colleen WolstenholmeSpatial Anomaly2018
2018
About the Item
Colleen Wolstenholme’s interest in the brain has flowed from her longstanding practice of making meticulous impressions of pharmaceutical drugs, such as Xanax, Prozac and Adderal, creating larger-than-life plaster pills and minute gold and silver cast beads to be worn as jewelry. Such pills, of course, work by adjusting the function of nerve cells to alter the chemistry of the brain.
In her recent work Hexagraphy, shown at Art Mûr as the culmination of her PhD research at York University, Wolstenholme takes the hippocampus as her subject – the region of the brain that is vital to both short and long-term memory, as well as spatial navigation. The hippocampus is home to place and grid cells, which fire in a hexagonal pattern to create a cognitive map that allows the body to orient itself in space.
Hexagraphy is composed of a topography of welded steel hexagons, upon which Wolstenholme has melted a white polystyrene sheet. The hardened plastic is then removed to create two separately installed sculptures – the now-redundant supporting grid and the crumpled screen, backlit with small blue and green LED lights on the gallery floor. The screen appears wet, warped and fleshy, perhaps like surface of the brain, and the lights flicker in a pattern that evokes the hexagonal neural field of the hippocampus. Yet the work also opens itself up to a variety of other visual affiliations: infrared projections of weather patterns on a landscape, an electrified reflecting pool, a magic carpet.
The exhibition title Apropos Obsolescence refers to Wolstenholme’s approach to technology: the pixels that comprise Hexagraphy support a ratio of approximately 35 pixels per square foot – a resolution that stands in hyperbolic contrast to the compulsion towards ever-finer imaging technology.
An affection for the mathematical constancy of the grid is palpable throughout Wolstenholme’s practice. She has described the pleasurable, calming effect of drawing elaborate hexagonal patterns. But there is equally a sense that she tests the limits of strict Euclidian geometry, infusing elements of randomness, as well as references to bodily phenomena, into her process. Wolstenholme builds her grids according to a set of pre-determined rules, cutting steel rods of relatively, but not precisely, the same size and then welding them back together in a hexagonal pattern. These variances are what produce the rough-hewn, rippling quality of Wolstenholme’s geometric matrixes. Her labour therefore becomes an act of performative automatism and the mistakes are built into the method.
This element of contingency is crucial for Wolstenholme. The technique of welding, managing electrical force to alter such inflexible material, is physically demanding and there is an element of the absurd in undertaking this labour of cutting through steel rods only to reassemble them again. The sculpture is thus a residue of this method, which encompasses both structure and flow, the precision of practice and contingent outcome.
- Creator:Colleen Wolstenholme (1963, Canadian)
- Creation Year:2018
- Dimensions:Height: 39 in (99.06 cm)Width: 37 in (93.98 cm)Depth: 27 in (68.58 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Montreal, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU4763344743
About the Seller
5.0
Vetted Seller
These experienced sellers undergo a comprehensive evaluation by our team of in-house experts.
Established in 1996
1stDibs seller since 2014
95 sales on 1stDibs
- ShippingRetrieving quote...Ships From: Montreal, Canada
- Return PolicyA return for this item may be initiated within 7 days of delivery.
More From This SellerView All
- ChallengerBy Brandon VickerdLocated in Montreal, QuebecChallenger consists of a replica of the escape hatch from the NASA space shuttle installed as if it has fallen from the sky and flattened a Canada P...Category
2010s Contemporary Figurative Sculptures
MaterialsSteel
- Deviant GridBy Colleen WolstenholmeLocated in Montreal, QuebecColleen Wolstenholme’s interest in the brain has flowed from her longstanding practice of making meticulous impressions of pharmaceutical drugs, such as Xanax, Prozac and Adderal, cr...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsSteel
- UntitledBy Shayne DarkLocated in Montreal, QuebecShayne Dark is a Hartington, Ontario-based contemporary visual artist who has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally since he began his artistic career in the mid 1980’...Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsSteel
- Interlace – PurpleBy Shayne DarkLocated in Montreal, QuebecShayne Dark's work results from a rhythmic and organic process involving ideas, feelings, images, formal play, and structural necessity. Every aspect of the process has the potential...Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsMetal
- Garden WallLocated in Montreal, QuebecNicholas Crombach (BFA, 2012) is an artist working in Kingston Ontario. Crombach has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award. His solo exhibition, Behind Elegantly Carved Wooden Doors, was presented at Art Mûr...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsConcrete, Metal
- PantieBy Cal LaneLocated in Montreal, QuebecLaughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane’s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society’s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards. In place of nets, women’s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-scène set in motion by viewer’s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction—a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug’s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry. Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The innocence of the submarine in popular culture and its reality as a phallic war object...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsMetal
You May Also Like
- Large Limited Edition Rusted Steel Wall Mounted Sculpture "Flasher"By Uwe PfaffLocated in Cape Town, ZAA life size, rusted steel sculpture, edition 3/5. This sculpture is wall-mounted and is hung on a wall as a painting would be hung. It stands about 20mm away from the wall, creating...Category
2010s Contemporary Figurative Sculptures
MaterialsSteel
- Limited Edition Kinetic Mild Steel Sculpture "Spiral Legend"By Uwe PfaffLocated in Cape Town, ZAA limited edition, powder coated mild steel sculpture, capable of bouncing (see video). Edition 2/5. Available in different colours on request.Category
2010s Contemporary Figurative Sculptures
MaterialsSteel
- Large Abstract Contemporary Black Chain Wall SculptureBy Matthew ReevesLocated in Houston, TXLarge abstract contemporary chain sculpture by Houston, TX artist, Matthew Reeves. The sculpture depicts a linked chain sculpture that can be displayed ...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsSteel
- "To Wish Impossible Things", Nic Noblique, Large Red Steel Sculpture, 120x48x72By Nic NobliqueLocated in Dallas, TXNic Noblique is a Texas-based sculptor whose preferred medium is steel. Noblique has, in a relatively short amount of time, become one of the foremost abstract sculptors in the Unite...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsSteel
- Entangled Rambling Blue - Intersecting spires of cerulean blueBy Shayne DarkLocated in Bloomfield, ONThis striking deep cerulean blue sculpture by Canadian artist, Shayne Dark is part of the ‘Entangled Series’ he has worked on for many years. The abstract series began in wood, then ...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsSteel
- Tilted Orange - Tall, bright, glossy, geometric abstract, coated steel sculptureBy Shayne DarkLocated in Bloomfield, ONEvocative in colour and form, Canadian artist Shayne Dark has created another dynamic sculpture. The industrial and the organic intersect in five tapered powder-coated angled shafts ...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsSteel