ASKEVOLD/HUTCHINSON

PETER HUTCHINSON

DAVID ASKEVOLD

Article Projects at 532 Gallery

532 West 25th Street, 2nd floor 917.701.3338

www.532gallery.com March 27 - April 20, 2007

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 27, 6-9 PM

We are pleased to announce an exhibition featuring two pioneer conceptual artists, David Askevold and Peter Hutchinson, who have established the connections between language, the found photographic moment; and an interaction with nature and the intricacies of the mind between actual and intellectual experience. Though Hutchinson has an ecologic sensibility and Askevold a metaphysical one, both of their oeuvres has added something distinct, useful, and inspired to the practice of Conceptualism.

The actual works, on close inspection, are as different as they can be. Askevold has crafted, in his “Ambit” series, a group of images that combine visual and linguistic meaning—that is, photographic images that evoke phastasmagoria (lights blinking; the shadow of an art being slowly waved; water beading across a surface as it slowly turns into ice; silhouettes of abstract seeming objects projected and then documented) and language that is so unbelievably dense that it approaches mere verbal ambiguity; another form of abstraction that can in a perverse way be appreciated only for its sound and not for its sense. The words are burned into the photographic images, which are zoomed in and therefore indistinct.

On the other hand, Hutchinson’s works are intensely intimate, combining an almost leisurely style of photographic evidence that is combined on large white sections of museum board with drawings and text that is handwritten, resembling a diary. His subjects are man’s position in relation to nature, which he investigates in a number of ways: hiking and eating off the land in his “Foraging” series; laying a path of bread crumbs (actually Wonder bread) on the lip of an active volcano; combining drawings, photographs, and a short text to recount an understanding of pure natural sublimity, when on a hiking trip be is surprised by sudden thunder in the middle of a bright blue sky.

This exhibition provides a simple snapshot of a period preceding our current one which was host to a myriad of approaches to man’s innate nature, his ability to feel and think, and to know meaning despite a confusion of the sensate or the cerebral. It brings the Conceptual back to us in ways that still instruct and inspire.