Mirus Gallery is pleased to announce, Off the Wall: Contemporary Sculpture, a group exhibition, featuring Clemens Behr, Joseph Cohen, Matthew Craig, Bartek Elsner, Katie Fisher, Matt Hosey, Duncan Johnson, Laura Judkis, Jonathan Leach, Aaron S. Moran, David Oliveira, Andrea Petrachi, Lauren Rice, Vadis Turner, Ron Ulicny, and Andy Vible.

Off the Wall: Contemporary Sculpture is Mirus Gallery’s fifth exhibition. The participating artists are the creators of the three-dimensional works that inspired Paul Hemming to open the gallery, an addendum to 2012’s Escape Velocity exhibits. Off the Wall takes contemporary art into the third dimension, illustrating sculpture’s new frontier in form and unconventional materials. Though these artists are diverse in nationality, subject, and medium, their mosaics of common materials are a reflexive point of entry to the viewer’s world.

Aaron S. Moran gathers wood from buildings demolished to make way for suburban malls and condos, the kind of architecture composed almost exclusively with man-made materials. He then cuts the wood into smaller geometric pieces, sorts them, and paints a few pieces to compliment a color on the found wood. Painted and unfinished pieces fit together by shared origin, in an order determined by their structure and how tightly this piece fits with that. The result is geometric sculpture in the round, with the oblique angles of an asymmetrical crystal. Moran thinks of his sculptures as monuments to things and places that no longer exist; the building, and the era it represents, lives on in the palette and grain of his sculptures.

Figurative sculpture typically represents a tangible body in our world, yet it is applicable to the alien and robotic forms by Andrea Petrachi. Anthropomorphic sculptures with articulated limbs made of toys and appliances from junkyards and flea markets are simultaneously familiar and dystopian, approachable and creepy. Italian artist Petrachi, also known as Himatic, creates these mechanical sculptures to draw attention to how consumerism is coercive and wasteful, particularly the manufacturing phenomena of planned obsolescence. The human faces on his sci-fi sculptures are apertures to how contemporary technology and consumption are changing humanity.

Jonathan Leach paints some of the more mercurial phenomena—light and shadow, vivid hues, ambiance—of concrete objects. His architectural abstractions in hard lines of neon pastel are painted on canvas and Plexiglass, the choice of support amplifying the subject. In Leach’s latest work, the subject form is also a function created by the piece; panes of Plexiglass painted with fine lines of color cast shadows to create the appearance of three dimensional sculpture. These pieces resonate with the energy and inspiration of metropolitan life.

Femininity and ceremony are explored through Vadis Turner’s mixed media installations. Her subjects are the liminal events of identity: menses, professional milestones, weddings, and death. These transitions are symbolically marked with vanities, wedding cakes, and wrapped bodies. Turner embroiders these symbolic spaces with materials that are traditionally considered for crafts, (ribbons, textiles, and pearls), or are markers of female fertility (tampons and birth control). Her abstract silk ribbon and flower paintings reveal their subject’s mortality, with titles like “Ripe Dirt/Fresh burial” and “A Rather Violent Merger of a Wedding Dress and a Swamp.”

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday 10-6

Location
540 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA
94105

Gallery Contact
monica@mirusgallery.com