Group Hug brings together a number of ACRE residents and staff working primarily with large sculptures. Each of these artists addresses an awareness of the body and human scale while striking careful and nuanced stances with regard to the contemporary discourse around (un)monumentality. Their objects, wrought carefully from an uncommon array of quotidian and rare materials, speak with a clarity of content and voice that belie their complicated critical and formal conceits. Most of this work stands outside of today’s retreat into formalism, and instead make relatively direct reference to specific, nameable forms. The pieces therefore abut conversations that exist outside of the aesthetic, treating with sentimentality and incisive thought conversations of scientific ambition, queerness, modernity’s decay, sport, and ritual. ACRE is proud to present these artists, all deeply invested in producing objects that both impress with the evidence of their making, and generously open conversations that are both accessible and complex.

Daniel Baird’s recent work stresses an awareness of the body through technological means. Utilizing materials and replications of objects developed by NASA, these structures evoke an existential encounter and emphasize a connection to the fundamentally human element in the construction of these technologies.

Paul Erschen’s recent assemblage and archive projects include Hydrocal castings of industrial waste products and ongoing collections of discarded drug bags and condoms. Paul’s use of transformative physical processes, such as mold making, screen printing, and faux-painting, cloud his stubbornly controlled installations with suspicion and emptiness.

Examining the workings of social infrastructure, Matt Nichols questions the implicit disposition of personal and institutional values. His recent work takes the idea of entropy as a departure point to consider the value of an object as its cultural or utilitarian meaning is diminished.

Subverting techniques and materials traditionally associated with craft, Betsy Odom explores displays of identity, most recently through the lens of athleticism. Her works in this show continue her engagement with the inherent relationship between the physical body and the pathos of sport, while speaking to ideas of transport and movement through space.

Aay Preston-Myint transforms disrupted objects, bodies and sites into mutating combinations of iconography, material and sensory phenomena. Structural anomalies based on discordant juxtapositions meet ambiguous/radical/meaningless intentions to form familiar-but-strange scenes.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Bridgeport, Co-Prosperity Sphere