Formulations


Formulation, as a term, has the interesting distinction of relating to issues of both development and reduction. Formulation can also be understood in terms of systemization. All of the artists presented here address inherent aspects and dualities of form as subject: flatness vs. dimensionality, the interior vs. exterior, reality vs. abstraction, construction vs. appropriation. These works are made through a combination of processes, including photography, painting, installation, assemblage, sculpture and optical illusion. If the centerpiece of sculpture is “the form”, then this visual exchange of materials and methods brings us a vibrant overview of contemporary approaches to form itself.

 

  • Featuring works by Sophia Chai, Adam Frezza & Terri Chiao, Tai Yin Ho, Jon Pylypchuk, and Ivan Stojakovic

  • Curated by Owen Houhoulis

  • June 3rd - July 16th, 2016

  • Location: 47-21 35th Street, Long Island City, NY 11101



Owen Houhoulis is the founder of Owen James Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Brooklyn, NY. The gallery focuses on emerging and mid-career artists from an international perspective. It is a showcase for the crossroads of America, Asia and Europe, with a special interest in Southeast Asian contemporary art.

Sculpture Space NYC is ceramics and sculpture center founded by artists Magda Dejose and Andrew Kennedy to foster creativity, concept and collaboration. SSNYC offers the space, equipment and advanced education to allow artists to explore and expand their work. In addition, SSNYC offers a range of classes, lectures, workshops, artist residencies and ongoing exhibition program.

 

Artists

Sophia Cha


Sophia Chai is a photographer who explores space and depth as it is perceived through the camera lens. The artist uses the floors and walls of her studio as a canvas of sorts, upon which she directly paints the illusion of forms and perspectives. These warped and angled situations are transformed through the camera’s placement to appear flat and straightforward. This playful interaction with space draws the viewer closer and forces one to question and interpret what is actually being seen.

 

Adam Frezza & Terri Chiao


Adam Frezza & Terri Chiao form the artistic team Chiaozza and they work in a variety of techniques. Their Paper Plant and Lump Nubbin works are playful interpretations of desert flora that hover between nature and pure imagination. These brilliantly colorful sculptures are made from an amalgam of materials: paper pulp, sculptamold, painted paper, acrylic paint and concrete.

 

Tai Yin Ho


Tai Yin Ho is a sculptor who often combines disparate found materials into delicately balanced mediations on the component’s shape, texture and possible uses. Intimate in scale, her sculptures are often mixtures of natural materials, such as rocks, and mundane industrial fair, such as packing foam and felt. This allows her to investigate a range of interpretations, not just in terms of formal structural arrangements, but also of tactile sensibilities, positive and negative space, time and strength.

 

Jon Pylypchuk


Jon Pylypchuk is a mixed-media artist that is best known for his humorous depictions of loveable losers. His characters often takes the form of anthropomorphized characters such as cigarettes, furry critters and, in this case, a toilet. His multiple edition Untitled (published by Eric Gero Editions) is representative of this aesthetic. A porcelain toilet reproduction has been given googly lightbulb eyes, and sits upon a scaled-down shipping crate. Alluding to an earlier work, the crate is sealed, and houses an original drawing by the artist that, due to its enclosure, will never be seen. The work is also an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Fountain” sculpture, and cleverly combines ideas of utility, interior and exterior space, and the repurposing of material.

 

Ivan Stojakovic


Ivan Stojakovic also combines materials, often cardboard, drywall, colorful plexiglas and live succulent plants. His work exists somewhere between painting and sculpture, and between life-sustaining and deconstructive systems. Stojakovic’s landscapes are at times literally that, based on topographical features, water systems, etc. At other times what we see is a purely abstract experiment, where the emphasis is a balance between a forms surface, the interior space, and the artist’s interventions that unite the two.