Siobhán Hapaska: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present the sculpture of Siobhán Hapaska in the artist's first American solo exhibition.
Siobhán Hapaska's sculptures . Like dreams they that demand consideration as entities unto themselves. Carefully imbued with certain spirituality, their closest visual relatives might be found paradoxically in the cold realm of industrial design, a result of the artist's affinity for and exploitation of technological media. Though a byproduct of civilization's obsession with efficiency in function, Hapaska uses technology to engineer the existence of objects she has described as "lost," abandoning them to come to terms with their utter functionlessness. How(1997) is not so much the declarative answer to some formal sculptural quandary as it is an expression of the work's own eternal longing to get somewhere else, to move forward. The concept of the future and the potential it
Initiating the design process of each fiberglass biomorph on the screen of a computer, the artist manipulates a virtual object into an undulating three-dimensional surface. Seductive and light- reflecting, the works imply motion, yet remain still, frozen; perhaps against their will as their emotive titles Want (1997) and Hanker (1997) imply. They are surfaces containing internal machinations unimaginable, merely hinted at by the glare of an ever vigilant, always lit, green or blue LED. These tiny lights are coolly implanted flush with the work's surfaces, a symbol of energy, a sign of function that remains a mystery, caught somewhere between the nonexistent and the incomprehensible.