NEW YORK, NY.- Laurel Gitlen is presenting an exhibition with Stefanie Victor, the gallery's first exhibition at 465 Grand Street and Victor’s first solo exhibition in New York.
Stefanie Victor’s work investigates the private actions of making, and the slow accrual of movement over time as gestures meet and settle into objects. Recurring cycles of studio work and patterns of her domestic activity are distilled in intimate sculptures that appear simultaneously utilitarian and abstract. Made by hand in raw materials including glass, cement, metal, and clay, Victor’s sculptures register unseen sculptural actions (twisting, pressing, bending, pushing) while also suggesting their own latent potential for activation. These discrete sculptures, disarmingly small in scale, are installed as a single work, in unexpected and shifting relation to the body and the gallery space.
Victor works slowly and with a sense of personal economy, using only what she needs. While formally restrained, the suggestive surfaces of her sculptures invite a psychologically charged relationship to everyday objects, spaces and human touch. Her works reference the repetition of common architectural elements; a soap dish embedded in a wall, a door pull, a hinge, or a looped electrical cord. But they also elicit the gestures that formed and encircled them; the shallow wave-like depressions of fingers in the soft surface of a bar of soap, the loose coiling of wires around a palm, or a brow-bone traced by a familiar hand; inviting a near-collapse between bodies and the spaces they inhabit or between the maker and the made.
Forming subtle rhythms and imperfect repetitions of marks or glyphs, Victor’s installation creates a spatial and temporal drawing that punctuates the room. Periods of he artist’s past activity and rest are embedded in her sculptures like invisible archeological fragments, and the act of mapping them onto the space of the gallery constructs an object-language around time, abstraction and movement. As Victor explains, “At some point in the future my sculptures will become completely still, they will have stopped being made and remade, and if I get it right, become their own kind of objects. … as still points along a hidden continuum that could still gesture back to the small daily movements which surrounded them.”
Stefanie Victor was born in 1982 and lives and works in Queens, New York. She earned an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art in 2009, and a BFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Participant, Inc., and the Drawing Center, New York; and CAPITAL, San Francisco. The first iteration of this body of work was exhibited at Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR in September 2021.
*Please note the gallery address is 465 Grand Street, 4C (the Apple Bank Building). The entrance to the building is on East Broadway. The space is accessible via elevator, please contact the gallery for access via ramp.
