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Email PageStructured Settlement
February 21, 2008- March 20, 2008
Reception: February 21, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Tom Fruin
BUIA Gallery
541 W 23rd St
BUIA Gallery is pleased to present Structured Settlement, an exhibition of new sculpture by Tom Fruin. In keeping with his tradition of working with found urban detritus, Fruin expands his vocabulary beyond his popular ‘drug bag flags’ to the landscape from which they emerged. In Structured Settlement, Fruin presents obsessively constructed tenements, factories, office buildings, and apartment buildings made from found signage and metal. Creating the works on a human scale and presenting them on extended arms for scrutiny, Fruin reverses the dominance these structures usually exert over their inhabitants and surrounding community, giving the viewer the opportunity to scrutinize this cross-section of the urban landscape.
With this new body of sculptural works, Fruin expands the scope of his commentary, in this case to the community at large, and shifts his material of choice to metal while retaining a similar sensibility to the stitched drug bag pieces. The new works exhibit a labored quality, highlighting detail and perfection. Regular intervals of rivets recall the zig-zag stitching joining the discarded drug bags. The scarred and obviously used surfaces of Fruin’s pallet of metal materials reveal their histories in the same way that the found detritus of public parks and housing projects belie the activities of the inhabitants. At times, Fruin completely transforms the sheet metal, as in the pizza factory series in which he removed the signage from a defunct pizza deli in his neighborhood to construct sculptures reminiscent of factories and industrial buildings. In other works, solely the details communicate the substance of the idea as in cabinet tenement, 2008 in which he adorns a filing cabinet with the single addition of found discarded corner moulding from a tin ceiling, suggesting roof ornamentation on the reverse of the still dusty metal box. What Fruin presents ultimately is a constructed cityscape for observation, offering bits of commentary along the way.
Tom Fruin is a Brooklyn based artist who has shown extensively both in the U.S. and internationally. Recent shows include solo exhibition hastle whitey at Galerie Bertrand & Gruner inGeneva, Over + Over: Passion for Process at the Austin Museum of Art, and Almost Art at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Recent press includes reviews in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The New York Post, Artnews, Flash Art, Flaunt, and Blackbook. We are pleased to present this, Tom Fruin’s third New York solo exhibition.
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