Email Page You must be logged in to send emails   Email Password Forgot your password? If you don't have a login yet, it's easy and fast to create one. Just click below. Close Window Add To Tour del.icio.us Facebook Digg Print Page

Year of The Pig Sty

October 11, 2007 - December 15, 2007

Reception: October 11, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Hany Armanious

Foxy Production

617 W 27th St
Foxy Production presents Year of The Pig Sty, Hany Armanious’ inaugural New York exhibition. In Armanious’ provocative work, perverse actions take place upon unexpected materials, resulting in enigmatic objects, scenes and associations. Like a pranksterish alchemist, he transforms the process of casting into a witty and symbolic practice. His detours and digressions through the fictional systems he constructs, paradoxically foster both confusion and engagement.

Year of The Pig Sty is an installation with an internal logic that seems more elusive the longer the work is contemplated. The viewer is greeted with a shocking vista of filth and disarray: on closer inspection, the work resembles a wayward workshop, where strange organic objects are crafted from mud. A desperate struggle seems to have taken place to keep an outmoded artisanal practice going.

The installation is a site where intense and delirious actions have taken place, where motives remain mysterious, and odd linguistic connections are forged. Recalling Beuys’ interplays between textures and history, Year of The Pig Sty inventively interweaves materials and allegory; but unlike Beuys’ work, the associations here are inconclusive, provisional, and likely to be misleading.

How various parts of the installation relate to one another can be alternately elementary or elusive. Crocs, the lightweight therapeutic footwear made through injection casting, figure centrally in the work: in one area, a chaotic collection of Crocs, shoe molds, molded bacon, shoeboxes, socks, among other elements, poetically and humorously conflates therapy, consumerism, and failure. An oversized Styrofoam box, hand-carved and containing mud and oversized truffles made from soil and resin, is surrounded by muddy Croc footprints. A trough constructed from form-ply is filled with mud, as if waiting for pigs to return. Resembling an alien pod, a white Styrofoam box is fused with the sole of a Birkenstock and cast in resin. A doormat with hollows is used to mold circular bricks through the action of the muddy Crocs being wiped on it. The bricks are dried under a snooker table light with hydroponic grow lamps that resembles a descending spacecraft. The same bricks are braced together to form pottery pool cues; apparently the end-product of this wayward production line.

The installation represents perhaps an artist’s studio in throes of fervid activity. Messy, unformed, embryonic objects are in the process of objecthood, as if we are witnesses to the primal scene of creativity. Or has the habitat of the artist been terminally disturbed, the scene contaminated, the project abandoned?

HANY ARMANIOUS (Cairo, Egypt, 1962) lives and works in Sydney. He holds a BA in Visual Arts, City Art Institute, Sydney, Australia.

Selected exhibitions include the Gallery of Wellington, Wellington (2007)(solo); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2006)(solo); Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2006); Busan Biennale, Busan (2006); Ocular Lab Inc., Melbourne, (2005)(solo); National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2005); Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, (2004)(solo); Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne, (2002)(solo); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2001) (solo).

Art Reviews of Year of The Pig Sty

New York Times November 23, 2007

Roberta Smith

"From an American viewpoint, Mr. Armanious’s precedents include Joseph Beuys, Matthew Barney and Jason Rhoades, which is neither here nor there, but his debut conveys an impressive sculptural ease and an appealing, provocative bit of let-it-rip madness. Anything, or nothing, could happen...."

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

Location   Gallery Foxy Production Address 617 W 27th St New York (Chelsea) NY, 10001 United States Phone 212-239-2758 Fax 212-239-2759 Hours Tue-Sat 11-6

© 2005-2008 chelseaartgalleries.com The information on this page is provided "as is", and might be incorrect, incomplete and/or out of date. The site owner makes no representation as to the accuracy of the information or its suitability for any purpose. The owner disclaims any liability for errors that may be contained therein. sitemap