Oscar Tuazon
17 Jan - 08 Mar 2014
OSCAR TUAZON
A Home
17 January – 8 March 2014
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to announce the second exhibition of LA based sculptor Oscar Tuazon at the gallery. Tuazon’s works, notably constructions in wood, concrete and steel are inspired by the tradition of do-it-yourself and survivalist architecture, adopted less in terms of form and more as a kind of strategy. His works are linking ideas of the Land Art movement with Minimal Art, combining the idea of the abstract with down-to-earth construction. The physical and collective challenge for the formation of his work as well as the reference to the exhibition site are pivotal for his work. Tuazon’s works are breaking up as well as linking categories of architecture, sculpture and design. In the following, please find the artist’ statement on his show:
A Home
A Home is my studio, a living space, a workspace, an exhibition space. Based on a house I own on the Hoh River, a remote area on the Olympic Penninsula of Washington State, about 4 hours from Seattle, A Home is essentially a 1:1 architectural study model.
When we bought the property almost two years ago there was no road, no power, no toilet, no running water—only a large workshop in the middle of the forest. Since then Dorothee and I have built a road, installed power, and built a rainwater catchment tank and a filtration system to provide drinkable water. The structure is still unfinished, though, with only a single internal wall dividing the space into two large rooms. For the past couple of summers I have used the structure as a studio.
A Home is full-scale model, a model home. On display in the gallery, the floor becomes a low stage, a pedestal, a building within a building. The floor is simply an empty room, an unadorned, featureless, unfurnished void, prior to occupancy. A floor as a room.
A series of six plaster panels hangs in a line. The plaster panels act like surrogate walls, walls on walls, plaster over plaster, structural panels, replacements for the walls they hang on.
Mirroring the plaster panels, a series of six windows stand along the other edge of the floor, facing and reflecting the windows of the gallery. Adapted from the work of Steve Baer, the windows are designed prevent heat loss by blowing insulation material inside a double-paned window. No longer transparent, the windows become strangely self-defeating objects, an absurd contradiction: opaque windows. Mechanically, none of the windows work very well, some of them not at all. As a series they describe the process of making sculpture as a sequence of wrong turns and false starts, as an endless prototyping process. A Home is that too.
Oscar Tuazon, December 2013
Since 2007, Oscar Tuazon (born 1975, Tacoma, Washington) has been living and working in Paris where he co-founded the collective-run artists’ gallery castillo/corrales, before he moved to Los Angeles in 2013. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In 2011, he designed one of the four para-pavilions at the 54th Venice Biennial. His work was featured in solo exhibitions as People, Public Art Fund at Brooklyn Park, New York (2012), in Spasm of Misuse at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin and in White Walls at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (both 2013). Opening in February 2014, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne will show the major solo exhibition Alone in an empty room with Tuazon’s work.
A Home
17 January – 8 March 2014
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to announce the second exhibition of LA based sculptor Oscar Tuazon at the gallery. Tuazon’s works, notably constructions in wood, concrete and steel are inspired by the tradition of do-it-yourself and survivalist architecture, adopted less in terms of form and more as a kind of strategy. His works are linking ideas of the Land Art movement with Minimal Art, combining the idea of the abstract with down-to-earth construction. The physical and collective challenge for the formation of his work as well as the reference to the exhibition site are pivotal for his work. Tuazon’s works are breaking up as well as linking categories of architecture, sculpture and design. In the following, please find the artist’ statement on his show:
A Home
A Home is my studio, a living space, a workspace, an exhibition space. Based on a house I own on the Hoh River, a remote area on the Olympic Penninsula of Washington State, about 4 hours from Seattle, A Home is essentially a 1:1 architectural study model.
When we bought the property almost two years ago there was no road, no power, no toilet, no running water—only a large workshop in the middle of the forest. Since then Dorothee and I have built a road, installed power, and built a rainwater catchment tank and a filtration system to provide drinkable water. The structure is still unfinished, though, with only a single internal wall dividing the space into two large rooms. For the past couple of summers I have used the structure as a studio.
A Home is full-scale model, a model home. On display in the gallery, the floor becomes a low stage, a pedestal, a building within a building. The floor is simply an empty room, an unadorned, featureless, unfurnished void, prior to occupancy. A floor as a room.
A series of six plaster panels hangs in a line. The plaster panels act like surrogate walls, walls on walls, plaster over plaster, structural panels, replacements for the walls they hang on.
Mirroring the plaster panels, a series of six windows stand along the other edge of the floor, facing and reflecting the windows of the gallery. Adapted from the work of Steve Baer, the windows are designed prevent heat loss by blowing insulation material inside a double-paned window. No longer transparent, the windows become strangely self-defeating objects, an absurd contradiction: opaque windows. Mechanically, none of the windows work very well, some of them not at all. As a series they describe the process of making sculpture as a sequence of wrong turns and false starts, as an endless prototyping process. A Home is that too.
Oscar Tuazon, December 2013
Since 2007, Oscar Tuazon (born 1975, Tacoma, Washington) has been living and working in Paris where he co-founded the collective-run artists’ gallery castillo/corrales, before he moved to Los Angeles in 2013. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In 2011, he designed one of the four para-pavilions at the 54th Venice Biennial. His work was featured in solo exhibitions as People, Public Art Fund at Brooklyn Park, New York (2012), in Spasm of Misuse at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin and in White Walls at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (both 2013). Opening in February 2014, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne will show the major solo exhibition Alone in an empty room with Tuazon’s work.