Lourdes Correa-Carlo: Intended Trajectories / Photo Maite Nieves
New York - For her solo exhibition at Knockdown Center,Lourdes Correa-Carlo has produced seven newworks in dialoguewith urban embodiment and the visualpolitics of city space.Through sculpture, drawing, photography, video,and installation, Intended Trajectories reflects the artist’s ongoingengagement with her material surroundings, as well as her interest in the relationship betweenthe body andthe built environment.
The exhibition’s title refers to the waysin which bodiesare moved by urban space,a movement at once spatial and affective. For those subjected by inequitable systemsof race, gender, and class, the relationship betweenbody and environment is often an ambivalent one, set apartby feelings of estrangement or dislocation. Itsantagonisms not limited to hostile architecture or unpleasant design, the built environment reproduces the biasesof its builders spatially, in public transportation paths, parkway overpasses, and cityskylines. For Correa-Carlo, the alienating effectsof city space—a sense of not being able to place oneself—are seen and felt in the visual and spatial politics of seemingly neutral architectural environments, the structures in which ideologies take form.
Trajectories II (detail), 2013, Digital image
Jutting into space, Crawler (2011-2017) is a large-scale inkjet print of a skyscraper, rotated sideways and mountedon wood. Inextricable from the modernist mythos of New York City, skyscrapers are representative of wealth and power in the popularimaginary, their powerful verticallines and sheerscale acting as visual reinforcers of this authority. Forced sideways, formally tripped up, the skyscraper’s orthogonal command is disrupted, as is the privileged perspective that typically accompanies such a vantage.
Two site-specific installations reference Knockdown Center’s former use as a glass factory, and later as the site of a frame and door company, imitating the gallery’s vestigial industrial featuresand destabilizing the exhibition’s architectural frame. Both artwork and infrastructure, Extend (2017) is a pipeworkparasite creeping into space, its camouflaged appendages taking on a decidedly anthropomorphic character. Interval (2017), a rectilinear fiberglass screen, both reveals and conceals an oft-disregarded architectural threshold: a sliding metaldoor typically keptshut during galleryhours.
Lourdes Correa-Carlo: Intended Trajectories / Photo Maite Nieves
While these installations engage preexisting architectural elements, other sculptural and drawing-based works introduce outsideviews, yielding a constellation of cityscapes within the gallery that alter one’ssense of perspective and scale. The City from Above (2008-2017), a spray paintdrawing on windowfilm, offers an ambiguous aerialskyline of lights and lanterns, standing in for skyscrapers as though a Surrealist had taken to urban design. The City (2014-2017), a series of sculptures comprised of salvaged radiators, turns the viewpoint offered by The City from Above from one of distanced observation to thatof an intimate encounter.
A seriesof vinyl printson glass anda two-channel slideshow video evoke theinterstitial spaces of waitingand watching routineto the city’s public transportation systems.Trajectories II (2013-2017) presents a sequence of views from the window of a Long Island RailRoad car, thoughwith horizon lineobscured, only therecurrent, oblique lines of telephone cables provide orientation. In_Reverse (2015-2017) is comprised of photographs taken from the windowof an underground subway train,from which, like individual cells in a filmstrip, thecolumns of theadjacent platform fragment time and space—framing a view while markinga distance.
Mapping a psychogeography of encounter betweenartist and city,body and building, the works in the exhibition look inward and outward at once. Refusing the formation of a fixed viewpoint, Intended Trajectories instead attends to disorientation, to the incongruoussights and sensations of our city space.
Lourdes Correa-Carlo: Intended Trajectories / Photo Maite Nieves
Lourdes Correa-Carlo (b. 1970, San Juan) is an artist who works across drawing, photography, collage, video,sculpture, and installation. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and a BFA in Sculpture from Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY (2015-2017) and has previously held residencies at Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2013); Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston,Houston, TX (2010-2012); and Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY (2011). Her work has been exhibited with institutions that include the Center for Curatorial Studies,Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY; School of Visual Arts, New York, NY; Real Art Ways,Hartford, CT; BronxMuseum of the Arts, Bronx,NY; the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston,Houston, TX; JuliusCaesar, Chicago, IL; Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY; and ArtCenter South Florida, Miami, FL.
ChristianCamacho-Light is a curator and writer based in New York. Recent exhibitions include Stage 6: Lourdes Correa-Carlo, Down-Below, International Studio& Curatorial Program, Brooklyn,NY (2016) and Standard Forms, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale- on-Hudson, NY (2016).They are currently at work on an exhibition to be shownat the Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts, Ramapo College,Mahwah, NJ (November 2017). They hold an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College,and a BA in Art History from Vassar College.
Lourdes Correa-Carlo: Intended Trajectories is presented with the generous support of the Foundation for Contemporary ArtsEmergency Grant. Specialthanks to EceGürleyik, Drew Lichtenstein, KristineServia, and ElenaYelamos.
Exhibition: Lourdes Correa-Carlo: Intended Trajectories runs through July 16, 2017. Knockdown Center gallery hours are Thursdayand Friday from 5 PM to 9 PM, Saturday and Sunday from 2 PM to 8 PM. Knockdown Center is located at 52-19 Flushing Ave, Maspeth, NY 11378.
