Transmitter presents:

Sculpture, Not-Sculpture

Joe Bochynski, Clinton King, Amanda Konishi, Amanda Nedham, Sarah Palmer, Jan Maarten Voskuil, and Maximilian Juliá

April 17 – May 15, 2020

In an effort to continue our programming during the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, we have begun to add new content of artists talking about their work on Instagram and on our website.

In this sudden era of seeing art exclusively online, we are required to adjust our expectations for how we interact with art objects and consider the distinction between experiencing art on the flat screen vs. the 3D presence of an art object. 

We originally planned for this exhibition, Sculpture, Not-Sculpture to be experienced at the gallery, however, we are now asking our audience to investigate these artworks as flattened 2-D images on a screen; creating or reinforcing a play between paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures.

“Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common...” 

—Donald Judd, “Specific Objects”, 1965

Adopting ideas from Judd’s oft-quoted essay, “Specific Objects”, Sculpture, Not-Sculpture features 7 artists whose work exploits the relationship between volume and flatness. While these artists work with distinctly different materials, they are all informed by their practices in traditionally two dimensional mediums. The artists utilize 3-dimensional components in their pieces to shift the way we understand the artwork as an art object, and frequently this means walking a fine line in terms of whether we might identify the work as a painting, photograph, drawing, or sculpture. 

Each Transmitter gallery director has selected a different artist to represent specific approaches to the question of how dimensionality in an artwork can shift the way we assess the materials and composition. The artists featured in Sculpture, Not-Sculpture include: Joe Bochynski, Clinton King, Amanda Konishi, Amanda Nedham, Sarah Palmer, Jan Maarten Voskuil,and Maximilian Juliá. Some of the work in this show is formally motivated and questions how physical dimensionality changes the way we understand surface, paint, or the drawn line. Other pieces borrow from historical crafts or practices and take materials used traditionally for specific functions (tiles, door mats, clay) to instead address conceptual or narrative ideas.

We will be promoting these artists and their work on our social media platforms throughout the dates of the show, with each artist being featured over the course of a few days. Please continue to check out our Instagram posts with new, ongoing artist content.