RENTED WORLD

Installation by Anne Sherwood Pundyk

The MAve Hotel

62 Madison Avenue (at 27^th Street)

New York, NY 

December 1, 2012 – February 28, 2013

Visible from the street 24/7

#RentedWorld

Opening Reception, Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Featuring remarks by Harriet Shugarman, environmental activist and Climate Mama founder.

Transitional states, temporary structures and a shifting sense of time and space are the properties of a rented world.  For her installation so named, Pundyk joins three of her large, gestural paintings -- “Aqueous Flesh” (2009), “Moonwater” (2009), and “Liz’s Beach” (2011)  -- to form a self-supporting triangular prism. The structure is positioned at the front of The MAve Hotel’s glass-walled street level salon, a block from Madison Square Park. A sky blue triangle is painted directly on the back wall of the space.

Pundyk shifts expectations by presenting her work in this exposed non-art space; the effect is further reinforced by her unexpected use of media: paintings become sculpture and a permanent wall becomes a temporary canvas. On the floor between the three-sided structure of recycled paintings and the painted geometric shape beyond, several pounds of blue gravel form a shallow triangle. Illuminated at night by raking light, the gravel’s gritty topography could be a moonscape, a moonlit beach, or a sample of material that will be intact far into the future.

On the ceiling, high above the  “V” of stretchers, arching over the gravel patch and the flat blue inverted triangle on the back wall is a projected montage loop. This flow of images generated from within the space created by the paintings replicates the free association of a changing state of mind, and, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a changing state of our city and of our world.

Anne Sherwood Pundyk is a Manhattan-based painter, writer and curator interested in the subjective perspective. Her work is in public and private collections here and abroad. She has recently exhibited paintings, videos and installations at Panepinto Galleries, Jersey City, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, Queens College Art Center, New York City, The Brucennial 2012, New York City, Susan Eley Fine Art, New York City and Art Miami, Miami, Florida. Her video, “My Atlas: Lindsay/A Report to anAcademy,” won the Bronze Award at The Standard Hotel’s screening in West Hollywood, CA. She regularly contributes to critical art publications including The Brooklyn Rail, artUS, and Art in America, Broadway + Thresher, the feminist publication GAG. 

This project is generously sponsored by The MAve Hotel; project lighting is generously provided by Frost/Productions; and Printed-Methods provided support for signage and printed promotional materials.