SOLAR 2011 EXHIBITIONS | CELEBRATING 10 YEARS 2001-2011
EXTENDED THROUGH 24 NOVEMBER!
DARLENE CHARNECO | ISLANDS OF MEMORY
27 August - 24 October 2011
Cocktail Reception Saturday 27 August, 5-7 pm
artists on artists visit+discussion
led by Eric Ernst on Saturday 17 September, 4:30 pm
followed by rum cocktails
Click here to view the exhibition
Mentioned in The East Hampton Star
Recommended by Kate Maier on thefeast.com
Reviewed by Janet Goleas on blinnk
Reviewed by Pat Rogers on Hamptons Art Hub
Islands of Memory features new works by Darlene Charneco. This is the artist’s first solo show at SOLAR and is an opportunity to view her most current series of signature resin, nails, and mixed media panels that draw on a number of sources, including network theory, geographic information systems, video games, virtual worlds, childhood toys, and educational tools. Islands of Memory is a continuation of the artist’s explorations into how we think, learn and remember.
Islands draws on a literal understanding of Charneco’s background and identity: Puerto Rico and Long Island as the locations, homes, and homelands that conform and shape her being. Metaphorically, as is explicit in the title, the term relates to memory, expressed in the artwork as forms. She states, “…I feel a draw to extrude the spaces and at times have them be free sculpture. These clusters are like thought-forms…a chunking of concepts that I am trying to hold, mix, marry, communicate with, make tangible”.
Darlene Charneco’s resin-layered mappings explore social networks and the gradual reorganization of information on the web into shareable and intuitively navigable 3D spaces. She is inspired by the blurring boundaries between dream and waking activities, natural and urban environments, the implications of our rapidly increasing interconnectivity and the evolution of an accessible collective memory. Her work is featured in the recent book The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, by Katherine Harmon (2009).
In a catalogue essay for a 2011 exhibition, Self Assembling MP, Katherine Harmon describes Charneco’s recent work and process:
“Charneco’s designs are inspired by a physical occurrence known as self-assembly, wherein components (nanoscopic and macroscopic) are seen to spontaneously organize themselves into an ordered pattern. The process creates a structure of a higher order than the isolated components from which they are formed. Moreover, the structures seem to build themselves in order to serve a purpose or perform a task. Charneco sees this process at work in the ongoing evolution of the World Wide Web. She envisions the minds of millions of Web users, bursting with uploaded images and text that are processed, reshaped, and stored in a giant communal memory bank; here multitudinous connections coalesce into a shared space that is fluid and navigable”.
This exhibition also includes ‘weave’ pieces wherein the artist rhythmically hammers nails into the wood panel creating surfaces that are topographical as much as manuscript. The 48 x 48 inch Bismuth City (The Empathetic Civilization) is included here and is a piece that is part of a series that Charneco has been working on since 1994. Harmon writes, “Engaged in the laborious process of building up rows upon rows of undulating geography, Charneco allows the hammering to take her into a near-meditative state”. She quotes the artist with regard to this aspect of her work: “When I first began ‘writing’ with nails in my artwork, I wanted to create a language that could be felt as well as seen”. Writing –the word—and memory are intrinsically connected.
Darlene Charneco has exhibitied throughout the US at venues including the Katonah Museum, the Hunterdon Museum, The Islip Art Museum and Parrish Art Museum. She has exhibited at SOLAR, most notably in the 2007 group show Brave New World and the 2010 4-person exhibition Mediums, co-curated by Irwin Levy. Charneco lives and works in Southampton, on the eastern end of Long Island.