Last Days! Closes November 30, 2012.
As of 2012, Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels has begun creating installations by first painting small, fantastical 'blueprint' paintings that abstract and compress geometric representations of forms that are both made up of layers of tiny versions of themselves and also grow larger versions of themselves quasi-infinitely-- like crystals made of a lattice of crystallite grains, or the Sierpinski triangle made of infinitely smaller triangles-- as representations of one individual comprised of the genetic and emotional layers of thousands of people. Loosely combining concepts from the paintings with a site's specific geography, she builds towards particular feelings and moments that subtly form people's experiences within the installation.
Her Crystal Cavern installation at the Clocktower, a collaboration with artists Vnesswolfchild and Terence Caulkins, also follows these principles. The Crystals will continue to grow for the duration of her residency while Vnesswolfchild records and adds new sound layers each day. These sounds will be sculpted into a dynamic, three dimensional sound field by Caulkins to create the particular soundscape of the Crystal Cavern. Visitors are encouraged to come back after their first visit to immerse themselves again in the sounds surrounding the various Crystals and see the Cavern grow and evolve.
Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels is a Tennessean-Australian-American based in Brooklyn. From discarded housing materials, she makes large-scale construction installations that are submerging environments built into existing architecture with a sense of placelessness, awkward entrances, and inviting nooks. Her work abstracts structures made up of layers and layers of other like structures, and explores how specific qualities of constructed environments create experiential constructs.
Her large-scale installations are most often shown in abandoned or odd locations; her work has recently been exhibited in the New Orleans Music Box Project and with her collective Rabid Hands in a former Brooklyn convent and a crumbling machine warehouse in Detroit, as well as at F.L.A. Gallery in Gainesville and Parse Gallery in New Orleans. We're happy to welcome her to the a project room on the 13th floor in the Clocktower Gallery.
The Clocktower projects of Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels are made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Jerome Foundation. Audio systems provided by JBL.
