New Year Souvenir is a set of installations of acquisitions from Western Bridge’s New Year project series. New Year Souvenir begins with a re-installation of Tauba Auerbach’s Ouroboros 1, an eight-part cycle of folded photographic prints. The work uses folds as its primary device and only imagery. By folding and photographing paper, the artist builds a developing composition across the eight large sheets, returning in the last piece to the forms of the first one.

Tauba Auerbach, Ouroboros 1
September 11–October 30, 2010

NYS continues with Untitled, a stack of textile potpourri pies by Josh Faught and Wall, a time-based deconstruction of the gallery’s walls by Corin Hewitt. Last March, Corin Hewitt spent three weeks at Western Bridge developing a project whose final form is now on view in our galleries. March found Hewitt removing sections of drywall, plywood, and insulation from the gallery walls. He then began a process of material examination, using construction techniques and still photography, and documenting his work on video. The completed installation is the workspace Hewitt built for himself, covered in tools and materials. Some of these are real, some constructed by the artist using photographs of the objects. In a second space, the video Hewitt shot during his time in residence plays—the artist’s first work in this medium. Here, the process of cutting open and then rebuilding a wall is dramatized: photographic prints stand in for materials, tools, and the artist’s hands, alongside real versions of each.

Corin Hewitt, Walls
November 5–December 18, 2010

Josh Faught is represented by a single work from his June New Year project Procedures to Reduce Contamination and Stimulate Better Living. The gallery hosted a group of sculptural, wall-based pieces: crocheted and hand-woven textiles with collaged found elements, including French manicure press-on nails, political pins, spray paint, scrapbooking stickers, and sequins. The work here, a stack of “potpourri pies” crafted of handbleached cotton, connected to several found texts incorporated into the other works in the project–including a note posted on the artist’s studio door complaining about the potentially toxic smells emanating down the hall to the neighboring ‘healing space.’ The pies can read as a pleasant gesture of welcoming, as an apology, or, in their great number, to an obsession with cleanliness and masking of smells.

Josh Faught, Untitled (Potpourri Pies)
November 5–December 18, 2010