New Year 12: Tauba Auerbach
July 1—10, 2010

For the twelfth installment in New Year, Western Bridge’s series of two-week projects, Tauba Auerbach presents an installation of new sculpture.

I took a piece of paper and folded it into ninths, lit it from the side and took a photo. I printed that photo out in a monochromatic palette, and then folded the print in a different way than I had folded the first piece of paper. That created piece number one. Then I took a photo of piece number one and printed it in another monochromatic palette, and then folded that print differently yet again. This made piece number two. I did this eight times. As the series progresses, the grids of fold lines pile up, and make a complicated network of topologies that could not physically coexist. In each piece, there are real folds competing with “fake” printed ones.

For the last year or so I’ve been working on creating objects/paintings of ambiguous dimension. I suppose some of this is motivated by a far-fetched hope that if I can merge the states of 2D and 3D, or at least create a smooth transition between them, i.e. remove the boundary, that I will somehow be able to remove the boundary between this 3 (+ 1)D reality and other spacial dimensions. So far, this work has taken a 2D form, with a record of a past 3D state, or sometimes multiple past states contained within it. This is the first time I’m presenting something in service of this agenda that is not flat.

The set of real folds in the last piece is the same as the set of printed folds in the first piece, bending this linear sequence towards being a circle.

Tauba Auerbach lives and works in New York and San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Drawing Center, SFMoMA, and is currently on view at the Whitney Museum Construction Site and at PS1 in the exhibition Greater New York. She is represented by Standard (Oslo), Oslo, Norway.