JULIE BOSERUP
Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to present its new exhibition titled Radical Intervention, a duo show featuring artists and photographers Julie Boserup and Marleen Sleeuwits. For this occasion, the gallery has given them free reign to create an installation within its space. In conjunction with their installation, the exhibition will be showcasing a selection of works realized recently by the two artists. An opening reception with the artists in attendance will be held on Saturday, September 23th, from 3:30PM to 6:30PM in the gallery space located at 16 East 71st Street, New York, NY, 10021.
Julie Boserup and Marleen Sleeuwits have made space and architecture their raw material. They immerse themselves in the gallery space, with perspicacity and a great sense of craft and harmony. In their approach, they bring a kind of radicality making them perfectly complementary while also different. They are able to kindly invite the viewer into a new dimension. From a repertoire of pre-existing shapes, content and various materials, they create new images multiplying the possible combinations. These artists, each in their own way, constantly juggle with the representations of the visible. The richness of their inventiveness leads them to brilliantly master new techniques and diverse sources of inspiration, generating effects of illusions.
Boserup has made collage her point of artistic departure in her exploration of space and architecture. Her practice brings together elements from different media, time periods and structures to create brand new associations. Boserup has forged her very own practice that thrives at the intersection of photography, collage, drawing and archival images. Boserup said: “for the gallery space , my collage is a mix of a lot of different historic inspiration:
from the actual photographs of 1940s New York, through drawings of lunar eclipses and planets. Further, through to the circular holes in buildings by Gordon Matta-Clark, in his notorious New York interventions in the 1960íes, and finally to the 1920s constructivism era, Bauhaus etc.I wanted to create a closed system between the photo, the gallery space and my composition with colored planes, wooden sticks, and a mirror.” The artist has given rise to a self-contained universe, a room of one’s own. While creating a zone of transformation, everything becomes linked by its own inherent logic.
Marleen Sleeuwits is inspired by impersonal environments, places that could be anywhere and nowhere, such as vacant zones in airports, unoccupied corridors of hotels, and empty rooms in office buildings. She creates contradictions in spatial orientation and then photographs the end results. The installations of Marleen Sleeuwits blur the dividing lines between fi tion and reality. The artist approach of the gallery space is a sculptural one: “I want to distort perceptible reality. In this way I question the materials and places we find ourselves in and how we relate to them, finding a means of visualizing the identity of these voids and connecting to them in novel ways. Through structural contradiction, illusion, and the manipulation of scale, I aim to transform viewers’ awareness of their surroundings. I see myself as an outsider who invites audiences to look again, who breathes unexpected new life into a familiar, dead reality. I transport the viewer away from the everyday world into an inner space full of wonder.” For the gallery installation, Marleen Sleeuwits chooses specific materials: Neon orange plastic, mirror foil, prints of concrete on pink paper using the ceiling as the structure: from every angle, a new composition will be created and the people may stand inside the installation.
