GALLERY ONE
Smack Mellon presents Anne Wu’s first major solo exhibition in New York City, There Is No Far and No Near, featuring sculptural installations that weave through the gallery’s existing architecture. The sculptures present a series of thresholds composed of the artist’s signature materials: brightly painted wood, polished decorative stainless steel, plastic packing rope, incense sticks, and cast objects.
In Wu’s work, the experience of space is best understood as an impression rather than something dimensionally accurate. Rooted in the visual landscape of her home neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, her sculptural practice riffs on the built environment through fragmentation, abstraction, and material verisimilitude. Referential details texture the constructions with specificity, delineating the transformation of a neighborhood from general geo-locality to distinctive place. As culturally-encoded signifiers, incense, plastic rope, and stainless steel railings–some of which were discarded due to fabrication errors–provide punctuation throughout the installation that visually points to, rather than represents, a particular cultural experience.
The spatial elements of this installation present a loose version of a standard measurement system employed through a playful sense of improvisation. The exhibition’s title comes from a quote by Claude Bragdon, an American architect during the turn of the twentieth century, in Yve-Alain Bois’ essay “Metamorphosis of Axonometry” (1981). A factually accurate method of depicting space, axonometric projection is often used in architectural renderings where the scale of an object does not depend on its relative location. It “abolishes the fixed viewpoint of the spectator and creates several possible viewings of one and the same image…”*. Formally, Wu’s sculptures follow the intuitive delineation of axonometry as explored by Bois. They appear as uncanny constructs that have been condensed into pragmatically articulated, two-dimensional drawings, then launched back out into spatial reality. The passage of her forms through these soft conversions naturally eliminates some details through reduction, while accumulating other unexpected ones in their rearticulation.
* Bois, Y. (1981). Metamorphosis of Axonometry. Daidalos, 1, 41–58. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/10004193168
Anne Wu is an artist from Queens, NY, who works primarily in sculpture and installation. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and a BFA from Cornell University. Her work has been exhibited at Island Gallery (New York, NY), Asia Art Archive in America (Brooklyn, NY), M 2 3 (New York, NY), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), The Shed (New York, NY), Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon (New Lebanon, NY), and the New York Public Library (New York, NY), among others. She was an artist-in-residence at the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program from 2021 to 2022 as a Van Lier Fellow and the NARS Satellite Residency on Governors Island in 2020. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Art in America, and Hyperallergic. In 2022, she received a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.
Image: Installation view, Anne Wu, There Is No Far and No Near, 2023. Photo by Etienne Frossard
This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Lincoln Restler, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc, and an Anonymous Donor.
Anne Wu, There Is No Far and No Near was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Artwork in the exhibition Frank Wang Yefeng, The House of the Solitary courtesy of Vanguard Gallery (SH, CN).
In-kind donations are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
