Group Exhibition Down to Nature, Brendan Carney, Jonathan Hartshorn, Thury Sigurthorsdottir, Scott Lawrence, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, 2008
April 4th, 2008–Ongoing

Mens and Womens Restrooms, fifth floor

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The Museum of Modern Art presents Group Exhibition : Down to nature a survey of the work of four emerging artists. The selection of works highlights the invention and vision of four artists who have radicalized and extended the definition of drawing, sculpture, and printmaking.

Jonathan Hartshorn (American, b. 1976) maps out a tangle of desultory associations with drawings, photos, and objects (found and of his own creation). His wall installations are mini-exhibitions, seemingly biographical, which in their intricacy create an introverted tautology. All in all, his work points to a world of relational meaning, collaged, mobile, re-contextualized with each component gaining significance in proximity to other works.

Thury Sigurthorsdottir (Icelandic, b. 1975) explores the reemergence of sculptural assemblage. Her work focuses on a specific form of contemporary sculpture that juxtaposes disparate elements to suggestive effect. These sculptures display an additive quality that gives them a distinct informality: conversational, provisional, at times even corroded and corrupted, they are disambiguous.

Brendan Carney (American, b. 1976) prefers to morph and change using a vast alchemy of sources and materials composed and distributed across both surface and support in defiance of the very notions of rationality and order. Tackling themes such as sexuality, redemption, rebirth, death, belief and disbelief, he employs a diversity of images and fragments of language, digital reproduction and representational painting.

Scott Lawrence (American, b. 1975) addresses a precarious intersection of scientific and poetic knowledge. In subscribing to the simple metaphysics of content within form, he asserts that, through formal manipulation, material may be invested with the immaterial. Symbols and objects reach alterity through displacement or geometric operations. The works - primarily drawings, sculpture, installation and video - may appear as artifacts from life outside of reason or point to the persistence of animal traits within civilization.