Here and There-May 1 to June 20, 2008

Here and There

Recent Work by Annie Coggan and Caleb Crawford at the Gestarc Gallery

May 1 to June 20, 2008

Opening reception May 1, 2008 7:55 PM

Here and There has two meanings. Coggan and Crawford were based in New York for 14 years. They recently moved to Mississippi where they now live and work. However, they are still engaged with New York, so they are both here and there. On a deeper level, it relates to a world view. Coggan’s work is deeply rooted in place, and engages the contexts in which she works. Crawford’s work is more speculative, and imagines other possible realities.

Annie Coggan

Walker Evans Builds a Chair

The American South is the genesis for the country’s most urgent problems as well as the well spring for the most vital narratives in our culture. Walker Evans’ photographs have been an inspiration in illustrating the often bereft environment and its most surrealistic potential. The exhibition is comprised of a series of chairs, which are an attempt to examine the surrealistic attitude and the “make-do,” “ad hoc,” and “do-it-yourself” culture of making and re-making in the south.

The maps are a method of drawing and model-making to show the places I’ve been to in and around my new home. Mississippi was not settled until the 1860’s and after the Civil War the region developed from the railroad industry’s entrepreneurial spirit. Towns were linked by small runs in and out of the cotton belt and the timber centers. Understanding the “line-making” of the railroad, the river and the highways has been a way to absorb a sense of place.

Caleb Crawford

Form Poems/Form Politics

Form is inevitable in the visual arts. It is the language with which we, as artists, give voice to our ideas. Poetry and politics frame competing issues. Poetry is something mysterious, that ultimately goes beyond words or forms to an un-nameable. Politics is the art of engaging in discourse and persuasion. The great struggle is to find bridges between the poetic image and the political.

The Form Poems are part of an on-going project. Alternately referred to as autodidactic drawings, automatic drawings, and useless drawings, they are investigations into the narrative potential of form. Meanings are varyingly explicit, implicit and purely material and gestural. As “autodidactic” drawings, they are self-teaching tools; from constant experimentation comes invention. As “automatic” drawings they are clearly linked to surrealist practices; the drawings evolve intuitively and spontaneously. As “useless” drawings, they confront the utility of architectural drawings; these drawings have no use in the development of any particular architectural project.

About Annie Coggan and Caleb Crawford

Their early formative training in fine arts combined with their subsequent training as architects, and their engagement with architectural practice has led them towards a decidedly interdisciplinary approach to their work. Their work is rooted in the language and practices of architectural representation and production, yet questions accepted norms. Annie Coggan has a BFA from Bennington College, and a Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Caleb Crawford has a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute and a Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). In 1996 they formed Coggan + Crawford Architecture + Design. Their work has been published in Architectural Record, Dwell, The Architects Newspaper, Residential Architect, Interior Design, Architectural Design (AD), the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Elle Décor and other places. The work of the firm received two AIA awards from the Brooklyn Chapter, and a Brooklyn Builds award from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, in addition to numerous other competition and fellowship awards.

For more about the work of Annie Coggan, see www.coggancrawford.com, and www.formpoetrypolitics.blogspot.com

About the Gestarc Gallery

Gestarc is a non profit gallery conceived, funded, built and operated by a group of five Brooklyn based artists/ architects: Thorsten Foerster, Jim Dreitlein, Serban Ionescu, Tara Rodriguez Besosa and Adam Golinczak.

The name is culled from the words ‘gesture’ and ‘architecture;’ two keynotes regarded as exciting modulators for the project development and intervention in spheres of the art, architecture and other. Per project basis, the Gestarc Group is intent on the use and the study of hidden notions referred to as ‘supplement-x’ or ‘x’. This has been and shall remain the contiguity of focus for the Gestarc generated work.

Work generated by other voices will be selected and shown with/ in its own independent vital stress, circumstances and media.

Located at

390 Van Brunt Street

Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY 11231

www.gestarcgallery.com