TRANSFORMER at SPRING/BREAK ART SHOW 2023
Marie Anine Møller, Tom McFarland and Chris Johst
Booth no. 1026
625 Madison Ave, New York
Inviting you to join us for this year's SPRING/BREAK Art Show, WILDCARD edition.
First Look | Wednesday, Sept 6th, 11AM-5PM
Opening Night | Wednesday, Sept 6th, 5PM - 8PM
Regular Show Days | Thursday, Sept 7th - Monday, Sept 11th, 11AM - 7PM
Field Project is proud to present the group show Transformer at this year's SPRING/BREAK Art Show. Here repurposed objects from memory, childhood and folklore come together to make the invisible visible. By drawing parallels between the multifaceted basis of natural, social, and idealistic change artists Marie Anine Møller, Tom McFarland and Chris Johst create windows into a space of invisibility. Seeking to take apart hypothetical, personal and political constructed grids by putting the everyday into a context of philosophical complexity, reflecting on slight mind-fucks of what things are in essence and how society in general carves our universal understanding.
Creating an elephant in a room - a farce. How did it get there? Blind faith, optimism or maybe through the unconscious choices we make everyday. The three artists give purpose to the subtle lies that's right in front of us and create a meta glimpse of what might be missing when we can’t see the forest for the trees. Transformer is paved with a mysterious necessity of play and passion for contemplating universal meanings and whether they exist - like looking for the invisible and seeing it. By considering craftsmanship, representation, and memory all three artists challenge preconceived notions of attribution and Heidegger’s Zuhanden, inviting the viewer to repurpose their thoughts and fixed understanding between a form and an action, transforming an object into another version of itself.
The true and false of our everyday life, value and fixed juxtapositions is the mantra of Marie Anine Møller’s work. Her representations and new versions of objects reflect on memory, fragility and what has value in modern society. She sheds light on everyday objects - takes them apart and puts them back together in a new way, to change something while preserving and reusing something. Tirelessly glass knives are put into ever changing grids of figurative sculptures, suddenly becoming an abstract painting. By repurposing knives, she disarms and transforms them into tools, dissecting considerations of law and power. Her work is both bizarre and recognizable, beautiful and terrifying and inspired by the Still Life genre, in French, Nature Morte - here, life becomes static rather than vibrant, and nature dead rather than blossoming.
Tom McFarlands inspiration has its ground in memories of kite flying and learning a hand craft as a boy. He worked alongside his adopted father using his tools, building and creating with any materials at hand. His work now revolves around hardware store materials, auto body coatings and parts. In this stretched string series, attention is on the deconstruction of the canvas and its framework. The process of building the bare stretchers and leaving them visible as part of the finished piece, slightly overpowered by abstraction, considers the structures of masking with a recipe to reveal its background. His work is always a reflection of memory travels and childhood.
Chris Johst’s work hides the waning splendor and harsh truths of American life in plain view. He scrapes cultural archives and repurposes folktales, social contracts, historical events, and domestic crafts and manufacture processes to generate objects as a form of psychodrama extraction of Western mythos. Resonant and identifiable objects, such as porcelain bisque figurines that often occupy liminal spaces between decor and art, allow ingress into a dialogue about the forces that have shaped contemporary life.
Marie Anine Møller (b. 1980) is a Danish visual artist and curator based in New York. She has a BA (Hons.) in Fine Art Photography from the Glasgow School of Art followed by an MFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute, New York. Her work integrates sculpture, installation and photography and explores contradictions in materials and social policy issues by questioning fixed states and definitions of value. Møller has previously exhibited at, among others Compass Gallery, Glasgow, CGK Gallery, Photographic Center and Arden Asbæk Gallery in Copenhagen. In America her exhibitions include Upstate Art Weekend and UNTITLED Art Fair, Miami with NYC gallery and event space Beverly's.
Thomas McFarlard is a contemporary artist based in New York, born and raised in the American Southwest. His work is energized by memories of travel, stories remembered, objects glimpsed—as his pieces are named after locations in New Mexico, Utah and New York where inspiration struck. He attended the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, where he graduated in 2014 with a BFA in painting. Tom also had the privilege of participating in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Summer art program, where he further honed his skills and expanded his artistic repertoire. Utilizing shop tools and hardware to construct woven string paintings and sculptures, Tom invites viewers to explore the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary art.
Chris Johst (b. 1991) works with new media and repurposed technology to examine current modes of social engagement. Scraping cultural archives and developing new ones is a core component of his practice and process. Johst received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Printmaking, 2015) and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts (Art & Technology, 2023). He is currently based in Los Angeles
