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Artist: Charles Long

Charles Long: Up Land at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, from September 11 to October 18, 2014

Up Land is a series of new bronze sculptures and pastel drawings comprising Charles Long's tenth solo exhibition at the gallery.
 

Charles Long: Up Land at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, from September 11 to October 18, 2014

Up Land is a series of new bronze sculptures and pastel drawings comprising Charles Long's tenth solo exhibition at the gallery.
 












Over the past two decades, Long's practical ideas have found myriad sources in nature, social interaction, the history of art, philosophy and spirituality.

These new works stem from the artist's thoughts about the deep past and the history of the earth, as Long ponders essential questions about the mystery of creation and in particular, how consciousness has manifested from or through the physical world.

The seven bronze sculptures in the Up Land show were made using the "lost wax" technique, a process of casting bronze that has been in use for over 5,000 years. In this series, the artist is working directly in wax and not using molds, allowing the wax and the bronze to melt at the same time. Working directly with the bronze presents a shift from the artist's most recent artworks that involved state of the art technology and months of pre-planning and design.

Here, Long sought to create a body of work in which the process involved no distance between the experience of making and the shape that it is taking. The resulting sculptures are both abstract and figurative, with tendrils that extend out from the center and sprout small, mysterious figures, which Long refers to as "monads."

Formally, there is a fluidity in the shapes, a way of complicating an object by adding extensions and an umbilical connection to another part.

Long is interested in the way that organisms grow in a viscous environment, how their growth describes and defines the space. In addition, the exhibition also features abstract pastel drawings on photographs of the Los Angeles landscape tilted on its side.