Michael Joo: Drift

April 6, 2014 to September 21, 2014 |

Over a career that now spans two decades, Michael Joo has redefined sculpture, creating a body of work that transcends the seduction of technology and the easy answers offered by science to generate a set of questions that place humankind in the context of natural history. Joo, like artist Robert Smithson before him, engages with a deep sense of time, as well as with the cycles of creation and entropy inherent in both nature and human endeavor.

For this new project, created specifically for The Aldrich, Joo expands Smithson’s notion of site/non-site by connecting the interior of the Museum to the surrounding landscape and its specific history.Drift is based on Joo’s meditation on Cameron’s Line, an ancient suture fault that traces the edge of the continental collision that initiated the formation of the Appalachian Mountains. The line–which runs north from New York City through Westchester County, passes through Ridgefield as it traverses Connecticut, then crosses Massachusetts into Vermont–is defined by a belt of marble that includes the famous quarries of Vermont. The exhibition poses Cameron’s Line as a linear experience through both time and space, and features a massive displacement of Vermont marble that takes the form of a fourteen-hundred-square-foot chamber, whose chilled and frosted ceiling echoes the marble’s crystalline structure.

Curated by Richard Klein and Alyson Baker.

Michael Joo was born in 1966 in Ithaca, NY, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Michael Joo: Drift is made possible, in part, by generous funding from Blain/Southern, London, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Jennifer McSweeney, Robin and Andrew Schirrmeister, and The Aldrich Contemporary Council.