D’Amelio Terras, New York
May 8 – June 21, 2003
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present an exhibition of new artworks by British artist Cornelia Parker. It will be her first New York solo exhibition in five years. The focal point of the exhibition is Subconscious of a Monument, a new large-scale installation comprised of soil removed from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa in order to prevent the building’s collapse. The powerful physical presence of the dried lumps of clay is matched by the weight of the material’s past life.
Another new work also features objects exhumed from the earth. Parker obtained objects such as Roman coins and fragments of a harmonica from a Civil War battlefield found with metal detectors below ground at sites across the US and UK. After documenting them, the objects from the US will be reburied in the UK and vice versa. The complex web of emotional and historical associations bound to each object mirrors the physical displacement they will undergo.
Parker melds the history of the objects with her own interventions. Whether meaning is embedded in the material or derived from her transformations, the resultant objects juxtapose formal beauty with lyrical import.
Cornelia Parker was born in 1956 in Cheshire, England. She lives and works in London. A 1997 Turner Prize nominee, she has held recent solo exhibitions at Frith Street Gallery, London; Galleria Civica D’Arte Moderna (GAM), Turin; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which traveled to the Chicago Arts Club and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Parker was included in Days Like These: 2003 Tate Triennial in London, and later this year will present a solo exhibition at Guy Bartschi in Geneva, Switzerland.
