Camp Hero: Frank Benson, Aaron Curry, Virginia Overton, Marianne Vitale
The Ranch | Montauk
June 17 - October 25, 2021
The Ranch and Camp Hero State Park sit a mere four miles apart. Our neighbor to the east is today a popular recreational site—a pilgrimage for campers and carousers alike. At its inception, the park’s outward identity as a quaint fishing village was but smoke and mirrors: a ruse to cloak its real function as a coastal defense station. A game of camouflage even seeped into the naming of the grounds; “Hero” in 1942 would have carried martial connotations of a decorated World War II soldier. In fact, it commemorated the recently deceased Major General Andrew Hero, Jr. But apart from those initiates aware of this particularly arcane strand of military history, Camp Hero represented a broad jingoistic affirmation: a fortress at the End of the World, defending in disguise.
The artists presented in the inaugural outdoor sculpture exhibition at The Ranch—Frank Benson, Aaron Curry, Virginia Overton, Marianne Vitale—trade on this game of cloaked reference and subterfuge through their distinct individual practices. Each handles the history of modernist sculpture as a pretense to induct diagonal discourses like agricultural production, theatrical performance, subcultural undergrounds, and locomotive travel. The exhibited works unabashedly display their citation of the key categories of sculptural production (the statue, the assisted readymade or objet trouvé, the assemblage, the kinetic object, the ruin, the monument) in order to discreetly confront new problems of contemporary sculpture vital for this generation of artists.
Unifying the works in Camp Hero is an underlying ideology that both depends upon and exceeds surface appearance. Just as Camp Hero assumed an alternate identity as a critical strategy, these artists serve up traditional vocabularies of sculpture as screens for more complex projections.
Frank Benson hijacks statuary memorials for the outcast and displaced, in Castaway (2018) allowing the pirate to become the subject of monumentalization. In identifying his subjects and transforming them into bronze casts, Benson navigates the formal syntax of the monument and the statue. The pirate, as a cultural siren for the industrious scavenger, provides a clear cognate to the sculptor working with found objects. Indeed, the pirate in Benson’s imaginary has found a bottle of detergent encrusted with barnacles that can become a multi-purpose tool. At the same time, however, Benson’s marauder lends the authority of the monument to the marginalized—those castaway by society. Working against the traditional verticality of the statue, Benson charges the viewer to lower their body to meet the pirate’s crouching squat.
Aaron Curry’s sculptures similarly chart the terrain of the assemblage by mentally welding together numerous conceptual citations from Alexander Calder and comic book graphics to Salvador Dalí and Isamu Noguchi. While fabricated anew, each work in his Melt to Earth series of highlighter hued biomorphic sculpture, first presented at Lincoln Center in 2014, alludes to artworks of various persuasions. Ultimately, these references reconcile into highly unique objects that present a futuristic vision of sculptures as theatrical performers. At once abstract and figurative, the three works on view in Camp Hero demonstrate that fractured memories of objects seen passing through books or in a peripheral glance at a gallery can collide into entirely novel beings that offer their own set of intelligences. Each sculpture assumes an attitude and character, which changes even as the viewer observes the works in the round.
Virginia Overton demonstrates that repurposed objects once associated with strenuous labor and agricultural activity like the Ford F250 and steel tank in her 2018 Untitled (Mobile) can simultaneously emphasize their functionality by coating the objects in solid black while still creating space for leisure. In this way, the tank at the back of the truck offers itself as an acculturated tire swing for reverie. Also in the exhibition, the artist's Untitled (chime), 2021, repurposes agricultural instruments sourced from various operating farms, including The Ranch, as wind chimes––producing a constant melodic score for the sculpture field. For Overton, the sculptural object invites sensations beyond the optical like physical entry into the steel tank or truck bed and sonic activation by strumming the chimes. Outwardly strong and industrial, these materials sway into lyrical refrains through Overton’s handling.
Marianne Vitale’s suite of mangled bridges exhibited in Camp Hero participates in this questioning of sculptural conventions by squarely addressing the ruin. Taking hold of infrastructural advances like the wooden bridge or the railroad as obsolete in the face of new technologies, Vitale laments these relics. In fact, the artist treats her steel constructions to create the false appearance that they are made from wood. Her fugitive materials are the key to understanding the dialogue at the core of Camp Hero: seductive surface appearances often conceal deeper meanings. As if alchemically transforming durable materials into intentionally dilapidated and seemingly impermanent structures, the artist recalls the destruction of outmoded technologies by their agents of replacement (in this case wood with bronze). At the same time, these burnt bridges ending without terminus conjure their own song of lamentation for individual rootlessness. Broken off without a fixed destination, Vitale’s structures journey into the unknown.
- Megan Kincaid
Camp Hero marks the first iteration of The Ranch's annual outdoor project series.