Michael Joo is one of the most renowned contemporary artists which is able to merge in his works the world of art and science in a innovative and unexpected ways as it happens for this new project realized for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

Michael Joo (b.1966 Ithaca, New York, USA) has redefined the concept of 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. Born to Korean parents, Joo grew up in the American Midwest and studied biology in college, then he received an MFA from Yale School of Art. His works are anchored in explorations about his identity, an exploration that is informed by various backgrounds and the cultural diversity he experienced in his formative years. In whole his work there is the continuous interest in deciphering the exact cross-points of complex notions of duality such as Nature and Science, the East and West, the inside and the outside.

Michael 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. Joo is fascinated by the concept of circularity of time and the Nietzschean “Eternal return” and he inflects this perception of the Time in the way he realizes his works. For this new project - curated by Richard Klein and Alyson Baker - Joo expands Smithson's sculptural notion of displacement by physically 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 exhibition poses Cameron's Line as a linear experience—but not necessarily in one direction—through both time and space.

Drift is composed of three major elements: the Marble Strata Room, an architectural construction featuring 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; Back Sight (Quarried), a laser device that emits a beam that first penetrates the structure of the Museum, is reflected through the building's interior, and finally exits into the landscape directed towards the quarry that was the source of the marble; and Succession (Cored), a displacement of a cylinder core-drilled between The Aldrich's first and second floors that has been transposed to the Museum's rear stairwell. The three interrelated elements involve time, continuity, adoption, and transposition, ultimately reflecting back on the landscape and Joo's physical experiences while both researching and traveling Cameron's Line.

The next appointment is for the 29th of June.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street
Ridgefield CT 06877 USA
Ph: +1203.438.4519
Fax: +1203.438.0198
www.aldrichart.org

Opening hours:

Tuesday to Sunday, from 12am to 5pm
Closed Mondays and New Year's Day, Easter Sunday, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day
Open Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, President's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Columbus Day For information via email, click below:
http://www.aldrichart.org/contact/message.php