In The Making
January 13–February 11, 2011
Opening Reception January 12, 6–8pm

Location One is proud to present “In the Making,” featuring new individual installations by Karolina Kowalska, Lovisa Ringborg, Yasuko Toyoshima, and Joana Villaverde.

Karolina Kowalska (b. Poland) deals with the bombardment and saturation of visual information in consumer society. Her new series of large digital photographs, titled An Unexpected Breakdown of the Advertising Market, re-imagines the streets of New York absent of their major source of visual pollution: advertisements and commercial images. To create the utopian world of her photographs, she removes all visual and written information, replacing them with empty white space. In this phantasmagorical city, billboards are transformed into abstract geometric constructions. Temples of consumerism, such as Times Square, Chinatown, and Chelsea resemble modernist grids from an earlier era.

Kowalska’s works are usually shown on billboards as site-specific interventions, challenging accepted ideas about copyright and public spaces.

Lovisa Ringborg (b. Sweden) explores states of mind that are at once familiar and unsettling. In her installation Figurines, she creates an uncanny and emotionally disturbing tableau exploring children’s mannequins. Without providing a defined narrative, her work raises questions about childhood, its complexity and its ambiguous states punctuated by moments of abandonment, solitude, and magical bewilderment.

In her signature works, Ringborg manipulates digital photographs to create a sense of disorientation and otherworldliness; these images suggest poetic spaces inhabited by young creatures veiled in reverie and mystery.

Yasuko Toyoshima (b. Japan) is attracted to games and their often-arbitrary rules. Her new series Motion #1 is based on a tote board from the Aqueduct Racetrack, a horse-racing track in Jamaica, New York. The artist plays with the odds and wagers of the race, recording the fluctuation of the bets and their numbers—which are uploaded on the tote board at 30-second intervals—and rearranging them in her constructed drawings. Her focus on the fleeting moment, the bets’ relentless velocity, and the rapid changes on the tote board undermine and contradict the fixed rules of the game.

Toyoshima’s work is concerned with various systems and structures that regulate contemporary society. She conceptually investigates social and cultural frameworks that are taken for granted, such as systems of measurement and financial markets in order to reveal how these frameworks are much more subjective than they appear to be.

Joana Villaverde (b. Portugal) creates spaces that lack a sense of proportion and proper scale. In her installation You Took from Me All the Air So I Can Breathe, an empty chair and a doorframe stands before a canvas, dwarfed by the large dimension of the portrait of a woman’s face. Although there is plenty of room between these objects, the gallery space becomes suffocating: the woman is too big for the painting in which she is entrapped, the chair is too small for its empty surroundings, and the door frame creates nothing more than an illusion of a place.

Villaverde’s works are often variations on the same theme: people in a space in need of more space. This closeness or suffocation, however, is more a mental than a physical one. Villaverde brings forth an intense sense of narrative and dialogue to the viewer using the plainest elements: a canvas, a chair, and a wooden frame.