14 Aug 2012

G11 Galerie presents Brendan Davis and Elizabeth Dorbad

Brendan Davis (Chicago / Berlin)
On the Edge - A Hidden Treasures Exhibition
10 August - 2 September 2012

G11 Galerie Berlin is proud to present the latest addition of Hidden Treasures; an ongoing series by the American multidisciplinary artist Brendan Davis. The series is comprised of in-situ installations that have been set in often overlooked places of special interest throughout the United States and Europe. Each installation comments upon the environmental boundaries that define human personal identity, free will and social structures.

Previous works include public sculptures that rethink the landscape by mirroring their environments and appear to become part of their surroundings. Reflective menhirs were installed in various locations including: on the shores of Lake Erie, outside of the Inland Seas Maritime Museum; deep within a reemerging forest at Bacon Woods Park; and within a 30 million year old river ravine at Mill Hollow Park.

In Davis' G11 Galerie debut, entitled On the Edge, the artist has transformed the gallery into an environment of total physical immersion. Sustainability, and ability to adapt to one's environment is currently at the forefront of a world that has long known an eco-crisis. Surrounding the viewer is the installation Pushing the Limit in which the artist has literally and conceptually shaped organic materials, such as living grass and black earth, into an environment of freestanding sculptural forms. Reaching from the floor to the ceiling is the massive painted sculpture composed entirely of black earth from grave sites entitled From once we came so shall we return and mounted on the wall is the delicate living ecosystem On the Edge.

With these new additions to the Hidden Treasures Series Davis continues to explore the relationship between humans and their environmental boundaries that define the fundamental concepts of individualism, control, choice and freedom within modern society.


Elizabeth Dorbad (San Francisco)
Itinerant Architectures
10 August - 2 September 2012

Elizabeth Dorbad is a sculptor and installation artist based out of San Francisco, California that exhibits and serves as an artist-in-residence internationally. In August she will be exhibiting at the G11 Galerie Berlin and also performing at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel. Her current works establish territories of overlap in the fields of sculpture, architecture, photography and theater. For her G11 exhibition she will present excerpts from an ongoing series of architectural responses.

The G11 exhibition will address notions of transience and architectural time drawn from experiences at two contrasting locations. The first is a site in rural California where the wilderness is reclaiming temporary trailer architecture. Left by Synanon, a drug rehabilitation facility and intentional community that turned into a cult and disbanded, the place now has seven mobile houses where there were a hundred. The second is a Rathaus in the former East Berlin that is in the midst of architectural renovation and repurposing.

The work redefines architecture not as structure but as transient sculptural systems. Structures are always itinerant. Whether lightweight aluminum positioned atop mobile trailers or brick and mortar constructions, the spaces are always in a state of flux. The rate of change that defines architectural time can be marked by the story that a place holds or by weather or any number of factors social, economic, or cataclysmic. The rate of decay, demolition and construction can be slow or extreme. Political regimes change, tornadoes happen, structures break down. Structures that are thought of as solid are always on the move. Dorbad elevates this breakdown by cutting a cathedral window into a decrepit mobile home, constructing a 6 meter wheel made from trailer insulation, drawing the plans for an enormous rose window on the gallery wall and applying a mock xstained glassx to a building that is falling apart. The exhibition will include installation works constructed from architectural debris, photographs and documentation of architectural interventions performed at both locations, and an attitude that embraces and celebrates change.