Studio Audience
Alan and Michael Fleming
February 2 – March 10, 2013
Cindy Rucker Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by twin brothers Alan and Michael Fleming. This is their first exhibition with the gallery. Like many artists, Alan and Michael Fleming work in tandem. However, instead of keeping the collaborative side in the studio, they openly invite their audience to view their process. In fact, it is the act of collaborating that informs many works in the exhibition. Script (2013) features a transcribed script of an hour’s worth of studio conversations placed on a pedestal. The viewer is invited to an uncensored look into the studio process. The same is true in 100 Bad Ideas (2013) where the artists reenact an earlier piece where they install unrealized ideas as crumpled pieces of paper around a wastebasket fitted with a novelty hoop.
Their sculptural, photo and video pieces are decidedly about interaction with each other, with the space and with the viewer. Point and Shoot (2013) presents plaster casts of the artists’ hands, one pointing and one as a gun. Installed directly across from each other, the sculptures delineate the space while alternately addressing each other and the viewer, touching upon the same themes of self found in Acconci’s “Centers” piece from the early 70s. Playing on their identical appearance, the photos explore geometry, symmetry, the organic and the inorganic. Here the brothers move in stereo in an industrial backdrop, breaking up the stark landscape with their stacked or leaning bodies. This is the self at play; a freeze-frame depicting how performance can exist in brevity yet still be both poignant and light. Lessons in Gravity (2012) further demonstrates this point as the brothers hang, climb, balance and bounce throughout the video without pause to pontificate the meaning of each action.