The Setting Stone
September 5th - 26th, 2019
University of Tulsa // Tulsa, OK
Alexandre Hogue Gallery | University of Tulsa
The Setting Stone
The Setting Stone explores the nature of mimicry and the role of the facade in the built American landscape. Through low relief and free standing sculpture, photographic works, site specific gestures and a looping experimental film, the exhibition considers contemporary notions of stone or rock veneers specifically. Stone implies the strength and stability of an institution and a human connection to the long-term scales of geological time. We use it to suggest that our home, business or civic infrastructure will last far beyond ourselves, providing a physical legacy of our cultural import. Yet our use of stone today, or our encounters of rock as a building form, are just as likely to be approximations - formed from myriad composite materials like plastics, particle board or fortified concrete. The Setting Stone meditates on the evolving trend of artifice, considering the implications of a culture which is concerned with creating affordable and repeatable likenesses for short term solutions in lieu of long term investments.
Within the context of the Alexandre Hogue Gallery, itself a curious mashup of exposed stacked stone, white gallery walls and stainless steel railings, the material and formal language of the installation creates a call and response between the actual and the artificial. The sculpture EcoStone Stack for example, made from a single plastic fence panel, appears to be built out of the same stone walls as the gallery. Meanwhile, the triptych Interaction of Surfaces, interrupts strip mall photographs with pea gravel frames whose surfaces are modeled after an ash tray that sits outside the gallery doors. The Setting Stone also entertains the wider context of The University of Tulsa’s stone clad, Collegiate Gothic style campus. Certainly meant to reference the staid, iconic Ivy League educational institutions of Princeton or Yale, and their predecessors Oxford and Cambridge, the projection of staying power implied by TU’s stone buildings are under new scrutiny as the college navigates its own evolving business model.
The Setting Stone situates us within a surreal, faux rock garden. It establishes a meandering course through filmic labyrinths, printed statuary and flowing water to wind us through uncanny encounters with a highly mediated landscape as we search for material and personal truths. The exhibition considers the continued relevance of stone as a “building material” even as our interpretations of it are increasingly divorced from the material itself, asking in the process, what future legacies might our new stones leave behind?
