Exhibition Dates
February 29 - April 19, 2024
Opening Reception
Thursday, February 29, 6–8 pm
******
Conversation with the Artists
Wednesday, April 10, 2024, 6-8pm

******
Gallery Hours
Monday - Friday 11am - 5pm
and by appointment

The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity.

— Paul Rand

Project: ARTspace is pleased to present Notation, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Annette Cords and Ilene Sunshine. This collaborative installation of Cords’ weavings, digital prints, and drawings along with Sunshine’s sculpture and handmade paper constructions is a result of their nuanced consideration of each other’s work. In addition, the show highlights the concept of co-authorship inherent in their individual practices.

Cords and Sunshine share a collagist’s disposition—a foraging approach that implies alertness to and dependence on their immediate environment. Both artists are passionate walkers through New York’s cityscape, photographing and noting in their bodies the forms, textures, and glyphs that become springboards to artworks. For Sunshine, this hunter-gatherer mindset also results in her use of scavenged twigs and plastic bags as primary materials. Cords begins with visual research and an index of images, phrases, word pairs, and fragments as she explores the interrelationship of visual-textual languages.

Both artists employ layering to achieve a density of texture and meaning. Cords’ Jacquard tapestries confer a tangible presence to intertwined words and images, linking disparate elements—digital typefaces and drawn forms, visual weave structures and recognizable texts, pixel-based images and tactile surfaces. Sunshine’s constructed drawings, comprised of plastic bag fragments sandwiched between cotton and abaca paper, elicit a confounding spatial ambiguity where meaning seems transmitted by vapor. Their mutual interest in language—aural and visual—is ever-present.

Cords and Sunshine also make connections to other fields and disciplines. Cords presents weaving as a language that intersects and augments developments in writing, painting, and abstraction, while Sunshine ponders nature’s cycle of growth and decay, including the cultural impulse to alter or arrest these processes.  As the artists’ works are perceived in relationship to each other, connections extend unexpectedly from form to content.

Notation is a lively dialogue between artists Annette Cords and Ilene Sunshine, highlighting their distinctly haptic responses to the material world.

Images above:
Change the Game, 2022, Jacquard Tapestry, 55x41 in. Annette Cords
c21 (roundabout), 2022, twigs, cord, thread, 28 x 21 x 1.5 in. Ilene Sunshine | photo: Alan Wiener