Gallery

BEWARE OF DOG @ HPP


Alan Ruiz: Density, Jan 16 - May 19, 2024



WS-C1-5R6A (2023)
One-way glass, aluminum composite panel, aluminum extrusions, hardware, existing architecture. 

Density consists of two works at 47-11 Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City, New York.  WS-C1-5R6A (2023) occupies the storefront window of the building that exists at this address. WS-B46-L4 (2024) confronts the entirety of the building on this lot, as well as its immaterial limits, through a one-year lease of the property’s remaining air rights. Both areas – the window at street level and the space over the building – are defined by legal as well as social contracts that give them shape and inform the way they, in turn, reproduce the contours of public and privatized space. Such techniques of spatial partitioning structure relations of authority in everyday life. They participate in infrastructures that determine access and exclusion and often become fundamental to a group’s social production. They generate forms, environments, practices, and modes of perception that exert a normalizing effect, where the new and old are not only intermingled but wrestle for vertical authority.

Techniques of partitioning rely on standards—standards that are often perceived as benign  (if they are perceived at all), as merely ways of establishing efficiency, compliance, and repeatability. Standards, either through soft law, zoning, or exterior building envelopes, may serve the ideal-ego of a dominant group, where obfuscation masquerades as transparency and organizational inclusion efforts produce wider forms of alienation.

Though standards and the socio-spatial choreographies they engender may appear functional and rational, they can also serve as covert social defenses, embodying the hardly conscious, irrational forces of a dominant group. Standards may be designed to ensure commensurability and safety within and across systems, yet, they can also be deployed to enforce homogeneity and exclusion, keeping the perceived dangers that evoke anxieties, such as difference and dissent, at bay.

- Alan Ruiz

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Previous exhibitions:


DW Fitzpatrick: tighten the belt, sweeten the pot


Photos: Ryan Page

tighten the belt, sweeten the pot 
2023
74 X 40 X 14 inches 

Everyone agreed when I suggested I write a thing. I said I would write a thing, and all nodded in agreement. Later that day, much too close to bedtime, I looked at a blinking vertical black line on the computer screen. I think it’s called a curser. I just looked it up- it is a cursor. I spelled it wrong. I do love a Freudian slip! Aren’t they the best? Idioms are great too. Birds of a feather, and all the others. Wikipedia says there are more than 25 million idioms in the modern English language. 

My original intent was to title this new sculpture: “tighten the belt, sweeten the pot”. I still kind of like it, but not 100% sure. For now, it’s an open question. There is the obvious reference as the sculpture is belted. Right there, we are in a good place- because ‘belted’ is a great word. 

I have recently lost weight (like 15lbs) due to not eating any carbs or dairy for 30 days. I have literally tightened my belt. Wikipedia says this idiom comes from the depression era. People at that time had less money, ate less food, lost weight and then had to tighten their belts. That is, men tightened their belts. Due to so-called you know what and you know who for years and years and years; women people weren’t able to easefully wear pants until the 1960’s in America. Wild! 

And here we are with a yet-to-be-titled sculpture. Back to the bloody, stinking, winking, blinking cursor! 

I think the whole thing might be a call to arms. Not that kind of arms. More of the human arm, with hand attached, doing things. I do know Montgomery Clift wore a gun belt extremely well in Red River. Hello! Glad to bring Monty into the room. 

It’s more of a bundle of tools. A this and a that. A gathering up and getting to business. There is plenty to do and appreciate. With this flotsam and jetsam, situated in the most crafted, exquisite environs I could build, for your consideration. 

DW Fitzpatrick
April 2023 

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INAUGURAL EXHIBITION

James Hyde: Five Frescoes


Photo: Lucas Bourgine

Listed in clockwise order from the upper left