Onsite piece by Carl E. Hazlewood
July 13 - 27 | Opening reception: July 13, 6-8 PM
NARS Project Space
Carl E. Hazlewood returns to NARS after spending a few months as an Artist-In-Residence at the Foundation in 2017. He utilizes the Project Space on the second floor, which, over time, becomes an arena for an extemporaneous assemblage of object-like work created in situ and scaled to the available space and situation. PRESENT/CONTINUOUS shows the artist as he works through possible solutions to various formal and other problems. He says, “While many of the things I make are ephemeral, they tend to respond to the light, space and surfaces where they are installed. Beside the painted/constructed entire environments I create on occasion, I like making discrete/specific 'things'... thus most transmute into defined objects of a formal sort; shape, scale, light, colour, materials, etc., are all manipulated as a way to bring my work alive in the presence of the viewer.”
Hazlewood is a life-long art-worker, and a border-crosser of sorts. He continually negotiates various transcultural, social and artistic locations. As an older black person, poor, an immigrant, in the current era, he is somewhat suspect. But functioning at that liminal edge of social and artistic possibilities can perhaps translate into something positive. “It’s all about being in the moment,” he says, “on ‘presentness,’ of always being ‘real’— in life as well as how one approaches art with its multiplicity and endless possibilities.”
MacDowell Fellow, Carl E. Hazlewood, BFA (with honors) Pratt, and MA from Hunter College, was born in Guyana, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. A Visual Artist, curator and writer, he co-founded Aljira a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. Recent awards and honors include Fellowships and residencies from The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France, The Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy, the NARS Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. A 2017 ‘Tree of Life Foundation’ award grantee, his fifty-two feet work, ‘TRAVELER’, (2017) was commissioned by the Knockdown Center, Queens. Hazlewood’s work was shown in PRIZM, Volta, and Scope Art Fairs. BOMB Magazine and the NY Times have written about the artist.
THE RETURN OF THE HAND: (RE)MATERIALIZING THE EVERYDAY OBJECT
…. There’s a formality and minimalism to the work that folds in on itself, revealing a delicate sensuality, a different parlance that doesn't negate the fully formed narratives that round out the intact edges. Hands were here, marking and making, speaking alongside the laser cut contours of the fabric. Indeed, Hazelwood has likened his constructions’ to “experiences of skin,” adding “we are live, sensual human beings, Eros.”4 With the skin as this porous object, the work inhabits a different order of things that is as much about abstraction as about storytelling through touch, a peeling away of precision in form.
The Return of the Hand: (Re)materializing the Everyday Object
Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi - Curatorial Assistant at the Hammer Museum
ArtSlant Magazine 7/17/16