Breaking The Material PlanE
A GROUP EXHIBITION IN TWO PARTS
Exhibiting Artists:
Elizabeth Atterbury, Dan Boardman, Sean Downey, David Lefkowitz, Susan Metrican + Nando Alvarez-Perez
Exhibition Dates:
Part I: January 4 - February 19, 2021
Part II: February 20 - April 2, 2021
Rivalry Projects’ inaugural exhibition, Breaking the Material Plane explores the spaces between abstraction and representation across a variety of media. The exhibition title is drawn from our scientific understanding of the universe, as well as one described in science fiction and fantasy novels. Dually, the title is also a play on words, as these artists work with multiple types of media to create; physically breaking the borders of the pictorial plane, transforming the mundane into something new and extraordinary.
Breaking the Material Plane brings together six artists whose work questions and explores our relationship to perception, how we understand, express and represent two and three dimensional forms. The artists included in this two part exhibition layer, cut, combine, and manipulate material to develop, cross-media hybridized forms in an effort to understand and position their work in our universe while also playfully pushing against the familiar and embracing the psychedelic.
The idea of a multiverse also illuminates this two part exhibition through the idea that there are other dimensions, planes, and realities that overlap our own. Artists, like cosmologists, try to map, measure, and understand the planes and their relationship to life, death, and to each other.
Breaking the Material Plane has been organized in two parts allowing for more work to be exhibited by each artist. It also creates two exhibitions that have been hung and installed in parallel, as a sort of alternative reality that exists alongside the exhibition.
By dividing this exhibition into two parts, it allows for viewers to experience not only the depth and breadth of artistic practices by the exhibiting artists, it also allows for our audience to learn of and experience Rivalry as a new, contemporary art gallery and production space in the heart of Buffalo’s Allentown neighborhood. It is my hope that this exhibition can serve as both inspiration and a reminder that while we may be isolated to our individual spaces that art allows us to escape, explore and transcend our physical limitations and find pleasure in the thought of other existences, or realms of possibility.
Rivalry Projects is undergoing a soft opening starting Monday, January 4, 2021. Appointments to view the exhibition can be made using our appointment scheduler below in 60 minute increments. At this time, appointments can be scheduled individually or in groups, no larger than 4. All visitors are required to wear a mask.
