New Release is proud to present Balancing Act, a solo exhibition by artist Arden Scott.

Scott's large scale steel sculptures make up most of the upcoming exhibition. A resident of the north fork Long Island town, Greenport, Scott has cultivated a strong relationship with her environment: the steel objects most often remind us of an inverted sail. However, unlike a ship's sail on open water, the movements in this work are only tricks to the eye. They are in fact sedated yet colorful; monoliths to our childhood toys boats and skeletons to the real ones lost at sea.

In Balancing Act (because these works tend to live outside with more freedom than inside the four walls of a gallery) Scott must act as a choreographer as well as a sculptor, giving the sculpture (as dancer) a necessary sense of center on a restricted stage.

In Body, Memory and Architecture, Kent C. Bloomer writes on this idea, “This omnipresent force (the pull of gravity) that we seldom consciously consider is the object of the dancer's acute awareness...the standing figure becomes a symbol as well as an element of the vertical axis. As the implicit link between earth and sky, he or she becomes the communication between the two realms. And because these realms have radically different properties, the body becomes the matrix for the synthesis and resolution of this polarity. Up and the sky are divine, spiritual, ethereal, light, rarefied, spreading, a canopy. Down and the earth are material, mineral, dark, compact, firm, a solid, a cave.” Scott integrates her work within both the upper and netherworld, the historical and the fictional.

Recently Arden Scott has exhibited at Pratt Institute and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts. Scott also was in the 1973 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial and “Alternatives in Retrospect” at The New Museum in 1981. In 1975 she had one of her earlier solo exhibitions at Ivan Karp's O.K. Harris Gallery in SoHo. Her work can be found in many major public work collections across the country.

Balancing Act opens on October 18th, 6-9 PM and runs through November 20th. 

New Release is open Fridays - Sundays, 12-6 PM