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 Alice Hope

New York, NY
Residency: April-May 2013

Project Description
When I first arrived at Sculpture Space, I worked on the components for the installation that I’m installing on June 17th at the Greene Space, which will be up through July. I glued over 4,000 obsolete magnets (the magnets were TV assembly component before TVs digitalization) in binary patterning, repeating the word "on", and customized 16 steel plates to the site dimensions, which will spell out in binary "on". 

I then made four 8" x 10" pieces that were commissioned for a show that's up through June 18. Each piece played with binary messaging and color gradation, using ball chain and perforated metal. One of the pieces also has neodymium magnets, and another has fishing swivels (found at Empire Recycling.)

My largest project was completing an 83 1/2" x 56" site specific commission. The work was a 30,000 piece ball chain gradation with 4,028 binary "yes"'s embedded in perforated aluminum. There was hours of work in planning the patterning and preparing the panel for binary encoding, and many hours (and hands) involved in the time consuming assembly. Community involvement throughout its process became an imbedded message, alongside its subliminal binary shout-out of "yes", and it's celebration of numeracy.

The 24-7, seven day a week work ethic/ atmosphere at Sculpture Space was an excellent place to focus my studio practice, while simultaneously remaining permeable to the residency's specific influences. The particularities of Utica, especially how it manifests impermanence, Sculpture Space's legacy and ethos, the other artists, Empire Recycling's gold mine, and the barracks at Griffiss were extremely influential; I'm certain that my work will make transparent Sculpture Space's generous effect, for which I'll be forever grateful.

About the Artist
Alice Hope maximizes the visual effect of a simple process through the dense deployment of a minimal physical palette or repetitive action.  Her materials — perforated aluminum, iron filings, ball chain, bibs, steel shot, ferrite and neodymium magnets– are associated with industrial functions.  Because these materials are functional outside of an artistic context, they must be manipulated through deliberate controlling of scale, placement, and pattern. In this context, numeracy, the power of numbers, contributes significantly to the eventual experience of the work- the work hours, number of magnets, degrees in scale, weight, and distance involved with each piece. Ultimately, her labor-intensive execution leads to opulent work that seems Baroque, in extreme contrast to the choices that produced it.

Alice Hope received her MFA in painting at Yale University, and has been a NYC based artist for the last 8 years. For the past two summers, she has made installations at the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, most recently constructing a large-scale installation at the former Camp Hero Air Force Station in Montauk. This year she inaugurated the artist-in-residency program at WNYC's Greene Space, which will continue through 2014. Most recently she showed her work in Ricco Maresca’s booth at the Armory Art Fairs and did an installation in Pier 92’s lobby during the fair’s duration. She’ll be having a solo exhibition at Salomon Contemporary in New York in the fall of 2013.