Spray Painting the Bronx Pink
New York based artist Tony Feher – born in Corpus Christi, Texas – at the Bronx Museum New York City
The Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City is currently presenting ‘Tony Feher’, the first in depth retrospective of work by the artist. The exhibition includes 60 pieces that show the evolution of Feher’s practice over the last 25 years.
He builds sculptures out of found objects including bottles, boxes, bags, and string by stacking, dangling, aligning, and folding them. Through the use of these everyday objects, he accentuates their distinct but mostly unnoticed characteristics and reveals the urban landscape they came from in a new light.
His adaptation of often overlooked and regarded as useless objects also serves as a reminder to his audiences to think critically about the fleeting nature of life itself, which is a recurring theme in Feher’s works. As the result of his coming of age in a time and place dominated by the overwhelming sense of endangerment brought on by the AIDS epidemic, he poses deep questions about the transience of objects, experience, and life.
The objects he reframes have been found in the streets of New York City, so the audiences will be familiar with seeing them in one context, and probably surprised to be confronted with them in another.
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Over three decades, Feher’s distinctive use of material has included marbles (collected in glass jars or spread across the floor to give a bird’s eye perspective reminiscent of Feher’s own as he roams the streets looking for materials); soda crates (transformed from unwieldy containers into large scale geometric sculptures); and plastic bottles (often lined up and filled with brightly colored liquids that form a wavelike line between the bottles).
His ‘Round Things with a Hole in the Middle Most of the Time’ was also featured in the Agent Artist exhibition curated by Thomas Büsch in New York City in 1994.
As part of his retrospective, Feher created a piece of public art in a vacant dirt lot next to the Bronx Museum, where he spray painted its ground in a symbolic fluorescent pink color.
The video is presented by BLOUINARTINFO 2013, interview by Vanessa Yurkevich
The retrospective ‘Tony Feher’ will be on view at The Bronx Museum through February 9th, 2014.