LOT-EK: STACK / CUT

September 14 - October 20, 2019

Opening: September 14, 6 – 8 pm

Artists' Gallery Talk: October 6, 4 pm

STACK / CUT is an ambitious exhibition of recent artworks exploring the shape-shifting geometries of shipping (and other) containers by LOT-EK (Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano), the duo of New York-based artists-architects, at Alden Projects, September 14 - October 20, 2019; opening Saturday, September 14, 6 - 8 pm. “STACK / CUT is a project to inventory and to exhaust all the possible configurations to form volume and space out of shipping containers,” LOT-EK declares. “Part discovery, part reflection, this exhibition aims to investigate and record all variations within given parameters, creating an inventory of volumes and spaces.”

This exhibition marks the 25^th anniversary of LOT-EK’s creative engagement with the corrugated metal shipping container, the standard industrial form (40 x 8 ft.) used for transporting commerce internationally. (Their first work to use a shipping container dates from 1994, not long after the duo arrived in New York from Naples, Italy.) The installation includes work about, and in the form of, shipping containers in mixed media, including upcycled, laser-cut cardboard boxes; wall painting; sculpture; videos about shipping containers. All focus on a universe of shifting volumes.

LOT-EK’s system in STACK / CUT employs two verbs: to stack and to cut. Layers or “additions” are stacked—for example, as actual and rendered stacks of industrial shipping containers—while actual and rendered “subtractions” / removals are cut from the same. Altogether, works in STACK / CUT are elements of an atlas-like inventory of possibility delimited by a set of given parameters. The geometry of minimalism is cut into or transliterated onto shipping containers—circles, squares, and triangles: alphabets dreaming of potential volumes and spaces.

Building on a technique first deployed in their 2016 exhibition at Alden Projects, twelve works consist of upcycled, flattened shipping boxes (some containing “Amazon.com” markings) re-purposed by LOT-EK as flattened surfaces incised by the artists with laser cut lines, forming surface removals. A large wall painting in black and yellow paint in the middle of the gallery spills over onto the floor, pointing towards an empire of the uncontainable. Two videos, Stack (2019) (30 min.) and Cut (2019) (62 min.) conjure up inventories of altered containers, while a STACK / CUT (2019) is an ambitious hand-made, codex comprising printed and cut sections; it collects together in miniature an inventory of volumes and space in positive and negative fields. This unique book-as-artwork calls to mind Marcel Broodthaers' diminutive book, Atlas (1975).

The installation, arranged by LOT-EK, includes a painted yellow line across the floor, bifurcating the gallery into STACK and CUT sides. The exhibition can be previewed in a hanging sculpture in two parts; SPLIT STACK (2019) located in the gallery’s two separate street facing windows. Like Duchamp’s boîte-en-valise (or box in a suitcase), each laser cut and painted cardboard box contains Alden Projects gallery in miniature, including small-scale renderings of LOT-EK works hanging inside. The artists also transliterate the gallery-as-container, conjuring up the railroad car-like shape of the Alden Projects gallery space as ghosted shipping containers en abyme.

© Todd Alden 2019

This is LOT-EK's second exhibition at Alden Projects.

A variation of the exhibition, STACK / CUT, opens on November 5, 2019 at the Design Building Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. LOT-EK's prior solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Museum, University of Santa Barbara; California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland; Deitch Projects, New York. LOT-EK’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. LOT-EK created Alden Projects’ street-facing sign on Orchard Street in 2015.

LOT-EK: ↑ THIS SIDE UP ↑

September 09 - October 16, 2016
Opening: September 09, 6-8 pm

LOT-EK. Flattened #1. Laser-cut cardboard boxes, sprayed acrylic, and acid-free glue mounted on wood and metal frame. 73 x 73 x 1 in. 
Photo: Courtesy of the artists and Alden Projects, NY

THIS SIDE UP is an installation of new works on paper by the duo of New York-based artists and architects, LOT-EK, at Alden Projects September 09 - October 16; opening Friday, September 09 (6-8 pm). This is LOT-EK's first exhibition in association with Alden Projects.

The title—THIS SIDE UP—is a shifting directional marker, indexing a manner to orient a shipped box or container. It also points like an index finger towards LOT-EK’s technique of détournement—of transposing and re-routing already given, commercial vessels for re-devised purposes. In this exhibition, ordinary cardboard shipping boxes (many retaining their original Amazon and other commercial shipping labels) are re-assembled, and transitioned into wall bound assemblages with actionable titles such as Stacked #1 and Flattened #1 (both 2016). The series, Foldables (2016) comprises ten folding works on paper fashioned out of flattened, assembled, spray-painted and laser cut cardboard boxes housed in a similar, laser-cut box: containers en abyme suggesting that for LOT-EK, the end has no end in these unfixed, shifting and collapsing volumes of the uncontainable. This syntax of shifters is an industrial alphabet, dreaming towards infinity.

Defying the conventions of two-dimensional painting and drawing as well as those of three dimensional sculpture and architecture, LOT-EK realizes these objects through assembling, unfolding, cutting and removal procedures, chiefly through the meticulous laser-cutting from surfaces of cardboard boxes. The material logic of Gordon Matta-Clark and Carl Andre comes readily to mind, but so too does Robert Rauschenberg's under appreciated series of cardboard-based works from the early 1970s. LOT-EK’s materially modest series swerves from the straight path of architectural drawings. These cuts, these markings, these unfoldings sometimes evoke actual objects and systems of industrialization, including identifiable, architectural projects that LOT-EK has realized in actual space or has dreamed of realizing. But more often than not, these works conjure up the world of material possibility: the shapes of imaginary objects in space, the shapes of potential volumes fleetingly captured in the shape shifting lines and absences in meticulously hewn fibers. 

Also on view is Urbanscan Atlas (2016), a nearly one-foot thick, photographic codex containing LOT-EK’s complete image bank of photographic mappings of urban typologies (e.g. containers, manholes, tanks, etc.) printed on vellum. (The duo has been assembling this Urbanscan series for more than two decades). It catalogs urban inspirations and teases out tensions between repetition and difference. It is a kind of autobiography of LOT-EK’s way of seeing that is in some ways comparable to Sol Lewitt’s photographic compilation, Autobiography; this atlas, however, is unique. Containing a selection of the component elements of Urbanscan Atlas is Urbanscan Blocks, a series of 56 wall bound, pre-printed yellow notebooks that have been imprinted by LOT-EK with a large survey of images from the Urbanscan series, but with each notebook stacked according to typology, and with each limited to the already-given number of pages in a pre-printed notebook: 50 images each, with only one of each typology visible on the wall. 

LOT-EK is recognized internationally for initiating the concept of creating art and architecture at all scales with infrastructural and industrial objects—most notably, the standard 40-foot shipping container. Whitney Studio, to name one, was commissioned by the Whitney Museum as an “education studio structure” and realized in the courtyard of their landmark Marcel Breuer building 2012. “Through such literal operations as cutting, opening, unfolding, and shifting,” LOT-EK notes, “and through additional strategies of multiplication and repetition, we develop the latent potential of these objects.”

LOT-EK's prior solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Museum, University of Santa Barbara; California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland; Deitch Projects, New York. LOT-EK’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; The Brooklyn Museum, New York. Installed in 2015, LOT-EK created Alden Projects’ gallery sign on Orchard Street.

© Todd Alden 2016                                         

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