ERNESTO KLAR
Invisible Disparities 2011 – 2014
March 7 – April 18, 2015
Reception Saturday, March 7, 5:30-8pm
Postmasters is pleased to present Invisible Disparities, a multi-faceted project of Venezuelan artist Ernesto Klar. Truly epic in its scope, Invisible Disparities proposes an experimental montage of cultural history, a reading of temporality in our material world.
In 2011, Ernesto Klar embarked on a three-year journey to collect dust from around the world. He began by selecting locations – forty of them – where a plurality of histories, times, and potentialities physically co-exist within their man-made infrastructural elements. Locations range from well-known to unfamiliar historical sites, from ancient sites to “contemporary past” sites. The West Bank, Rwanda, Hiroshima, Hollywood, Athens, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, Warsaw, Petra, Moscow, Dhaka, Havana, Sydney, and Ho Chi Minh City are among them. Klar traveled to each location to collect, store, and archive its dust. These processes are methodically documented on video, where the artist is seen always wearing the same uniform and using a portable duster to vacuum the dust. This performative action, the actual vacuuming of dust, represents for the artist “a centrifugal gesture that instigates, both literally and metaphorically, the convergence of disparate temporal, historical, and material relationships.” After having collected dust at all sites, the artist created a sculpture by mixing together and then fusing the dust under intense heat. Klar refers to the resulting sculptural work as one anthropic rock, or a man-made rock, in which “invisible disparities join one another and transmute into new matter.” Separately, Klar has created an artist book that archives individual dust samples for every site in hermetically sealed glass vials. All forty videos, anthropic rock and the book will be on view.
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Ernesto Klar is a Venezuelan artist based in New York City. His works have been included in recent exhibitions at Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst in Unna, Germany; La Gaite Lyrique in Paris, France; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago, Chile; FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Sala Mendoza in Caracas, Venezuela; and Microwave Festival in Hong Kong. His awards include the Artist Fellowship in Electronic Arts from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. Recent participation at art residencies include FAAP in São Paulo, Brazil; WAA in Mumbai, India; Maumau in Istanbul, Turkey; and HKAC in Hong Kong. Klar holds an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design, and a BMD from Berklee College of Music. He is a faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design and The New School for Film and Media Studies in New York City.
