Stephen Hendee
Silent Sector
May 22 to August 28 2004
Mark Moore Gallery is proud to present Silent Sector, an important new sculptural environment by artist Stephen Hendee. This is the work’s first appearance in Los Angeles: Silent Sector was recently featured in critically acclaimed exhibitions at the New Museum of Art in New York and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.
Over the past decade, Hendee has become known for all-encompassing, light-based installational works that push the viewer’s sense of space and geometry. Compared by Art Forum editor Tim Griffin to Kurt Schwitter’s fantastically constructed interior, Merzbau, Hendee’s work utilizes back-lit panels to create environments of flat planes in which all shadows are eliminated (Silent Sector is comprised of nine modular panels placed over a wall-mounted light array masked with colored gels).The effect, as Griffin points out, is to create “allover three-dimensional fields that are difficult to process.”
“I try to make manifest the psychological element of how we live today,” Hendee says, “and of how we live in an environment that is so much simulated.” His work has been the focus of numerous solo gallery and museum exhibitions, including Ascension at the Birmingham Museum of Art; Iron Skies at Cornell University; and Presence Control at the Laguna Art Museum. Stephen Hendee was also recently included in Illuminations: Sculpting with Light at the Smart Museum of Art, which brought Hendee’s work into a context with pieces by Dan Flavin, James Turrell, Robert Irwin and others.