“Virginia Overton: Flat Rock,” marks the artist’s first solo exhibition at an American museum, and features both works from the artist’s studio and commissioned sculpture compiled with objects sourced in the area around the exhibition site to reframe the relationship between work and environment.
Known for an artistic process that involves found and readily available materials—wood, pipes, cement, rope, Virginia Overton (b. 1971, Nashville) transforms and repurposes these into sculptures and site-specific installations that highlight distinct physical properties, such as weight, gravity, tension and suspension. The artist uses simple constructions and materials to make significant revisions to the perfect forms endemic to minimalism. In the past, pedestals have been pressed and perched between two gallery walls; planks of Douglas fir wedged between columns to create large, leaning triangles; flat, inflexible Plexiglas panels have been bound at their ends with a ratchet strap, creating ominously unstable structures. These often large-scale works, straightforward in fabrication and composition, maximize the tensions inherent to materials and the exhibition site through the artist’s physical manipulation.
