Claudia Chaseling: Radiationscape

Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings is pleased to announce the next exhibition in the lobby of 55 5th Avenue, Claudia Chaseling: Radiationscape.

Berlin-based Chaseling will produce a ‘spatial painting,’ a site-responsive painting installation that relies on the architecture and site-lines of a particular space. It will be the first of Chaseling’s immersive large-scale works to be presented in Manhattan.

Chaseling’s spatial paintings are an eruption of colors and sweeping abstract gestures that reach for the limits of a space, crawling around corners and oozing onto the floor. She complements the wall paintings with tighter, more detailed abstractions on stretched ovoid canvases, and highly reflective aluminum floor coverings that reflect, multiply, and warp the installation above. The ovoid paintings feature references to landscapes and aerial maps overlaid with fragments of texts and url codes, which hint at the work’s content without giving away its secrets. Chaseling’s appealing bright colors and shiny surfaces function as a Trojan Horse to deploy serious content: for years, Chaseling has been researching and making work about the invisible destructive forces of radioactive contamination, primarily as it results from the US and NATO’s use of depleted uranium munitions for over two decades in the Balkans, Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan.

For Radiationscape, Chaseling expands her artistic inquiry to include the intertwined industries of uranium mining, nuclear power, and continued military use of depleted uranium weapons. In particular, Chaseling explores the problematics of Indian Point Energy Center, the nuclear power plant located on the Hudson River just 36 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, which is slated for decommission in 2021 following decades of safety issues and leaks. The contamination from nuclear industries threatens the health, safety, and environment of communities worldwide. It is not a far flung problem, but one that hits squarely close to New York City. Chaseling’s seductive work ensnares the viewer, forcing us to consider these invisible threats and their implications.

Learn more:

Spoon Energy Matters

“… It is a legal weapon of war. End of story. We used it, it’s legal.” -NATO spokesman Mark Laity

Truth on Depleted Uranium

Deadly Dust – Depleted Uranium (Frieder Wagner 2007)

The Guardian: “The west used colonies as laboratories for weapons. It’s not different today“
by Moustafa Bayoumi

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Claudia Chaseling is an international artist born in Munich and currently living and working between Canberra, Australia and Berlin, Germany. She is known for developing the practice of Spatial Painting: environmental-political biomorphic abstract paintings, comprised of canvases and sculptural elements with pigments on objects, walls, floors and ceilings. The artist has exhibited her works in over fifty solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Yuill Crowley Gallery, Sydney and the Wollongong Art Gallery, Australia, as well as group exhibitions at Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York and with Momentum in Berlin. The “Verlag für zeitgenoessische Kunst und Theorie” published her first extensive monograph in 2016 and she is at the present completing her PhD at the Australian National University.

For press inquiries contact: Mary Kate Mulhauser, QUINN | mmulhauser@quinn.pr | 212.868.1900 x616.

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Claudia Chaseling: Radiationscape is curated by Jennie Lamensdorf and sponsored by the Time Equities Inc. (TEI) Art-in-Buildings. TEI is committed to enriching the experience of our properties through the Art-in-Buildings Program, an innovative approach that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for our building occupants, residents, and their guests.