125 Maiden Lane – New York, New York
January 29, 2024 – November 29, 2024
Art-in-Buildings is pleased to announce two new exhibitions opening in the atrium and lobby of 125 Maiden Lane, Grace Sachi Troxell: Tectonic Turnips and Cecile Chong: Chicken Little – Lost in Transmission.
In Grace Sachi Troxell’s Tectonic Turnips, the sculptor explores the connections and entanglements between the human form and the manmade environments that surround us. Using clay and steel structures, Troxell translates the organic shapes of a digestive system into a layered installation that grows from the marble backdrop of the atrium wall towards the windowed divide to the outside city.
Starting the figurative journey through the building and body, a curved steel lattice hangs on the back wall, dotted with irregularly shaped ceramic tiles. A second lattice is suspended in the air, extending down into a series of floor-based sculptures, holding the same muted blush and cream tiles. The tiles – created from scans of Troxell’s own body, those of loved ones, and vegetables form her garden – decentralize the human form as a means of portraiture, instead abstracting the shapes into a topographical landscape.
On the pedestal stand two floor-based sculptures titled Beets and Boobs and Fennel Foot, which feel as if Troxel pulled a vintage biology illustration into a three dimensional space with their surreal cream-colored rounds perched atop a vascular system of spindly steel.
The handmade-cum-technological process by which Troxell creates the organic, fluid forms in Tectonic Turnips is rooted in the intersection of the biological and industrial world she investigates throughout her practice. The sculptural pieces start from a human cast which Troxell scanned and translated on a computer, then using a pre-programmed machine, the image is cut in foam blocks which are returned to their original form as a cast to mold the final clay tiles.
The resulting panorama of Tectonic Turnips has a photogrammatic effect, which echoes the way we, as humans, seek to visualize the internal, both of our own bodies and the physical spaces they occupy.
For the lobby of 125 Maiden Lane, Cecile Chong’s latest installation Chicken Little – Lost in Transmission considers the impact of fear mongering in an increasingly digital world. Drawing on her own multi-cultural identity, being born in Ecuador to Chinese parents, Chong’s multimedia practice navigates the complexities of otherness through her material and historical explorations.
Chicken Little, an evolving exhibition the artist began in 2017, depicts a “crumbling sky” formed from organically modeled foam panels, deftly painted with a white and blue wash and layered with encaustic dipped, dried flora. For this iteration of the installation, the fragments dramatically cascade down the marble walls on each end of the lobby, framing a series of heaping, floor based figures that are dripping in the same luscious, waxy materials. Through merging the synthetic with the natural, the installation acts as a symbol of our man-made attempts at saving the increasingly fragile and decaying natural world around us.
Furthering the investigation of how we connect interpersonally and with the world in which we live, Chong inserts a cell tower into the space that “transmit” to growing figures below, which are replete with plexiglass rods as receptors. The assembled metaphors of the installation are a gathering place for discourse on how we acquire and share culture, and how world cultures now overlap and interact in ways previously inconceivable. While the figures merge together in larger masses, some stand independently – reflecting on both the isolation and connectedness a digital world affords.
As content is disseminated more easily than ever online and through social media, how we filter through truths and misinformation is progressively more challenging – often times ‘lost in transmission.’ The installation serves as a poignant commentary on these dangers and the fear it can produce.
Grace Sachi Troxell is a sculptor based in New York. In her current work she uses clay and found objects to explore entanglements between organic and inorganic materials, form and deformity, and digestion. She received a BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College, a Post-Graduate certificate in painting from the Glasgow School of Art, and an MFA from Cornell University. She has been artist in residence at Sharpe – Walentas, MacDowell, Yaddo, SculptureSpace, the Studios at MASSMoCa, Woodstock Byrdcliffe, Willapa Bay AiR, The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, Dumfries House, Scotland, and The International Textile Art Symposium, Daugavpils Rothko Center, Latvia. Troxell’s work has been included in exhibitions in NYC at Hesse Flatow, Wave Hill, and Alison Bradley Projects and at other venues in New York that include: Cohen Gallery, Alfred Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca; The Hartnett Gallery, The University of Rochester; String Gallery, Wells College, Aurora and Woodstock Artists Association and Museum. She currently is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hamilton College.
Cecile Chong was born in Ecuador to Chinese parents and grew up in Quito and Macau. She is a multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, video, and public art, layering materials, identities, histories, and languages. Her work addresses ideas of cultural interaction and interpretation, as well as the commonalities humans share both in our relationship to nature and to each other. Her public art installation EL DORADO – The New Forty Niners was installed in the five boroughs of New York City (2017-2022). Fellowships and residencies include Surf Point Foundation, Dieu Donné Workspace, BAC – Brooklyn Arts Fund, Asian Women Giving Circle, NYSCA, LMCC Creative Engagement, Urban Field Station, The Hispanic Society’s Vilcek Artist Research Fellowship, Block Gallery/Bronx Museum, BRIC Media Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, Wave Hill Winter Workspace, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Solo exhibitions include Kates-Ferri Projects, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, Selenas Mountain, ICFAC at Pinta Miami, Smack Mellon, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Five Myles, BRIC House, Emerson Gallery Berlin, Corridor Gallery, and Honey Ramka. Chong’s work is in the collections of El Museo del Barrio, Museum of Chinese in America, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Center for Book Arts, Bryn Mawr Hospital, Citibank Art Advisory, and private collections internationally. She received an MFA from Parsons, an MA in education from Hunter College, and a BA in Studio Art from Queens College.
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Image left: Grace Sachi Troxell, detail of Tectonic Turnips, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
Image right: Cecile Chong, Chicken Little, 2017. Courtesy the artist.
Grace Sachi Troxell: Tectonic Turnips and Cecile Chong: Chicken Little – Lost in Transmission is curated by Tessa Ferreyros and sponsored by Time Equities Inc. (TEI) Art-in-Buildings. Grace Sachi Troxel: Tectonic Turnips, was supported in part, by a Foundation For Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Grace Sachi Troxell would also like to thank Sharpe Walentas, Sculpture Space, Cornell University, and Hamilton College for their support.
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 guests.
Founded in 1966, Time Equities, Inc. (TEI) has been in the real estate investment, development, and asset & property management business for more than 50 years. TEI currently holds in its own portfolio approximately 22.61 million square feet of residential, industrial, office and retail property – including more than 3,078 multi-family apartment units. In addition, TEI is in various stages of development and pre-development of constructing approximately 1.62 million square feet of various property types which includes at least 1,157 residential units. With properties in 27 states, five Canadian provinces, Germany, the Netherlands, and Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, the TEI portfolio benefits from a diversity of property types, sizes and markets. There are concentrations in the Northeast, Southwest, Midwest and West Coast, and new markets are always being evaluated.
