125 Maiden Lane New York, New York

May 24, 2016 – November 04, 2016

Art-in-Buildings is pleased to announce the newest exhibition in the lobby of 125 Maiden Lane: Work from Home, featuring works by Anne Muntges and Alan Ruiz.

Muntges’ and Ruiz’s sculptural interventions create architectural spaces, appropriating familiar objects and materials to redefine traditional understandings of the home and office. Drawing on the diametrically opposed domestic and corporate environments, the artists create disorienting reconstructions of familiar spaces.

In Muntges’ highly detailed installations, she develops spaces that both align with and challenge ideas of the home. Skewed Perspectives is an installation of furniture, objects, knickknacks, and textiles that are typically found in domestic spaces. Muntges converts each element of the installation into a cohesive, immersive drawing by enveloping the familiar objects in a sheath of hatch mark patterns. Her labor-intensive process (she draws every line in the work by hand) expands drawing into three dimensions, flattens objects into two dimensions, and conflates the physical with the imaginary. Muntges manipulates items of comfort in order to bring moments of wonder and unease into a quotidian environment.

Alan Ruiz’s practice explores the ways in which the built environment reproduces and reflects structures of power. Engaging architecture as both a perceptual and political medium, his work questions the spatial dynamics between a work of art and its container. At 125 Maiden Lane, Ruiz presents a modular system of glass and aluminum units. Seemingly benign forms, they recall Modernist curtain-walls and office partitions, ubiquitous architecture within Manhattan’s Financial District. In recent years, organizations have redefined their physical identity due to a rise in decentralized labor, doing away with corner offices and cubicles in favor of “open plan” workspaces. In these spaces, glass walls have become omnipresent, heralded as promoting collaboration among employees and “bright and welcoming” interiors. Yet, for all its promise of cooperation, glass may remain an apparatus of surveillance.

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Anne Muntges is an artist who makes highly detailed drawings, prints, and installation art based on concepts of the home. Born in Denver and based in Brooklyn, her work has been exhibited in New York at the New York Foundation for the Arts and Lilac Museum Steamship; in Chicago at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art; in Buffalo at the Burchfield Penney Art Center; and in Knoxville as a part of the Southern Graphics Council International Conference. She received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University at Buffalo. Muntges was awarded a residency at Anchor Graphics in 2010 and at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2013, and received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artist Books in 2014. In 2015, Muntges was awarded a fellowship and artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center and Ox-Bow.

Alan Ruiz (b. 1984, Mexico City, Mexico) is an artist living and working in New York City. His work addresses the intersection of site-reflexivity, architectural discourse, and urban policy. He received an MFA from Yale University, a BFA from Pratt Institute, and is a 2015–2016 fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Queens Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Abrons Art Center, Y Gallery, Horatio Jr., The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Johannes Vogt Gallery. His writing has been featured in TDR (The Drama Review, MIT Press), InVisible Culture: an Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, and BOMB Magazine. In 2015 Ruiz was an Artist-in-Residence with the Youth Insights Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Work from Home 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.

Photos by Alex Schaefer.

For press inquiries please contact: Nikki Buccina, QUINN | nbuccina@quinn.pr | 212.868.1900 x387