Superimposition: Sculpture and Image | Nadia Belerique, Valérie Blass, Ursula Johnson, Kelly Lycan, Ursula Mayer, Kristin Nelson, Dominique Rey and Andrea Roberts.

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Valérie Blass, "Vices – épater," 2014

Plug In ICA launches our fall program with a major group exhibition presenting multiple works by eight artists in each of our galleries. Nadia Belerique, Valérie Blass, Ursula Johnson, Kelly Lycan, Ursula Mayer, Kristin Nelson, Dominique Rey and Andrea Roberts are connected in Superimposition: Sculpture and Image as artists who contend with the spatial terms of sculpture while also contemplating the flat surface of images. “ Superimposition” is often used as a technical term in graphics to refer to the layering of photographic images or patterns. It can be as simple as placing a pattern over a shape to give it texture or more complexly creating an illusory effect by joining two photographic images seamlessly as if they were taken simultaneously. The commonality of this effect is exponential. The more acute outcome is that in superimposing one thing over another there is always a concealing of portions of one image or graphic for another that determines its transformative action. It is this characteristic that is overlaid on to the work in this exhibition not as a technique but as a method of approach.

From the figurative to fashion or architecture to sci-fi fantasy, the works presented in this exhibition vary in form and subject. They diversely reference film, performance, architecture, design and social history, yet they are situated together for their reformation of the way objects and images are experienced. There is more than a colliding of sculpture and image in the works in this exhibition, there is a deliberate inversion. Here the act of superimposing moves into three-dimensional space, activating the viewer whose position and movement through the exhibition shifts what is concealed and made visible. Without losing the properties of flatness, the artists expand the plane of an image into spatial terms to be viewed as objects from multiple perspectives. Conversely and concurrently, many of the works collapse three-dimensional space into flat representational images while retaining an object-like quality.

- Curated by Jenifer Papararo