Opening: Friday, June 1, 6-9:00PM

On View: July 1-30, 2005

 Abandoned lots are sites for at best, graffiti and at its worst, waste and crime. Land reclamation projects have sought to regenerate these properties, clean them up and ready them for use as parks, public gardens or new construction. To ready the site encourages ceremony and rite-of-passage, gestures that mark a new journey for the initiate and for the rest of us, provide parameters and definition. Transitional gestures, ones which are managed but temporary, can draw attention to new strategies for combating urban decay via land reuse, but without the contentious move towards gentrification.

Brooklyn artist Virginia Poundstone utilized her ThreeWalls residency to complete research and the initial stages of a proposal for a temporary sculpture to be erected at any of the abandoned service stations in Chicago. Her exhibition is a culmination of that research: photographs, prints and a scale model of the proposed sculpture. concretebreaking explodes the idea of the sublime by fantasizing a nature that erupts through a concrete foundation; it suggests an aggressive entropy of nature and reminds the viewer that nature is astounding, awesome and even terrifying.

Citing her Naturalist heritage as influential on her practice, Poundstone's work addresses the points of friction between industrialized civilization and the natural landscape. Her sculptures displace the familiar in cunning, but tragic landscape tableaus: landscaped meridians become sterile gallery objects and a car dealerhip is submerged under sod, transforming consumer might into a haunting burial. Her past work has been exhibted in New York and Brooklyn as well as recent inclusion in "High Desert Test Sites III," an exhibition curated by Andrea Zittel.