Harry and Pete (DUMBO Arts Center, New York, 2011) was a collaborative exhibition with painter Todd Bourret. Using the gallery as a shared studio during the week before the opening, we worked under three familiar constraints — space, time, and budget — to produce a body of work exploring dialogue, debate, support, and influence. The exhibition took its title from the relationship between painter Piet Mondrian and sculptor Harry Holtzman.
Working from a fixed list of materials, each piece generated the conditions for the next. The first gesture recorded the changing pattern of light passing through the gallery windows onto cyanotype canvas. These exposures became the basis for Bourret’s monochrome embossed paintings, while shapes cut from his painting supports became molds for cast sculptures, so that the negative of one work became the positive of the next. Rather than dividing authorship between two artists, the exhibition unfolded as a continuous chain of reciprocal transformations in which materials, processes, and decisions passed back and forth between us.
above: Harry and Pete, 2011
Installation view: concrete sculpture and cyanotype on canvas.
left: Harry Valencia, 2011 Concrete, wood, spray paint 91½ x 39½ x 50 inches Installation view of Harry and Pete, Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY, 2011
