143 West 29^th Street, New York, NY  10001

Eric P. Laverty's Structural Catabolism – Images from the Reanimated Built Environment

DLG Gallery is proud to host - Structural Catabolism, a solo exhibition of painting and photography by Eric P. Laverty, his first show with DLG Gallery and his first in New York City.  The exhibition runs from December 8, 2009 through January 15, 2010.

Ubiquitous change and the struggle to cope with it in the built environment is in full view throughout urban centers across the globe. Structures rise from empty land, existing ones are torn down to accommodate the new and aging facades stand cloaked in scaffold and netting as they undergo restoration.  These scenes form a backdrop that is tolerated then disregarded as we await somewhere fresh, somewhere new to hang our hats. For Eric P. Laverty they are transitional periods of rich, visual interplay; reanimated in a process he refers to as Structural Catabolism. What describes degradative metabolism within an organism, Laverty has found appropriate to describe processes he has observed over long periods of revitalization and regeneration in the built environment.

Laverty’s Structural Catabolism reveals the layers of history, use and meaning in reanimated structures as builders attempt to reconcile the past with contemporary realities of rebuilding and are catalysts for developing visual legacies from the collective histories of those who built, ran and now redefine their use.

As an artist, photographer, historian and pioneering witness to these building environments, Laverty operates within the transitional state between the ‘before and after’, navigating the realignment of material and energy before it settles, reconfigured for the future.  From this vantage point, he is positioned within a process akin to when foundations were first laid; driven by new motivations, characters and technologies that resuscitate existing structures from their abandoned, decaying or otherwise antiquated state.  While the results in the built environment do not always favor our aesthetic ideal and in many cases, destroy much of what we revere, the process of rebuilding has a story and beauty of its own, inspiring a fleeting cast of shadows in its wake.

Laverty’s interest in industrial structures developed early in life during pilgrimages to the great factories and automotive plants of the Midwest, later cultivated as witness to the dormancy and decline of many of those same factories as well as those in America's Northeast and Germany's Ruhr valley where he has lived before coming to New York.  The temporary loss of these once productive spaces is clearly an opening for meditation and reflection; however, it isn’t until an inspired instinct that values and embraces the connective ties to the past and reengages those spaces that Laverty’s imagery of reanimation is fully defined.

Eric P. Laverty was born in 1965 in Detroit, MI USA. Educated at the University of Michigan (Anthropology), School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Photography), and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany as a guest of Gerhard Richter.  He established his studio in New York City in 2000. His paintings and photography are in private collections throughout the US, Europe and Asia.

The Structural Catabolism exhibition features selected photography and painting from Eric P. Laverty’s commissioned photographic projects in the New York area.

     

All images: © 2010 Eric P. Laverty

Source:  DLG Gallery

For more information, contact:

DLG Gallery
143 West 29th Street, 7th Floor
New York, NY  10001
Website:  http://www.lavertystudio.com/DLG_Gallery/DLG-Laverty-Exhibition.html

Gallery and Artist info: Eleonor Stein, DLG Gallery 
phone:  347.581.3310
email:  eleonor.stein@gmail.com

Press inquiries: Lynn Zilka, Principal, zilka inc.
phone: 646.265.5516
email:  lynnzilka@zilkainc.com