Ken Butler
Instrumental Bricolage
Sculpture and works on paper
April 17th – May 18th, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, April 17th, 6-9pm
Friday, May 8th, 8 pm
Performance by: Ken Butler’s Voices of Anxious Objects
Ken Butler on Hybrid Strings with Matt Kilmer on Hand Drums
The Hogar Collection is pleased to announce a very special exhibition in the “back room” of sculpture and collage based works on paper by Ken Butler. His “Hybrids” are like complex simplicities that are created from society’s discards. Primarily rooted in an amalgamation of sculpture and music, his work expands the possibilities of innovative “low-tech” sonic investigations that synthesize the everyday ordinary trash objects from our utilitarian world into instruments of the unimagined imagination. Playful and wit-fully engineered, Butler’s work in an overall sense reaches for and embraces music’s primal qualities of understanding a universal existence in an ephemeral world.
Ken Butler’s works have been featured in numerous exhibitions and performances throughout the USA, Canada, and Europe including The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Exit Art, Thread Waxing Space, The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as well as in South America, Thailand, and Japan. His works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC, including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ken Butler studied viola as a child and maintained an interest in music while studying visual arts in France, at Colorado College, and Portland State University where he completed his MFA in painting in 1977. He has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Butch Morris, The Soldier String Quartet, The Tonight Show Band, and The Master Gnawa musicians of Morocco. His CD, Voices of Anxious Objects is on Zorn’s Tzadik label.
His work is represented in public and private collections in Portland, Seattle, Vail, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, and New York City including the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
*For more information or images, please contact Todd Rosenbaum (director) at 718.388.5022.
Gallery Hours: Thursday – Monday, 12- 7 pm and by appointment
