Who Goes There

Who Goes There
The Skirt
Rita LeDuc

Opening Reception:  
December 10, 2016 6-9pm


Ortega y Gasset Projects is also pleased to announce Who Goes There, work by Rita Leduc in The Skirt, our dedicated space for site-specific installations. 

In today’s Anthropocene, organizing our world via “this/that” definitions and “me/not me” boundaries has become a definitive tendency of the modern human, but this was not always the case. It still isn’t for babies, who witness everything as an extension of themselves, nor is it for the non-human, animate world, who first assesses the environment as porous and boundary-free. To these participants, all players are equalized in an interconnected present; the parts are the whole. Through this perspective, empathy is employed. Understanding – rather than simply recognition – is the end goal.

With this goal as her driving inspiration, Leduc has been making work at 52nd St. and the waterfront in Sunset Park for the past two years. Beginning as “integrated photos” (photos that conflate various materials on clear acetate with the surrounding environment), her focus continued through collage, graphite drawing, and mixed media drawing. As she gathered information on-site and reworked it through derivatives in the studio, Leduc was able to distinguish repeating colors, textures, shapes, light, and other location-specific qualities that she refers to as a site’s “sensorial fingerprint.” It is with this work – and these fundamental qualities – that Leduc created Who Goes There. Rescaling and repurposing her findings to fit within The Skirt’s existing architecture, Who Goes There offers a three-dimensional space that affects and is affected by the viewers’ presence. An abstracted synthesis of the 52nd St. location’s sensorial qualities, Who Goes There emphasizes our symbiotic relationship with place and environment, speaking to ideas of primal, environmental empathy, conflation of defined boundaries, and sensorial essence of place. 

With its bright yellows and lonely blues, overreaching shadows and whitewashed light, chain link and open air, Who Goes There presents a tucked-away waterfront where the dichotomy between freedom/barrier grows increasingly apparent, confronting the viewer with a conflicting sense of both safe haven and dead end.

Rita Leduc lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University) in 2012, post-baccalaureate certificate from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010, and BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. Leduc has most recently exhibited at Trestle Contemporary Art Gallery (2016), Fastnet (2016), This Friday or Next Friday (2015), Public Address (2015), The String Room Gallery at Wells College (2015), Sierra Nevada College (2015), and Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Art (2015). www.ritaleduc.com