Mette Tommerup: Love, Ur

Mette Tommerup has a new exhibition called Love, Ur curated by Tyler Emerson-Dorsch at Emerson Dorsch.  The first opening reception is Friday, November 29, 2-4pm. A second reception will take place during the Progressive Art Brunch on Sunday, December 1, 2019, 11am – 4pm. There will be a panel discussion with the artist, Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, and Lorie Mertes, director of Locust Projects, on January 8, 2020, 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition will be on view through January 18, 2020.

For this solo exhibition, Tommerup will create a complex installation from her dyed canvases, which debuted in her 2017 exhibition Ocean Loop. She will create zones of canvases, undulating like tectonic plates. In various planned interventions, she’ll invite friends and allies to animate her elements. These visitors will become protagonists, as are the canvases, in something like an analog video game. Her invitation will be to let them play. One of the interventions, called Start the New Year in Ur will be an experimental community activity on Saturday, January 11th, 3-5pm.

In her essay for the exhibition’s brochure, Eleanor Heartney described how the idea of Ur came to define the premise of this show:

“The installation’s title refers to Ur. Originally the name of an ancient Sumerian city, Ur has evolved to encompass the idea of the primal stage of any phenomenon. In Tommerup’s native Denmark, the word is often used to refer to the pre Christian Nordic world and its more essential connection to nature. In this installation Tommerup makes use of this association. But she also references The Urmaterial Urge, a 2004 essay by the art historian Johanna Burton that explores the idea of art as a kind of psychic space. Provocatively, Burton suggests many of the most prominent exemplars of this idea are male artists whose construction of womb-like spaces actually leave no room for female experience. Tommerup aims to change that.”

Heartney continues, Tommerup “has produced an installation designed to create a kind of enveloping, unbounded and psychologically charged space that evokes the primal and often inchoate sensations that linger just beneath our rational consciousness. Participants (the word viewer no longer seems appropriate) are free to wander through a chaotic world, making their own path between elements whose effects veer from the intimate to the overwhelming. The work is designed to imbue a sense of release that is at once unsettling, liberating and connective.”

Writer Biography
Eleanor Heartney has written regularly for the magazine Art in America for decades. She is also the author of many books about contemporary art including Art & Today published by Phaidon in 2008 and After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art, published by Prestel in 2013.

Mette Tommerup: Love, Ur | Programming

Receptions: Friday, November 29, 2019, 2 – 4pm
Progressive Brunch, Sunday, December 1, 2019, 11 am – 4pm

Panel: Wednesday, January 8, 2020, 6 – 8pm

Special Event: Start the New Year in Ur, Saturday, January 11, 2020, 2 – 4pm at Emerson Dorsch