Night Gallery is proud to present The Third Measure, Sean Townley’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. It will be on view October 24—November 21, 2015, with an opening reception to be held on Saturday, October 24th.
The Third Measure is anchored by three cast aluminum lions which the artist sculpted from a three dimensional scan of an ancient Greek funerary lion. Central to Townley’s work is the interrogation of artistic authorship and the systems of value inherent to notions of origin and autonomy. Many of his pieces are the result of appropriating content directly from institutions as they restore and even de-restore works of art, with Townley’s versions finding their resting point somewhere along this timeline of alteration.
Townley’s objects exist at the perceived perimeter between original and reenacted, swimming around a hidden, idealized source. Centered on the inextricability of surface effect from interior core, his work reveals a profound fragility in material and symbolic identity. Taking sculptures originally produced in quintessentially solid materials—marble, bronze—as reference, his work unveils how easily the supposedly fixed authenticity of a sculpture can slip. If in his practice historical narrative begets material process, Townley’s sculptures ultimately rest in an unspoken third place.
Sean Townley is based in Los Angeles. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Antoine Levi in Paris, Michael Jon Gallery in Miami, and Night Gallery. He has an upcoming solo exhibition at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the spring of 2016. His work has been written about in Art in America, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, and Mousse, and he received his MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 2012.
