POOLTIME COLLECTION
And Other Worldly Narratives
Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong
and Dev Harlan
Historic memorabilia, exotic fruit, minerals and monuments create collections of objects that tell stories about the passage of time. This 2-person exhibition features the collaborative series, Pooltime Collection, and sculptural works from Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong and Dev Harlan.
Pooltime Collection is a series of photographic works created with select memorabilia from the Queens Historical Society’s collection of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs held in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The narratives explore themes of technology, cultural and national representation, travel and artifact, as they have transformed across the ages.
The series was created alongside Pooltime, a public art pavilion that, in conjunction with NYC Parks, will be installed at the north end of Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Summer 2019. Pooltime is a public pavilion and series of community programming paying homage to the historic Aquacade aquatic amphitheater and centering around the rich history of the Park as a site for the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. Pooltime activates an underused public space and aims to discuss the World’s Fair structures and their architectural lives and meaning post-exhibition.
Wong’s constellation of sculptures, including works from the Pooltime photo series, reference monuments at different scales—architectural monuments and fossilized domestic objects. How do we define a monument? How does this definition bear embedded information about race and class? What meanings do monuments amass, what meanings are lost? How does a monument shift to obsolescence and what happens when it does?
Harlan will show recent sculptural work, also including objects and artifacts from the Pooltime photo series. His works incorporate polyhedral sculpture, obsolete computers and cast replicas of natural stone. While playful in their juxtaposition, the objects suggest a non-anthropocentric understanding of forces and timescales in which humans are embedded.
More information about the Pooltime public pavilion project available here: http://www.cherdevalonius.com/pooltime/
About the Artists
Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong is a NY-based artist/chitect. Through sculpture, installation and site-specific architectural interventions, she investigates the transformation of space over time. Cheryl received her BA in Art and Italian at U.C. Berkeley, studied sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Milan, Italy) and earned her Master of Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP. Cheryl’s work has been commissioned by NYC Parks Department, Percent for Art program in Washington DC and the City of Inglewood. Her work has been exhibited at NYFA, Istanbul Design Biennial, Usagi Gallery, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the Venice Biennale of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Museo della Permanente (Milan, Italy) amongst others. She has taught architectural design at Parsons School of Design, University of Sao Josè in Macao and at INDA, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Her work has been published Domus Magazine, the L.A. Times, Triple Canopy, Bijutsu Techo, Designboom, Dwell, Interior Design Magazine, Architizer, GSAPP Books and Design Observer.
For more about Cheryl, visit her online at www.cw-zw.com
Dev Harlan works in sculpture, installation and digital media. He has exhibited in the US and internationally with solo exhibitions at Christopher Henry Gallery, Gallery Madison Park (New York), Vasquez Gallery (Brooklyn) and Northern-Southern (Austin). Public art exhibitions include “Ideas City / Nuit Blanche”, (New Museum, NY), Singapore Light Festival (Singapore) and CUNY Oswego Sculpture Program. Recently he was included in the museum show “Noor (Light)” at the Sharjah Art Museum, (UAE).
For more about Dev, visit him online at www.devharlan.com
