William Cannings: Luster Cluster

Anya Tish Gallery presents  William Cannings: Luster Cluster September 9 – October 8, 2016

Anya Tish Gallery is pleased to announce the return of British sculptor William Cannings for Luster Cluster, marking the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition of work by the Texas-based artist.

In this new body of work, Cannings further expands upon his characteristic process of heating and inflating steel, continuing his journey through the unique materialism and manipulability of the tenacious metal alloy.

The artist serves as both creator and fabricator of the pieces, welding together carefully planned sheets of steel and forcing extremely hot, pressurized air into the hulls before coating the pneumatic sculptures in slick, viscous automotive paint. After 16 years of perfecting his process, Cannings has become undeniably seduced by the smooth, supple planes of hardened metal and the visceral quality of his finished, inflated works.

For these newest sculptures, he has stepped away from his signature anaphora of impersonating disposable plastic objects, eliminating all distinctive visual details and paring down the three-dimensional concepts to their most formal properties. The unadulterated physicality of this body of work offers a literally unyielding approach to movement, emotion, and empathy. Creasing and buckling, stretching and contorting, the sculptures seem to hold their breath and express fatigue and excitement, recognizing their perceived weight and retaining a spirit and body of their own. Works reach up from the ground, lean onto walls, sink into corners, and float in mid air.

Among the work exhibited will be an installation titled Swarm, a bright, multicolored cacophony of near-clones suspended from the ceiling; Arc, whose top heavy crown curves the figure inward on itself; and Depend, a deflating, floor-dependent wedge with an apex the size of a pen-head resting precariously on the wall ahead of it.

William Cannings currently lives and works in Lubbock, Texas, and presides over the Sculpture Department at Texas Tech University. He traveled from Manchester, England to Richmond, Virginia to study Sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University, afterward earning a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Europe, and was included in the definitive anthology of contemporary Texas artists, Texas Artists Today, compiled and written by Catherine D. Anspon. Cannings has installed major outdoor public artworks in Dallas, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana, and his solo exhibition in conjunction with the Texas Biennial was reviewed with critical acclaim in Art in America.