Nate Page: couchbleachers
January 10 – March 22 2015
reception: Saturday, January 10, 2015 6pm – 9pm
couchbleachers are accessible to audiences as both art and functional object. The work has an interior that can be entered through a small door at the rear of the base, creating a unique access to the work by addressing the negative space. couchbleachers was designed as a wink at the cultural institution that is “under the bleachers,” where wayward high school students could engage in nefarious activities. The area under the structure is also a unique venue performers may utilize.
Verge will be facilitating a series of community dialogues throughout the run of the exhibition, with the goal of generating a crowd sourced history of contemporary art in the Sacramento region. The inspiration for this effort is a result of our recent merger with the Center for Contemporary Art Sacramento. Facing the couchbleacher installation will be a chronology of art in the Sacramento region with key milestones identified. Viewers will be encouraged to contribute their own stories to the wall either in the form of written notes or oral histories, which will be recorded in our classroom space in the month of February during “The New Group Mess.”
In addition to this history project, we’ll be hosting a series of events and community partnerships to activate the couchbleachers installation. The tentative list of events is listed below. More will be added during the run of the show.
Artist Information
Nate Page is interested in sculpture that goes beyond a purely visual experience. He wants sculpture that can be experienced architecturally — where an individual can touch it, move through it, climb on it, etc. As part of his interest in crosspollinating accessible and inaccessible spaces, Nate has been working with the idea of seating. Seating invites interaction, but its presence in a gallery space as an art object creates hesitation as to whether audiences can interact with it as art. Nate Page’s couchbleachers are both art object and an interactive, touchable environment.