Fusing human features with animal bodies in sculptures, artist Rona Pondick’s work appears to take its cues from Franz Kafka. Rona Pondick: A Fifteen Year Survey is the first major survey exhibition of this contemporary sculptor. The exhibition was organized by and opens at Cranbrook Art Museum on September 20, 2003. It reveals the broad spectrum of the artist’s investigations into the psychology of the human form and highlights Pondick’s crafting of allusive objects that reference her own body to evoke primal human urges, appetites and desires. Her innovative use of unconventional media heightens an awareness of the body’s materiality and vulnerability while extending the diverse traditions of surrealist, minimalist and classical sculpture.

Presenting over 15 works including 2 room-size installations and an outdoor installation on the historic grounds of the Museum Rona Pondick: A Fifteen Year Survey begins by chronicling the artist’s compelling use of raw materials such as wax, fabric, dirt and found objects in earlier assemblages and mixed-media installations, including Pink Legs and Dirt Head, two physically engaging, room-scaled projects. Pondick’s later works of the 1980s and 1990s underscore the body as fetish and potent symbol of unconscious desires. In her most recent sculptures cast in stainless steel and silicone, her exploration of the body engages the new frontier of the genetic.

"Pondick merges traditional casting techniques with 21st-century digital technologies to achieve uncanny results," says Joe Houston, Curator of Exhibitions and organizer of Rona Pondick: A Fifteen Year Survey.

The artist achieves a dreamlike melding of human, beast and steel in works such as the stunning Monkeys, a tangled swarm of creatures with both human and animal features. Cast in modern materials, these disturbing hybrids were achieved by directly scanning her own body for reconfiguration using highly refined computer rapid prototyping techniques. The sleek, mercurial forms of Dog, Fox and Marmot embody an extreme psychological and physical transformation by new technologies that can manipulate our experience and re-engineer our bodies in heretofore unimagined ways. A new stainless steel and bronze tree sculpture, in which Pondick grafts her own visage onto the branches? budding fruits, is being created especially for this exhibition. The latest in an ongoing series of arboreal works, the intricately detailed Crimson Queen will be sited on the museum’s grounds, providing viewers with a rare context in which to view Pondick’s unnatural wonders.

Rona Pondick was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1952. She received her BA from Queens College in 1974 and her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1977. She has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Groninger Museum in The Netherlands, and the Galeria d’Arte Moderna Bologna in Italy. She has been included in many important group exhibitions including the Biennale d’art Contemporain de Lyon (2000), the Venice Biennale (1993) and the Whitney Biennial (1991). Among the public collections in which her works are found are the Israel Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Pondick has received numerous honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. She is represented by Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston. She currently lives and works in New York City.

A hardcover catalog published by Sonnabend gallery will be available in The Store on the lower level of Cranbrook Art Museum.

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 10:30 AM - 1 PM:
TEACHER APPRECIATION BRUNCH WITH SCULPTOR RONA PONDICK
Brunch will be followed by a gallery talk at 11:45 am. The galleries will be open at 10:30 am for a preview of the exhibitions. Fee: $15 per person. By reservations for teachers only. Please call 248-645-3314.