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Birmingham Museum of Art, Published 2003. Wraps, 63 pp.; 25 cm; distributed by D.A.P.; printed and bound in the UK by Butler & Tanner; illustrated throughout with color photographs, one double-page gatefold; catalogue raisonne; exhibition history.
In Very Good condition. Pictorial paper covers (detail of Ascension on front, a row of five color squares on rear) with light bumping and creasing to edges and corners, mild shelf wear; a few tiny dark specks to rear cover. Sewn binding, tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Published for Perspectives 7: Stephen Hendee, 5 September 2002 to 6 July 2003, the seventh in the museum's series on new directions in contemporary art. Ascension was a 30-foot-high glowing tunnel of corrugated polypropylene, black tape, hot glue, fluorescent lights, and gels built into the museum's existing staircase, so that visitors walked up through the sculpture; it incorporated pieces first installed around downtown Birmingham during Hendee's 2002 residency at ArchitectureWorks, including Presence Control V.2 in the Concord Center tower and works set in the vaults, firing range, and fallout shelter of the decommissioned Federal Reserve Bank branch. Moos compares the work to Pierre Koenig's Stahl House, Tony Smith's Smoke, Blade Runner, Tron, and Coltrane's Ascension; Phillips, a mathematician and Hendee's collaborator on Q-Artifacts (1998), reads the installations as quasicrystals and cellular automata; Griffin, then associate editor of Artforum, on the synthetic ideal. Hendee (born Santa Monica, 1968; BFA San Francisco Art Institute, MFA Stanford) has since built installations for Meow Wolf Las Vegas and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The catalogue raisonne of built sculpture, pp. 48-57, records every installation from BlackMarket RAM (1994) to 2002 with venue, dates, and materials. Contents: Secret Spaces, a foreword by Gail Trechsel; Connecting with Ascension, an essay by David Moos; Ascension, an installation by Stephen Hendee; What Infernal Hand or Algorithm? A Mathematician's Perspective on the Art of Stephen Hendee, an essay by Robert Phillips; Synthetic Ideal, an essay by Tim Griffin; Artist's Exhibition History; Catalogue Raisonne of Built Sculpture; A Note on Additional Images & Text; Contributors.