Aurora Robson The Great Indoors

18 SEPTEMBER - 26 OCTOBER 2008

Attracted by the idea of re-use, as well as by the beauty and complex curves of plastic bottles, Aurora Robson used more than 15,000 of them in her installation at Rice Gallery. Robson let the shape and thickness of each bottle determine how she cut it. Then, using heat and at least 55,000 rivets, she constructed and painted lavishly detailed organic forms, which bring to mind deep-sea creatures, jungle plants, and microorganisms. Such allusions to hidden worlds are fitting since it is childhood dreams of oozing blobs and strings that Robson names as the source of all her work.

In The Great Indoors, Robson has created a landscape based loosely on microscopic imagery of the human body. Visitors can enter the gallery through membrane-like, translucent tunnels and walk toward a dome-like space, or they can exit the tunnels into an open space filled with suspended sculptures containing solar-powered LED lights causing them to glow. The installation is painted in tints of red, orange, yellow, pink, and fuchsia alluding to the colors of the human body’s interior. As Robson explains, “The Great Indoors is a landscape and a living organism. There’s an internal wilderness in action as we speak.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Aurora Robson was born in Toronto, Canada. She received a BA in Visual Art & Art History magna cum laude from Columbia University, New York in 2000. She is a certified structural welder and for many years ran her own welding studio in New York, where she has lived for the past 18 years. Robson recently completed What Goes Around Comes Around, a large-scale suspended sculpture commissioned by Merrill Lynch for its offices in Hopewell, New Jersey.

PRESS
Feature on
Paintheworldgreen
5 November 2008

Article by Hrag Vartanian,
Hragvartanian.com
7 October 2008

Video on
Art Babble
October 2008

Article by Edward M. Gomez,
Art in America
October 2008

Interview with Douglas Britt,
Houston Chronicle
17 September 2008

Interview with Meghan Hendley,
KUHF 88.7 FM
18 September 2008

Article by Julia Ramey,
Houston Press
18 September 2008

Article by Steven K. Lee,
Plenty Magazine
September 2008

Article by Garland Fielder,
Arts Houston
2008