Echo Extra Echo is pleased to announce raft, an exhibition featuring work by the New York–based multidisciplinary artist Ann Messner, on view from October 24 through November 22. This presentation debuts raft (2014/2026), a large-scale sculptural installation comprising an array of materials—a ladder, a music stand, a satellite dish, speakers, power strips, sheets of neoprene rubber, apple boxes, among other items—found in the urban environment and in the artist’s studio, which indexes and reveals the seemingly prosaic gaps that appear in our surrounding spaces. The objects in raft are dismantled, punctured, exploded, or left whole, and then joined and reassembled by Messner in such a way that conveys the artist’s longstanding consideration of such themes as impermanence, personal experience, and the decision to act.
Messner began raft in 2014 at her studio in Williamsburg, where she had worked for three decades before being unexpectedly displaced. Like other recent sculptures that were first conceived in the artist’s previous workspace and then revisited, raft is imbued with the process of revision. Reworked this year in a studio of a smaller scale, raft is further recontextualized in the domestic space of Echo Extra Echo, absorbing the different phenomenological and sociopolitical conditions that have variously framed the sculpture across time and place. Encircled by a faintly perceptible hum that runs through deconstructed speaker cones—a recurring motif in Messner’s practice—the installation purrs with a disquiet that occupies the continuum between muffled rage and guarded hope.
The artist writes:
raft is a provisional situation. It is the fallback when the bridge has not yet been built.
raft is the placeholder, when conditions demand, when the destination remains indecipherable and one is in the gap, the interim, between.
raft struggles to find balance. It is a dislocated harbinger, a canary in the mine. raft interrupts an imminent collapse, secures a stay, offers the space between to locate one’s bearings. The condition remains urgent.
One embarks on the journey not because one chooses, rather because the current conditions insisted—one was already on that raft—it was involuntarily slipped beneath any sense of stability one might have imagined to have had. To recognize this is to begin to come to terms with the fact that a breach has occurred, the situation is untenable, there is an urgent need for repair.
raft is a surrogate, an autonomic proxy. Ground gives way to sway, to the give and take, shapeshifting echo from within. raft constitutes a duration, rather than an interruption, offers a stay, a space of holding, a reprieve. raft extends a condition of reflection—as only mirrors can do–transmitting the circularity of repair.
An opening reception will be held on Saturday, October 24, at 1–6pm. Jeremy Johnston and Nina Felshin will participate in a discussion with the artist at the gallery on Saturday, November 7, at 3pm.
Viewings are by appointment only, though the work can be seen through the windows on the ground-floor level of the apartment building at all hours. The gallery address is 35 West 92nd St, #1EE, New York, New York 10025. Email us at echo.extra.echo@gmail.com or text Coco at (610) 507-9983 or Joseph at (415) 828-4663 to RSVP for the November 7 program or to schedule an appointment to view raft another time.
Ann Messner (b. 1952) is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist who has explored the relationship between the individual body and the body politic over the course of five decades. Through sculpture, installation, performance, film/video, and guerilla-style public intervention, Messner has continually tested the pliability of the social contract and examined the fault-lines between collective and self-consciousness. Early on in her career, she became involved with artist-activist groups in New York City, notably Collaborative Projects (Colab) with whom she participated in the staging of the landmark Real Estate Show in 1980, occupying an abandoned downtown Manhattan storefront in solidarity with working-class and immigrant communities being dispossessed of their neighborhoods. This experience set the foundation for a practice that is politically engaged and object oriented, whose processes and methods are informed by the legacies of conceptual art but remain grounded in the domain of the personal.
Messner has been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes from the New York Foundation in the Arts (1986, 1987, 1989), National Endowment for the Arts (1987), New York State Council on the Arts (1988), Henry Moore Foundation (1995), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1996), and Anonymous Was a Woman (1998). The artist was awarded a fellowship at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (1999–2000), and appointed Senior Fellow Princeton University Humanities Council (2001–2002).
Messner has taught at Bennington College, Vermont; Hunter College, City University of New York; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; and Princeton University, New Jersey, and held a tenured position as professor of MFA Integrated Practices at Pratt Institute, New York, from 1993 through 2022. The artist’s work is held in the Neuberger Museum of Contemporary Art, Purchase, New York; the Sol LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Echo Extra Echo is a project organized by Hyunjee Nicole Kim and Joseph Issac Cohen, based in New York.
