First Friday features new RoCo exhibit

What do you do if you spot a seed pod, rubber band or lost glove on the ground?

If you’re one of the artists in Rochester Contemporary Art Center’s “State of the City,” an exhibit that opens Friday, you incorporate it into pieces of work that challenge viewers to pay closer attention to their environment.

“This exhibition is about ecology and about reuse, but not reuse in that simple ‘reduce and reuse’ branded, catch-phrasey approach,” says Bleu Cease, RoCo’s executive director and curator. “It’s more about how artists search and engage with their surroundings, then build their artwork out of found objects that encourage us to think about our space differently.”

Begun in 2008, the “State of the City” series brings artists from various backgrounds and disciplines together to document and explore cities. Three years ago, Rochester’s Inner Loop was the theme, with artists and collectives responding to the freeway in various ways: as an old friend, a piece of architecture, a problem.

The current show is less specific, with a focus on consumption and waste in a contemporary environment. Opening with a First Friday reception and running through Sept. 27, it features Philadelphia-based studio artist Ron Klein, New Jersey-based artist Laura Quattrocchi, and a performance company and nonprofit organization called Shua Group, which is also based in New Jersey and comprises Quattrocchi and choreographer Joshua Bisset.

Quattrocchi’s “Lost Collection” incorporates roughly 800 objects dropped by pedestrians in New York and New Jersey. She archived her discoveries — a wedding ring among them — and created an installation she suspends at eye level.

“They’re all installed in a very simple but ethereal way, hanging from the ceiling, and they encourage people to walk through and look at them,” Cease says. “There are a few messages there. One is just about the sheer amount of stuff that people lose when there is a major pedestrian population. In Rochester, it would take decades to find that much stuff. It’s a subtle way of illustrating what’s missing here, of looking who isn’t on the street because they haven’t left behind their traces.”

The exhibit’s video artwork is by Shua Group, whose projects include field-recorded sound, improvisational structures and interactions with objects and geography.

Geography is central to Klein’s artistic process. He has traveled to dozens of remote locations for materials so that discarded seeds in an Amazon forest, for example, can be juxtaposed with urban waste.

“As I see it, one of my jobs is to look carefully, see what I’m attracted to, and really let my intuition be my guide,” he explains. “I want to draw attention to the culture of nature and the culture of industry. I hope people can understand that neither can really exist without the other, and that there is beauty in both.”

In addition to Klein’s smaller sculpture in the show, which measures about 9 by 6 feet, he has an installation estimated at 40 by 10 feet that he has never seen put together on a wall, which is how it is meant to be displayed.

Working in a studio with no wall longer than 30 feet, he spent two months constructing “Twisted Ladder” — about regeneration and replication, inspired by the artist’s fascination with DNA — on the ground. Made up of about 800 parts, he plans to use his studio assistant and several people from Rochester for the assembly.

“I search for order in chaos, and chaos in order,” he says. “I make these sculptures to understand what I don’t know. I hope viewers can enjoy part of that journey with me also. If I do what I think I ought to be doing, the piece will be successful.”

Says Cease: “We’re bringing artists into a conversation that usually doesn’t engage them.”

Presented in partnership with the Memorial Art Gallery, “State of the City” is meant to press us to look through a new lens at what surrounds us.

“These artists put meaning in objects when the rest of us just walk by them — and in some cases throw them out the car window or out of our pocket onto the street,” Cease adds. “They’ve maintained a wonderment and engagement with found stuff, and they each do it differently.”

Flanigan is a Rochester-based freelance writer.

First Friday

State of the City at Rochester Contemporary Art Center, 137 East Ave., opens on Friday with a reception from 6 to 10 p.m. and runs through Sept. 27. An artists’ talk will be at 1 p.m. Saturday.

The reception is part of the First Friday gallery hop. Start planning at FirstFridayRochester.org or call your favorite gallery. Here are some of the receptions:

• Marilyn Nosky’s work will be featured at the Main Street Artists Gallery and Studio in Suite 458 (door 2) of the Hungerford Building, 1115 E. Main St.

• Judah Reigns, featuring works by Richmond Futch Jr., Michael P. Slattery and Joshua Lopez, is the latest exhibit at A.R.T.S. Gallery at Bethel Christian Fellowship, 321 East Ave.

• Fear Not: They Come in Peace features Laura Sherwood’s work around the Perseid meteor showers. It will be at Cat Clay Studio, Suite 242 of the Hungerford Building.

• Community Art Gallery is part of Tent Week 2014 at Asbury First United Methodist Church, 1050 East Ave.