Alice Hope maximizes the visual effect of a simple process through the dense deployment of a simple palette or repetitive process. Her Minimalist materials -- perforated aluminum, can tabs, iron filings, ball chain, steel shot, ferrite/neodymium magnets-- fall outside of an artistic context and are most often associated with industrial/consumer functions. She transforms her materials by controlling scale, placement, and pattern. Numeracy – the power of numbers -- looms large in her work. She calculates the work hours, number of parts, degrees in scale, weight, and distance; this generates its own hybrid aesthetic. Ultimately, her labor-intensive execution leads to opulent work that seems Baroque -- an extreme contrast to the choices that produced it.
At Craft in Focus New York, Alice Hope will be working in collaboration with the audience on a mountain of used can tabs to construct a continuous sculptural malleable line. This project extends the immense collaboration and life cycle of the collected used can tab. The project reckons the used can tab’s fluctuating value and meaning in continually changing contexts. Each tab represents an individual narrative of production, consumption, collection, and donation, making the project an inadvertently global collaboration.