Alice Hope: TAB

The tab is emblematic of consumption, desire, urban myth, and obsolescence. Its reproduced form is formally beautiful with its alignment to the golden ratio, its balancing of positive and negative space, and its humanizing ergonomics. The tab’s genetic, engrained beauty coupled with its potent associations is so succinctly iconic, both in form and meaning. It screams, “BUY, DRINK, RECYCLE.”

Last year, Alice hit a tab jackpot, 700 pounds in one recycling bin, “The find was an aesthetic experience of a lifetime: stupefyingly sublime and achingly bittersweet; I was overwhelmed by tab’s amassed beauty, the immense Good Samaritan collective collecting drive, and the numeric evidence of how insanely much we consume. Since acquiring the collection, my studio has been a tab lab. I’ve been sorting and attaching hundreds of thousands of them, tributizing the hundreds of thousand plays of that one very specific quenching sound, exploiting its cultural and aesthetic references, and transforming its obsolescence into forms that weave in and out of tab’s iconic meaning.”

Alice Hope holds an M.F.A. from Yale University, and has shown since the late 1980s. She has created numerous public and residential commissions including a large-scale work titled, “Under the Radar” at Camp Hero State Park in Montauk, NY for the Parrish Art Museum. She often incorporates binary code and the obsessive repetition of this code in forming her compositions. In her 2013 Armory Show Project, Alice was commissioned by the fair to create two public works; one panel repeats the binary code for love, and the other is based on the binary code for blind. She recently inaugurated the WNYC Greene Space artist-in-residence program where she will be working through 2014.