True Value, 2025
Courtesy of the artist

True Value, 2025
Courtesy of the artist

True Value, 2025
Courtesy of the artist

True Value, 2025
Courtesy of the artist

True Value, 2025
Courtesy of the artist

True Value, 2025
Courtesy of the artist

Alice Hope

True Value

This site-specific installation is constructed in direct response to Long House'siconic Buckminster Fuller inspired geodesic dome, engaging its architectural legacy with geodesic spheres built with True Value yardsticks. The installed works are in homage to Fuller’s geometry while examining the ideals of measurement and value embedded in both the materiality and form.The yardstick, a utilitarian object of measurement, is recontextualized as structure—each one forming part of the sphere’s triangulated surface. Branded True Value,these tools evoke not only standardization and quantification, but also a distinctly American intersection of commerce, labor, advertisement, and the illusion ofobjective worth. By transforming these instruments into the very material of the structure, I invert their purpose: the tools that once measured now become what ismeasured. Red dots punctuate the yardsticks across the surface of the spheres. In the artworld, the red dot signifies a sale, a transaction, a marker of value assigned. In other contexts, it connotes targeting, surveillance, urgency, or erasure. Here, the dots serve as both pattern and code—suggesting the friction between commodification and perception, between utility and symbolism.Unlike Fuller’s open-ended dome, the spheres are complete and enclosed implying containment, recursion. The concentric installation invites viewers to walk around,read, and interpret geometry made not only of lines and angles, but of culturally loaded signs—yardsticks and red dots—that measure not just space, but also our unconscious systems and beliefs on value.

Alice Hope is a multidisciplinary artist who works in New York City and LongIsland. Named New York’s “Woman to Watch” in 2018 by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Hope is widely recognized for the public and privately commissioned installations that are central to her practice. At the core of Hope’sapproach in developing new bodies of work is her choice in materials with embedded cultural references and relevance. Over the past decade the can tab has been the most salient element, but she also works with price tags, blue tape,magnets, and fish netting. Hope’s interest in seine netting, was prompted by a 2019 site visit to Maputo, Mozambique for an Art in Embassies commission. Inspired by the rhythmic wading seine fishermen and their heaped discarded nets in eye shot from the U.S.Embassy, she embarked on Murmuration 1, an undulating seventeen foot wallsculpture, a massive accumulation of directionally knotted Corona tabs into monofilament seine netting. In 2021, the commission was permanently installedin the Embassy; in 2022, Murmuration 2- aggregations of Coke can tabs knottedinto a multifilament seine net - spilled from its wall expanse to a pelt like formon the floor in The Church in Sag Harbor, New York. The seine net has taken ona buoyant ethereal role in recent shows- in 2022 with Guild Hall and in 2023 Drawing Room gallery ; the installations engaged the nets' negative space and shifting shadows as essential as the form. Alice Hope holds an MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited widely at galleries in New York and on Eastern Long Island, and has created site-responsive works under the auspices of several public institutions. Among her many site-specific installation projects, Under the Radar was presented by the Parrish Art Museum in 2012 at Camp Hero State Park in Montauk. Subsequent projects in New York City include installations at WNYC Greene Space (2013), the QueensMuseum (2015) and the Armory Show art fair (2013). In 2014-2015 she was artist in residence at New York’s Museum of Art and Design. In 2018 her work was the subject of a one-person exhibition at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, and in 2022 the museum presented her site specific installations in an off site exhibit att he historic Amagansett Life Saving Station. She recently completed two public commissions - in Washington DC and Brooklyn- made with blue tape.

Photos ©Jenny Gormon

True Value, 2025
Courtesy of the artist