calendario eventi  :: 

X

7/11/2008

Two Exhibitions

Kim Light/ LightBox, Los Angeles

Kim Lig ht/ Li g htBo x is pleased to present sacred and profane, an exhibition of new sculpture and drawing by Los Angeles-based artist George Stoll. Stoll’s objects have long catalogued American arcana from Tupperware to toilet paper to holiday memorabilia. In his new work he brings his domestic American sensibility to bear on subjects more familiar from the landscape of Italian art and the vernacular of crypts, chapels, reliquaries and x-votos.

From among the innumerable products that populate our lives, Stoll's choice of models stems from a refined subculture of consumption. sacred and profane focuses on store-bought items that—although inexpensive and common—have particularities of character that stimulate nostalgia, and breathe presence into their second lives as sculptures and drawings. In fact, it is a prevalent interpretation that Stoll's lovingly rendered works are animated by the techniques of portraiture, seeking to accentuate the enduring traits of the model.

The artist carefully selects his subjects from cultural assemblages such as holidays, novelty shops, and the domestic front. They are suggestive of metonymical readings-- a sculpture of stacked jack-o-lanterns (modeled after plastic trick-or-treating pails) is a stand- in for all that is Halloween, conjuring the bowl of candy, the sound of a doorbell, the autumn air. But with its stark monochromatic surface, it also merges the childhood impulse to stack toys in orderly arrangements with Stoll’s minimalist propensity to do the same.

The gallery of nature morte sculptures are patently un-lifelike plaster replicas comically abstract bones, skulls, and oversized ears and noses. There is a reverential quality to their treatment of these curios. They seem modeled with the high seriousness of 17th century Baroque sculpture in marble, with their bleach-white surfaces and gently handled curves and crevices. Hung and mounted with the care of sacred reliquary, these sculptures affect an inner life; born of the exchange between a vernacular of suburban American rituals, Roman Catholicism, and handicraft. Stoll’s trademark Tupperware tumblers also find their way from the kitchen counter to hallowed ground. In a sculptural installation that draws on the translucency of the beeswax and paraffin cups to affect the play of light in a stained-glass window, we also find a connection to the aesthetic practices of California Light and Space. In another continuing project, Stoll's architectural drawings reveal the soft-focus twinkle from strings of Christmas lights, cropped by crisp geometric “windows” lifted from architectural details and from paintings—notice the contour of the undulating floor plan of Borromini's Sant Ivo chapel, the triangular pediment of the Parthenon, the detail from John Soan's tomb. Again and again in surprising combinations, we find the profane wrapped in the sacred, and the sacred celebrated by the profane.

George Stoll lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited extensively and he has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Angles, Los Angeles; Grant Selwyn Fine Art, New York; Gallery Seomi, Seoul; Windows Gallery, Brussels; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Boston; and The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. Stoll’s works have appeared in group exhibitions internationally, including Cheim & Read, New York; American Academy in Rome, Biagiotti Progetto Arte, Florence; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Drawing Center, New York. Public collections include the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Norton Family Collection; The Robert J. Shiffler Collection; and the Williams - Sonoma Collection.

CHRIS WILDER
FALLS THE NIGHT
Kim Lig ht/ Li g htBo x is pleased to present FALLS THE NIGHT, a video and photographic installation by Los Angeles-based artist Chris Wilder. Wilder's work explores instances of the intersection of sublimity and decay. FALLS THE NIGHT assembles a poetics of the dusk and the dawn, touching on the associations between waxing and waning and living and dying that are inherent in the transition from day into night, night into day.

The installation's projected video image offers a static shot of the sun setting, in real time, over a sea whose tides roll in towards silhouettes of palms, in calm and regular rhythms. Though at first glance, the video's generic sunset-on-the-ocean image has all the trappings of a tourist snapshot, Wilder unhinges these tropes and creates an experience that is far more absorbing. The resolution of the video footage has been degraded in post- production to effect a painterly flattening of the moving image, and a keying-up of the colors that a video camera uses to reconstitute the visual world--red, blue, and green. And as the sunset progresses, a blush of purple and pink video artefacts circulates through the sky, the water, and the fronds; achieving a level of artificiality in the image that erodes the primacy of representation.

The sun, itself, is masked (and it's progress measured) by a mysterious black dot layered into the video. As a meditative, durational experience, a complex of emotions attend this setting sun. The coming of the night produces sublime sensations of entrancement, loss, anticipation; an anxiety about the abyssal darkness of night, which is tied to mortality. This ominous experience of the dusk is made more explicit by the accompanying soundtrack. Among a cycle of songs whose lyrics are embedded with metaphors comparing the setting sun and the waning of life, Taps is the key to the metaphor, here: a traditional U.S. military bugle song used as both a daily marker of time (at "lights out") and as a mournful ritual element at funerals.

Yet between the pop songs and underneath the mournful bugle track, there are audible calls of birds and insect songs; the sounds of people and of animals still thriving in the dying of the light. The photographic prints in Wilder's installation document an urgent affirmation of life, bearing witness to the effusive overnight blooming of the elusive and mysterious Queen of the Night flower. The Selenicereus grandiflorus blossoms in these photographs will not open until midnight, and by morning they will have died. FALLS THE NIGHT offers two halves of an endless equation, where the cycles of the night and of the day represent a relationship of commonality: they both eradicate and reincarnate one another.

Wilder lives and works in Santa Monica, California, and holds a degree from California Institute of the Arts. He works in video, installation, sculpture, painting, photography and performance media; and his work has been exhibited extensively in numerous private and public venues, including at the Sydney Opera House, the Foundation Cartier in Paris, the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, the Orange County Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia, and the University of Queensland in Australia.

Reception, Saturday, November 8, 6 – 8 pm

Kim Light/ LightBox
2656 S. La Cienega BLVD Los Angeles
tue.sat 11am-6pm

stampa

permanent link