FARRAH KARAPETIAN
Lightyear

September 12 – October 24, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday September 12, 2009

Sandroni.Rey is pleased to announce Lightyear, Farrah Karapetian’s first solo show with the gallery. Through new photograms, video, and sculpture, Karapetian explores the contemporary political landscape of Southern California as well as her preoccupation with the passage of time.

Modes of transportation and concerns with surveillance figure strongly in the pieces on exhibit as does Karapetian’s unique regard for the plastic nature of photographic process. The 20 x 10 foot photogram Stowaway mimics the X-Ray technology currently used to identify illegal immigrants inside trucks at U.S. border crossings and shows the interior of a moving van replete with V-8 engine, Mexican Coke bottles, and a man. In Driver’s Side, a driver’s side door frames an animated video of a 3-mile stretch of La Cienega where commercial storefronts give way to oil fields. In We All Go The Same Way Home, a bus shelter frames self-portraits of the artist at 30 and, altered by forensic age-progression specialists, at 70.

The show’s eponymous piece, Lightyear, is a circular video projection that uses a 3d body scan of the artist as a sundial to consider issues of pace and place. Other images on exhibition are photograms made from signage familiar from the urban landscape, such as those warning of surveillance technologies; Karapetian has animated these signs by contact printing them multiple times. Each piece derives from Karapetian’s observation of imagery on the internet or in the neighborhood of her studio and exhibits the elasticity with which she regards the conventions of both the photographic process and its display.

Farrah Karapetian was born in 1978 in California, where she continues to live and work. Having studied photography for her BA at Yale, Karapetian pursued graduate work in photography at UCLA, where her practice took a sculptural turn. She has exhibited her work at the Aspen Art Museum and at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Parc Saint-Léger, France, among other locations. Upcoming projects include a group installation at a foreclosed property in Los Angeles and a traveling exhibition developed by Kim Schoen for Material Press in which participating artists curate one another’s work.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

HEATHER RASMUSSEN
HITO

September 12 – October 24, 2009
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, September 12, 6-8 PM

Sandroni.Rey is pleased to present “HITO,” a project by Heather Rasmussen in the Container Space. This will be Rasmussen’s first show with Sandroni.Rey.

The Sandroni.Rey Container functions as a project space gallery inside, but by branding the exterior to represent her fictional shipping company, HITO, Rasmussen turns the exhibition space into a sculpture itself. The blue and white block on the left of the logo is the flat template from which all containers are folded from.

Fascinated by the volume of shipping containers and drawn to a sense of comfort and claustrophobia found where they are stacked on one another, Rasmussen began making regular pilgrimages to The Port of Los Angeles a few years ago. She began to see these locations as miniature environments, and has explored the use of found satellite images to further her interest in the sculptural aspect of containers. To simplify the ideas behind the work by returning to the inherent materiality of the containers as objects, she designed a scaled template and created a system of folding containers out of cardstock paper.

The sculptures exhibited inside the Sandroni.Rey Container are based on found photographs of shipping container accidents downloaded from the Internet. She abstracts the scenes of the catastrophes, removing the original context and placing the damaged containers, rendered simply out of colored paper, onto a seamless white background. This process transforms the containers into pristine patterns of color and shape. Each sculpture is displayed in it’s own setup, some including specific colored backdrop paper, mimicking a typical photography studio and bringing together the use of the space with many different sized pedestals. The background paper hangs from ceiling, to pedestal, to floor to create a circular viewing of the installation.

The drawings are also based on shipping container accidents found via the Internet. Rendering specifically the damaged containers, the negative space created by the white background of the paper highlights the catastrophic scenes, and also mimics the previous process of creating a scene to be photographed.