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New Paintings
June 21, 2008 - July 19, 2008
Sandroni Rey is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Matty Byloos. This will be Byloos’ first solo exhibition with Sandroni Rey.
Byloos’ latest series, New Paintings, is inspired by the homes that were removed during the Los Angeles International Airport expansion that occurred during the mid-1970s. Byloos focuses on architecture; specifically of his native southern California and using a variety of source materials his paintings aim to capture the homes in a transitional moment.
Boarded up, vacant and completely drained of functionality, these homes allow Byloos to investigate ideas of photography’s ability to reconstruct memory and how painting might be a more appropriate vehicle for representing the mercurial qualities of distant experience. Like a recycled vellum manuscript, Byloos’ paintings embody the idea of a palimpsest. The homes no longer occupy any tangible architectural space, rather they exist as portraits of houses already lost to the past and have already been “scraped clean” for new use. Obscured by shadows and built up through suggestive layers, the paintings convey a ghostly and mysterious air: seen but nonetheless intangible. Furthermore, Byloos’ paintings push this metaphor of architectural palimpsest into a more general sense of understanding the complex writing of Los Angeles’ own architectural history and its constant revision rivaled against its own historical context.
Byloos currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA.
Fiction Friction
April 26, 2008 - June 14, 2008
Sandroni.Rey Project Space
Heather O'Rourke: If I try hard to really consider how often my character Carol Anne and I were walking that tightrope, and how many screens it was happening on, or in, its dizzying…. There might well have been a moment, a minute, a few seconds even when I was never there, or here, at all.
Emmanuel Lewis: I guess there is a parallel in my experience, I similarly came to see myself through a doubling or multiplication.. But in my case the effect was more a suspension of time than a continual replay. By inhabiting the role of Webster Long, I was able to repeat and extend my early childhood indefinitely. - Excerpt from script of Fiction Friction
Fiction Friction: The Big Bang and the Bonsai Tree is a rumination on New York based artists Ian Cooper and Anna Craycroft's shared attraction to the trappings of childhood. Cooper and Craycroft's allegory for this state were the careers of 1980's child actors Heather O'Rourke and Emmanuel Lewis.
Dressed up in proper role-play with Craycroft as Webster and Cooper as Carol Anne Cooper and Craycroft sit on a mock television set to discuss in character the parallels of their childhood experiences.
The artists chose O'Rourke and Lewis as subjects for their collaboration specifically because of the psychological and physical toll that their on-screen portrayals had on the actors, literally halting their growth.
Already developmentally stunted due to a physiological condition, Lewis' portrayal of the Webster character cast him in a role 5 years younger than he was, replaying the years he had just grown out of. O'Rourke died tragically of an intestinal rupture during the filming of the final Poltergeist film, abruptly ending her life at age 14, and forever cementing the entanglement of her own identity with that of her fictional character.
The cultural representation of childhood is a common theme in the artwork that Cooper and Craycroft make independently of one another, and for Fiction Friction they wanted to explore their shared seduction to repeat this period of their own lives.
O'Rourke starred in the "Poltergeist" series as Carol Anne Freeling, and Lewis was the star of the 1980's television sitcom "Webster".
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