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Sayre Gomez & Ruby Sky Stiler Questions of authenticity and the value of originality in artwork run through both Sayre Gomez and Ruby Sky Stiler’s work. Approaching collage and sculpture respectively from a similar focus on materials, both artists enlist the process of art making itself in order to create meaning. Contextual references to a wide variety of art historical themes run through each artists’ work but irreverent play and juxtaposition lightens the mood and allows the focus to remain grounded in the fundamental pleasure of invention. Ruby Sky Stiler carefully constructs and styles sculptures that evoke physical human attributes and subvert the historical concern with authenticity. For this exhibition she has made two large-scale sculptures out of painted foam core that resemble ancient vases found at Pompeii. In the work Lets Get Comfortable, Stiler's addition of a simulated, over-ripe pear recalls traditional still-life iconography, as well as a visual pun, which refers to the voluptuous shape of a female figure. The artist pinpoints a peculiar, human instinct to domesticate or assimilate natural settings: an arbitrary chip out of a boulder at just such a height reads as an instinctual location to set, store, or tuck something away. Using the ancient vase as a definitive reference to ancient art, and authoritative history, these added elements reframe the original object and question the value of authenticity. Sayre Gomez makes installations, drawings and collages that address art making from the most basic creative instincts. For this exhibition he has made a series of collages using images from a variety of books that illustrate artistic projects for children as well as for the amateur or hobbyist. Using these images as his primary source material, Gomez incorporates them into compositions that include basic symbols of art making such as, line and color, or the gestural brush stroke to reference aspects of the history of art and to suggest that the simple act of placing things into a different context can be a useful and rewarding exercise for artists and viewers alike. Sayre Gomez graduated with an MFA from CalArts in 2008 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He will show work in an upcoming group exhibition with Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, IL in September, 2008. Ruby Sky Stiler graduated with an MFA from Yale University in 2006 and currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally, recently including group shows at Annarumma 404 Gallery in Naples, Italy and Sunday Gallery in New York City. She will also have her first solo show with Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York in the spring of 2009. Drew Dominick’s sculptures and installations deliver a wry aesthetic in reference to and based on the specific humor of the American West. Ranging from small cast sculptures of hunting treasures displayed as curiosities on glass shelves to raucous installations of grinders let loose from their inherent purpose to make drawings on gallery floors, Dominick’s works address both quiet observation and more active participation. In “Snake Box with Video” his conceptual agendas merge as stationary stand-in objects interact with real live snakes in a custom terrarium and are then paired with an 8-channel video that appears as though it could be a live feed. In marked contrast to the white walls of a gallery, Dominick has darkened the container and added hand crafted details to retain a rich narrative that feels complex and meaningful in a current context, whether that intention is to be political, environmental or ironic. Drew Dominick lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has exhibited his work internationally and throughout the United States. He has had solo exhibitions at Team Gallery, New York, and Pageant, Los Angeles. He has most recently exhibited at Jail Gallery, Los Angeles; Bonelli Contemporary, Los Angeles; Sabine Knust, Maximilian Verlag, Munich, Germany; Torrance Museum of Art, California; and High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, California.
Matty Byloos 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. Kim’s portraits freeze moments of a subjects’ continuous movement as she traces imagined images onto a glass table with her fingertips. Each unique photograph is differentiated by cuts-outs made by Kim that relate to the posture of the woman in each piece and range from representational images of the natural world to more graphic depictions that suggest movement in time and space. Each photograph in the series is linked to the figure’s movement as it comes alive in a type of dance that flows through the photographs. In this way, each photograph is reminiscent of the next. In the same way that a dancer’s steps are linked together to become fluid choreography, each step in the Superheavies series is experienced within the context of the series as a whole. Placed between the portraits are shots of Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, CA, a glass church designed by Lloyd Wright as a “tree chapel” that considers the trees as a frame for the architecture, and the space created therein as sacred. These uncut photographs work in tandem with the photographs of the young woman to consider a type of liminal space present in both architecture and photography. Soo Kim received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and now lives and works in Los Angeles. She teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2004 California Biennial. She has also shown at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and the Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Andy Warhol While the structure of the piece itself is restrained; bound literally to the shape and scale of the container it inhabits, the method behind it is tri-fold: sculptural, photographic and performative. Entering the container the viewer is surrounded by photograms made by Karapetian in collaboration with graffiti artists Jaber and Failure, who tagged the photo paper with light, invoking the history of graffiti art and linking the repurposed container to its alternate circumstance. “Shipping Container” is an echo chamber. Karapetian aspires to communicate the various encounters involved in the act of representation and to challenge the conventional orientations of the photographic print. Perhaps like all photographs, the meaning of “Shipping Container” is defined in its surface and in the environment shaped and enacted by that surface. Karapetian graduated with a BA from Yale University in 2000 and will graduate with an MFA from the University of California - Los Angeles this Spring. Her thesis show will be in April, 2008 and her work will be included in the upcoming exhibition “Something About Rooms and Walls” curated by Mitch Mcewen at Superfront in Brooklyn, NY. Karapetian lives and works in Los Angeles. In this new body of work Nobell continues to explore landscapes through intricate narratives conjured from both imagined and real events. He juxtaposes vibrant color and cartoon-like imagery with apocalyptic themes to create paintings that are ominous yet amusing as machines and natural elements merge and take on lives of their own. Nobell creates organized chaos in a degenerated paradise where he plays out the life cycles of political struggle, violence, hunger, sexuality and death. While his work does not necessarily fit within traditional landscape genres, Nobell borrows from a wide variety of art historical references in order to evoke intense emotion and conflict through anthropomorphic beings—acknowledging and interpreting human relations to nature in a contemporary society where natural and man-made worlds collide. Nobell graduated from Valand University of Art (Gothenburg, Sweden). He was an artist-in-residence at New York’s International Studio and Curatorial Program and has exhibited his work at Andrehn Shiptjenko Gallery in Sweden and Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. He currently lives and works in Stockholm. A slide image was made representing each days action whether from a photo, A generic office form was filled out for each performance noting a A video log of the project was also generated and as with the other methods |
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