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Kendell Carter Changing Room April 11, 2009 - May 23, 2009 Opening Reception Saturday, April 11, 2009 6.00-8.00pm Sandroni.Rey is pleased to present “Changing Room,” a project by Kendell Carter in the Container Space. This will be Carter’s first show with Sandroni.Rey. Kendell Carter’s work investigates the duplicity of language as a basis for aesthetic production. In melding art with design and infusing hip hop references he creates environments comprised of a mix of elements that feel comfortable in their domestic nature and yet confront viewers with a sense that something may be awry. Drip paintings made from shoelaces, wainscoting embossed with the same pattern as the bottom of Timberland boots and lamps made with Kongol hats are interspersed with ready-made furniture producing playful but conflict-laden environments. His installations take cues from California artist Robert Irwin with a focus on art as experience. With an emphasis on casual and formal culture Carter’s work engages opportunities to connect cultural vectors while rejecting the cloak of high or low. In “Changing Room” Carter is interested in challenging conventional ideals by creating a space that is vulnerable and free from hierarchy. Furniture and other design elements are placed among paintings and racks of real clothing to create an imagined character’s fantasy closet. Giving participants of the installation an opportunity to physically change is central to the installation’s offering and effectiveness. Kendell Carter was born in New Orleans and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BA from Atlanta College of Art in 1994, studied environmental design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and graduated with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. Carter’s work has been shown at the Armory Arts Complex, Pasadena, Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and the Nexus Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta. He had a solo project at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2007. |
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| Past Exhibitions |
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Carlo Zanni My Temporary Visiting Position from the Sunset Terrace Bar January 22 - February 18, 2009 Sandroni Rey is pleased to present My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar, an exhibition in the Container project space by Carlo Zanni. This is Carlo Zanni’s first exhibition with Sandroni Rey, organized by Julia Fryett and Michele Thursz. Carlo Zanni (La Spezia, 1975) is an Italian born artist living between Milan and New York. His work is focused on the intersection of computation and representation fusing old and new media to shape landscapes and portraits often confronting themes of real time/real life; fiction/information. Zanni's practice finds its minimalist roots in Sol Lewitt’s artist statement, "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”, which he translates into a contemporary adaptation, "The idea becomes the code that renders the art.” Shown in the Container is an archive of My Temporary Visiting Position from the Sunset Terrace Bar. Set in the city of Ahlen, Germany, the project imitates an amateur’s film of the landscape framed at sunset. The work confronts themes such as exile, migration and border control and is enhanced by a poem by the esteemed author Ghada Samman and music by Gotan Project and Gabriel Yared. While the city strip is prerecorded, the sky is captured in real time from a webcam shooting Naples, Italy at sunset. Zanni exposes a new dimension in cinematic production by the use of generative information, DATA CINEMA, using narrative structures and the use of live data feedback gathered from the Internet to create time based social consciousness experiences. The entire project may be viewed at http://www.fromthesunsetterrace.com, where visitors choose upon two ways to experience the work: a live mode, available only in a specific time frame during the sunset in Naples or browsing through the archive where a time accelerated HD version of the movie is rendered every day and archived online. Carlo Zanni has shown worldwide in galleries and museums including: MAXXI Museum, Rome (2007, 2006); New Museum, New York (2005); Gavin Brown's Enterprise at Passerby, New York (2005); Chelsea Museum, New York (2004); CCA Glasgow (2003); Analix Forever Gallery, Geneve (2003, 2002); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2001). |
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Sarah Vanderlip Eleven November 22 - January 17, 2009 Sandroni Rey is pleased to present Eleven, a project in the Container project space by Sarah Vanderlip. This will be Vanderlip’s first exhibition with Sandroni Rey. Vanderlip has worked in sculpture, collage, video, and installation often drawing directly from close personal and familial experiences. Eleven is an installation that reinterprets an exhibition, “Two,” that Vanderlip did in New York at XL Gallery in 1999, in which she created a play space in the gallery for her 2 year old son. Throughout the exhibition he spent time in the space, making it his own until the final day of the show when the piece was completed. Almost a decade later Vanderlip recreates the piece based on a design entirely conceived by her now eleven year old son. Before the show opens he and his friends will spend time in the piece and how they leave it will be the first incarnation of the work. Echoing the body cast of her son she made for the first incarnation of the piece, Vanderlip has editioned a cast of a phallic-shaped light bulb in red rubber that represents his presence in the work when he is not physically in it. When the piece opens to the public, it will serve as a medium for collaboration between artist, subject and viewer—inviting play and investigation over the course of the show. Sarah Vanderlip lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, has taught at UCLA and is currently teaching at California State University, Bakersfield. She has shown her work internationally, including exhibitions at White Columns, New York; XL Xavier La Boullbenne, New York; L.A.C. Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Sigean, France; Bonelli Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; Galerie Jacques Girard, Toulouse, France. |
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Lisa Tchakmakian Light Box: Version 1.0 is a study of: Reciprocal relationships Light Box: Version 1.0 is an installation comprised of sculpture and light in which Tchakmakian explores emotional responses triggered by moving light and image. A partial cube made of translucent plexi-glass sits on the floor of the container and is counterbalanced by amorphous clear plastic shapes. Light is refracted and bounced between the organic and inorganic shapes, creating an atmosphere of trapped and projected images. This installation marks the first model for several planned versions of the lightbox project. Throughout her work, Tchakmakian has employed cinematic effects and imagery to convey a sense of mysterious play. She often incorporates obscured imagery of people in a state of agony or ecstasy, dependent on how it is viewed and is interested in how varying moving forms, both highly structured and organic can be combined with the effects of light to induce myriad emotional states. Lisa Tchakmakian is an artist and curator who lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated with an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2003. Her work has been shown at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Women’s 20th Century Club in Eagle Rock, CA; and 2121 Lofts in Los Angeles, CA. She curated “All That Heaven Allows” at Bonelli Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA in Spring, 2008. |
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John Espinosa John Espinosa’s sculptures and installations stem from the transfer and containment of energy and information. Working from an interest in the USSR’s strategy for containing the Chernobyl nuclear radiation leak by filling it with concrete and steel, Espinosa began the project “Dead Reckoning” by burying a radio in concrete. The radio was originally set to a frequency with the sound of static, but was allowed to run out of power while the concrete set around it. In this process, the concrete functioned as a filter that slowed the energy emitted from the radio which would have been converted to sound waves through the machine and then through the human ear. The protruding radio antenna, which is the only part of the radio that was not submerged in concrete, alludes to the presence of energy buried within. For the final piece, Espinosa replaced the sound of the static with a recording of the sound produced by the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake (an undersea earthquake that took place in the Indian Ocean in 2004). Set inside a plywood construction built within the shipping container, viewers are surrounded by muffled noise and reverberating energy as if buried underground themselves. John Espinosa Plywood, the sound of a deep water tremor, earth on birch, UV Sensitive acrylics, radio buried in concrete, audio equipment, painted foam, and black flocking John Espinosa, born in Bogotá, Colombia, is a graduate of Yale University (MFA Sculpture 2001). His work has been exhibited internationally including a solo show at the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art. He has participated in shows at The Renaissance Society, Chicago; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; Metro Pictures, NY; Marianne Boesky, NY; Vilma Gold, London; Tracy Williams, NY and Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. John Espinosa lives and works in Los Angeles. |
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Drew Dominick 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. |
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Ian Cooper & Anna Craycroft Fiction Friction April 26, 2008 - June 14, 2008 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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Farrah Karapetian 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. |
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Jamie McMurry 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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Anthony Goicolea The Septemberists September 15, 2007 - October 13, 2007 Sandroni Rey is pleased to present Anthony Goicolea’s video “The Septemberists” in the video project room. The Septemberists is a thirty minute black and white film that chronicles the preparations and processes associated with traditional religious ceremonies. A group of boys harvests materials in a dream-like landscape in order to construct the clothing and elements necessary to enact a series of semi-sacrificial rites of passage. Taking inspiration from Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," the musical score becomes a substitute for dialogue. Each group of boys functions as a pack of mute workers accompanied only by the sound of their designated musical instruments. Set on a farm reminiscent of an old southern plantation, the characters appear almost like a refined tribe or community living an existence removed from society; half military academy, half monastery. Like cloned worker bees, each group moves in silent, pre-choreographed unison, carrying out their individually assigned tasks. As one group herds and sheers sheep, another picks cotton growing in a steam filled greenhouse, while still a third group meets at a moonlit marsh to catch octopi and harvest their ink sacks. Done in collaboration with designer Thom Browne, the ritualistic preparations, dress and customary uniforms associated with different, traditional, western, ceremonial rites shifts the focus from the macro to the micro. Gathering the raw ingredients and materials to create uniform garments and dawning the vestiges of tradition becomes a ritualistic ceremony in itself. Each member’s assigned station or role is designated by the built in hierarchical dress code attributed to each costume and its association with each custom. In the final scenes, a first communion, wedding and funeral blend together and culminate as a make shift wooden coffin is rowed down stream and crosses paths with a baptismal ceremony. Traditional rituals such as matrimony, baptism and funeral rites merge together in mystical outdoor settings to create new, dream-like hybridizations of seemingly recognizable, established, western customs. Goicolea received his MFA from the Pratt Institute of Art in 1996. He currently lives and works in New York City. In 2005, Goicolea was awarded the BMW Photo Paris Award for his photograph “Ghost Ship.” Goicolea’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston |
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Drew Heitzler/Flora Wiegmann Black Box/White Cube is a dual-screen projection of two 16mm films of a dancing body, performing a single movement phrase, mirrored within two specific spaces, the black box of the theater and the white cube of the gallery. These two spaces, sites of performance for at least the last 40 years, locate nuanced sets of rules that inscribe specific conventions upon all they contain. Black Box/White Cube, through a filmed examination of choreographed movement within those walls, re-presents those rules in an effort to re-inscribe those conventions; laying bare the subjective and thus socio-political limits of any action realized within the boundaries of any institution. Drew Heitzler lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His films have been screened and exhibited at various galleries and institutions in Europe and and the US, including Angstrom Gallery, Collective Unconscious, Sweeney Art Gallery, Centre Culturel Suisse, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, PS1. Contemporary Arts Center, Anthology Film Archives, Kunsthaus Baselland, and The Project. Flora Wiegmann is a dancer and choreographer working in Los Angeles. Recent projects include Dancing 9 to 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Altria, Visual Noise at The Happy Lion, World’s Largest Walkie Talkie Network at LA><ART, Dance videovideo Dance at Monkeytown, New York, and site-specific works at High Desert Test Sites and Le 102 in Grenoble, France. |
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Jennifer West Yeah Film January 20, 2007 - February 24, 2007 Jennifer West’s film-based work is rooted in an interest in structural practices, alchemy and the experience of synesthesia. West will be presenting "Yeah Film (#22)" from the ongoing Cameraless Film Series. Using language as a departure point, West produces her films by marinating 16MM film negative in concoctions based upon the names of cocktails and energy drinks, the description of perfume scents and/or other disparate codes of sensual experience as literal recipes for the film marinades. The results are abstractions that relay time, language and visual abstraction amongst one another to produce hypnotic, even hallucinatory effects |
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