 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
SIXSPACE CURATED PROJECT FOR IMPULSE Sixspace presents reLAted at Pulse New York, a curated exhibition that explores how five artists working in Los Angeles deal with issues of "relating" and "relationships" within their work: Heather Cantrell deals with the relationship of identity; Wendy Heldmann details relationships to nature; kozyndan depict relationships to community and, as a collaborative team, to each other; D'nell Larson deals with familial and romantic relationships; and Chad Robertson digs into our relationship with our inner-self and society. The city of L.A. itself acts as an influence in their work because of how its unique and diverse sprawling landscape inherently affects resident's relationships to other people (strangers, family, friends) and nature (both in and outside of the city). Heather Cantrell's photography extends beyond mere aesthetic documentation of people and places to project a historical narrative that blurs the line between what is real and what is imagined; and often the two are indistinguishable. She explores issues of family, tribes, cults, subcultures, and the historical (both worldly and personal) as a way to parallel metaphors with states of realism and folklore. Her subjects are often staged scenes of her "community" (mainly artist friends, mentors, and musicians). Cantrell questions the authority of identity in portraiture through the viewer's relationship with the subject. Wendy Heldmann's paintings and works on paper suggest an emotional impression of a place through its depiction. The singularity and totality of the moment in her landscapes deal directly with a utopian desire to be at peace with the natural world. With translated imagery from photographs and videos taken from walks, pictures, traveling, and experiences, she fragments the depiction of a place so that the pieces become part memory, part imaging, and part copying/doubling. Whether through her Rorschach, Elysium, and video series, Heldmann is interested in exploring our relationships to natural environments: the inherent danger and beauty, creating black abstract holes which leave space for something unexpected to happen, and the experience of nature in urban environments. Though created in a structured manner by the artist, Heldmann attempts to become "free and undone" in that same process. The collaborative duo kozydan (Dan and Kozue Kitchens) produce series of personal works that often reflect their affection - and repulsion - for the rampant urban sprawl and technological overload that characterize everyday city life. Their latest series of original work utilize ama, diving woman of Japan, as a vehicle to deal with the disconnected climate of our contemporary culture. The artists state, "The world we live in today strikes us as being one of disconnect - disconnected from the natural environment, from nature, and also from one another. In our apartments, in our cars, in our cubicles, we are out of sync with the push and pull of nature's cycle and can pass days without meaningful human contact. This kind of isolation is what made the ama stand out to us so vividly." D'nell Larson's sculpture, video, and installation-based work (such as Frozen presented at Pulse) explores love, compulsion, and the dynamics of romantic relationships; moments in love that are so blissful that time and space seem to disappear as well as moments resulting from neurotic impulses thought to be out of love. She attempts to re-construct these moments through spatial relationships and the use of materials in her work. Recently this interest manifests itself in themes of love, longing, emotional generosity, personal history, intimacy and the possibility of emotional exchange, and often refers to as much to the relationship between families as the relationship between lovers. Chad Robertson's paintings often relate to social conditions (his zombie series reflects political climates while his grocery store paintings depict the banal everyday); his figurative work explores how people relate to popular contemporary culture and issues. With a particular interest in defining a deeper, truer meaning through his subjects, Robertson stresses the notion that we have the tendency to overlook defining subtle nuances of people and our surroundings. His latest series Mashup refers to the mash-up phenomenon of layering popular, and sometimes opposing, songs (music and/or lyrics) to create something new and original. Robertson mimics this idea - his Mashups compose layers of diverse images (encompasses the entirety of the picture plane) taken from travels, film, photographs, and real life to create a total experience through its part. |
