 Installation view Group Show Frank Benson, Liz Craft, Urs Fischer, Mark Handforth, Elliott Hundley, Jim Lambie, Chris Lipomi, Paul Sietsema Regen Projects is pleased to announce a group exhibition of sculpture and collage. The artists included in this exhibition work in very different ways, but share an intuitive formalism that is favored over a strict logic or armature. The work embraces a popular visual language, engaging with quotidian objects and materials. While there are three different generations included in this show, there is a common anti-analytical, and even anti-linguistic quality to the work that privileges the experience of image over idea. Frank Benson's sculptures combine manipulated found objects with sculpted elements. Often a man-made container embraces an elaborate natural form. Benson's work also deals with the pictorial quality of the still life. For this show, Benson has created a sculpture of an overturned wooden bucket supporting a sculpted pear with a bronze melted candle resting in its spooned out cavity. These forms, both having evolved out of their function, create a balance in their contrasting complexity - the simplicity of the bucket and the richly detailed surface of the pierced fruit. Liz Craft's sculptures draw from a Los Angeles vernacular: a large cactus in an old shopping cart, a naked hippie smoking a pipe while strumming a guitar, a giant beaded curtain. A California native, Craft mines a familiar cultural landscape, referencing Hell's Angels, sychedelia, and other California iconography. Urs Fischer works in sculpture, drawing, and painting. Both the ideas and the materials for his work originate from his immediate surroundings or from the do-it-yourself center around the corner. Humor lends a lightness to Fischer's work, making it utterly accessible while he eludes being pinned down to the mere illustration of ideas. Mark Handforth's work has included twisted street lights and sign posts, burning candles balancing on scooters covered in colored stripes of dripping wax, and vibrant fluorescent light pieces. Handforth casts a romantic light on seemingly banal elements from the urban street. For this show, Handforth has made a fluorescent light tube sculpture of an abstracted sunset, blurred into horizontal striations as if from heat rising off the ground. Elliott Hundley creates densely layered collages that sometimes spill out from the wall and sometimes break free of the wall all together. Cut out photographs of figures taken during staged performances orchestrated by Hundley are collaged with petals of artificial flowers and fragments of endless baroque thrift store detritus. Despite their heavily embellished surfaces, these elaborate constructions are primarily pictorial and are actually experienced as drawings in the round. Jim Lambie uses such base sculptural materials as duct tape, doors, mirrors, record covers, safety pins and glitter. Lambie creates objects that directly reference the worlds of art and design, as well as the social environments associated with music. Lambie's combinations of familiar objects are transformed by a psychedelic palate from bed-sit trash to talismans. Chris Lipomi has created a sculpture constructed from a group of brooms bound together, each caught in a different stage of sweeping, tracing the physical space of a motion. There is frequently a performative aspect to Lipomi's work. In this instance the action is taken up in the sculpture itself. Lipomi's work takes the form of sculpture, video, drawing, and photography. Found materials are often incorporated into the work. These found elements act as cultural markers pointing toward a language of the familiar. Lipomi often combines these familiar objects with manipulated or sculpted elements constructing a sort of sculptural collage. Paul Sietsema's work consists mainly of film, sculpture, and drawing. For this show he will include a work of collaged watercolor and graphite drawing with hand written texts. Within this drawing, a notebook of texts unravels into the double ellipse of the infinity symbol. The spiraling text is transcribed from a newspaper article about the brains of taxi drivers becoming physically larger due to the amount of spatial knowledge they must retain. Organized by: Lisa Overduin Exhibition: July 10 - August 7, 2004 Gallery hours: Tue-Sat 10 am - 6 pm Regen Projects 633 North Almont Drive USA-Los Angeles, CA 90069 Telephone +1 (310) 276-5424 Fax +1 (310) 276-7430 Email office@regenprojects.com www.regenprojects.com |
 |