Contemporary Los Angeles, ultimate poster boy for the distended urban condition, has a secret fetish for fixed big boxes, fantasy castles and gated communities. Fragments of medieval echoes appear through the endless fabric of the Hinterlands. The archetypal sprawling city can often be found worshipping the contained and feeling out the edge. Emerging against a backdrop of flat–lining cultural ubiquity, default density assumptions and environmental neuroses, comes a New Romantic Urbanism of figures and fields, Emerald Cities and flowering asphalt.
As the cat climbed over the top of
the jamcloset first the right forefoot
carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot
— William Carlos Williams, Poem (As the cat)
A cat reflects our emotions like a mirror; the subtlety of a cat’s movement can describe time and space in thousands of ways. A Point of View of a Cat introduces the cat as a narrative form, as well as a vehicle for exploration of material and space. This two-fold exhibit delivers the representational and the abstract as two independent vocabularies, which operate on their own terms, yet sometimes intersect each other in the actions of a cat. As hu- mans, we may never know the exact cat experience. Therefore, the exhibit focuses on cat behavior as it is visible to us, and specifically on how cats animate, fragment, and abstract everyday objects. Works included in the show can be divided into two categories: cat scenes and cat artifacts. The first is narrative, representational, animated and seductive. The second is abstract and material-driven; it vaguely refers to household environment and objects we would like to engage with if we were indoor cats (food, fabric, wood, concrete, plastic, etc). The show was inspired by the philoso- phy of Richard Rorty, which advocates that simultaneous use of multiple vocabularies results in a richer experience of the world.
Group Exhibition
Gregg Fleishman and Nana Tchitchoua present new works in the exhibition Seeing-Being-Dwelling, a mixed-media exploration of the world around us, the world within us and our situation with regard to them both.
Nana Tchitchoua’s new drawings and paintings are vibrant with life, luminous kaleidoscopes romantically intertwining humans and wildlife. Her work offers us a visual embrace on the way to an inner world, an up close and personal experience with birds and animals. Textural stencil works made from scraps comprise the graphic environments – a magical coexistence of elements.
As a continuing theme of the previous collaborative exhibitions such as The Kindergarten for All Agesî, the new works presented in Seeing-Being-Dwelling seek to navigate cultural divisions and fixed boundaries in order to discover ways of simpler and better living. This exhibition is dedicated to all the glimmers of awareness, possible solutions, and constructive approaches.
Opening reception: Sunday, June 14, 2009
*****