Space + Land at FOCA
Fellows of Contemporary Art presents Space + Land
Curated by Chelsea Dean
August 25 –November 2, 2018
Featuring work by:
Chelsea Dean / Susan Feldman / Susan Logoreci / Aili Schmeltz
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 25, 5-8 pm
Space + Land is an exhibition featuring the work of four female artists who employ architectural concepts to construct new realities. With the City of Los Angeles and its surrounding geography as their muse, each artist responds to the rich history of the built and natural environments around them that are simultaneously forming and eroding. Their use of transitional subjects emulates the gridded landscape through order and entropy, balance and fragility. By manipulating and reimagining these spaces, the artists create systems that offer alternative experiences of the grid.
Chelsea Dean’s drawings and mixed media collages embody her attraction to systems that erode. By gathering and incorporating discarded elements from abandoned homesteads in the remote reaches of the Mojave Desert, she layers and builds them back into her collages, assigning new meaning with the addition of gold elements and embellished patterns. She carefully documents then reconstructs these spaces, offering the viewer a spatially rich experience that responds to the original site. Memorializing architectural histories, Dean emphasizes sites in transition to re-contextualize and illuminate their inherent value.
Susan Logoreci’s colored pencil drawings offer viewers dizzying versions of the city where, from a bird’s eye view, the architectural grid and the buildings within it become simplified and warped. By methodically layering colors in thousands of tiny shapes, Logoreci’s work reveals the massive expanse of the city and its individual components. Her drawings depict the underlying possibilities and anxieties produced and sustained in our shared spaces.
Susan Feldman’s visually complex assemblages mimic the provisional structures that she’s drawn to. Her practice mirrors the process of building, intuitively weaving and layering raw materials and imagery to construct personal narratives. The works manifest as installations, drawings, and mixed media projects. Feldman utilizes the grid through both medium and subject, calling attention to the pattern and rhythm of Los Angeles’ frenetic energy.
Aili Schmeltz’s sculpture utilizes the Cartesian grid as a framework, referencing architectural drafting systems and modernist art icons. The work simultaneously exists as a form imposed on the space, while also offering a grid through which the viewer experiences the exhibition space. Schmeltz articulates the absence of space and form via a dramatically different approach through her large-scale drawings. Her monumental works envelop the viewer with their seamless gradations and shifts in spatial orientation, where lines deviate and bend into pattern and form. The atmospheric light and space of the desert landscape coalesce as graphite on paper, recalling minimalist systems and twilight of the desert sky.
Special Event Workshop: Sunday, October 28, 1-4 pm
A hands-on workshop inviting the community to build and reinvent architectural spaces using raw materials provided by the artists. Artists Susan Feldmdan and Chelsea Dean will perform an all vinyl DJ set during the event.