August 8–September 5, 2009
Opening Reception August 8, 7–10 pm
Until we come to one that reminds us
Paintings and sculpture
Kristina Faragher, Christine Frerichs, Amy Green, and Curt LeMieux
Kristina Faragher |
Christine Frerichs |
Amy Green |
Curt LeMieux |
Until we come to one that reminds us is an exhibition of four artists whose works reflect an engagement with materials in a landscape of personal and political trouble. Kristina Faragher, Curt LeMieux, Amy Green, and Christine Frerichs use materials as surrogates for body, place, psyche, and the gap between emotion and language.
The paintings and sculptures in this exhibition suggest a substratum of guilt and loss in American psychology, the unease of belonging to a nation engaged in imperialist wars that have not ceased despite popular objection. The works subtly couple a domestic sensibility of the brutal landscape of war in a queasy interplay of long-time American themes.
Kristina Faragher’s hundreds of small, craft-store balsawood “keepsake” boxes are strategically smashed, reconstructed, and enameled with painstaking attention to detail. The pieces are then forced back into the boxes, no longer able to contain sentiment. Faragher’s work suggests the violence inherent in frustration at the limits of knowledge, cycles of violence and creation, and the potential recuperation of those who have been disfigured and forced back into a cultural system that must contend with them.
Christine Frerichs uses charged materials—active carbon, cement, dirty turpenoid—in order to call up the penetrable split between the conscious and unconscious and the personal and cultural impact of repression. Images are cultivated on the surface of her paintings to be immediately rejected and wiped out. Some images are barely allowed to form, while others have been laboriously plied. Frerichs rehearses the connection between personal and cultural conflicts, between what is spoken and what is denied. The incompatibility of materials echoes the way in which emotion and language disengage at the height of tension, neither being enough for the other, both resonating apart.
Amy Green’s felt paintings delicately try the relationship between craft and abstraction. The paintings recall metaphors of stain and place, of an uneasy bargain between surface and support, and of the liminal space of the 70’s household, wherein women understood the murky possibilities between liberation and reduction in the tight confinements of the physical world. Green’s tentative placement of the frayed felt surfaces against the hard edges of the stretcher bars belies a hesitation in the juxtaposition of craft against its heavy modernist counterpart.
Curt LeMieux’s sculptures and mixed media drawings allude to the witnessing of bodily trauma within the tragedy of mediated warfare, linking barbarity to everyday cultural referents--remnants of curtains, socks, pencils, and shoes. Materials are handled with a delicate aesthetic that opens up a place into which the sense of both the disjunction and union of violence and security can flow. Surveying LeMieux’s small drawings and sculptures, one has the sense of the viewer as mute witness to a concatenation of banal and terrible events that have been reviewed, acknowledged, and dismissed.
ARTIST AND CURATOR BIOS
Kristina Faragher, Artist
Kristina Faragher has exhibited works of art individually and collaboratively in a host of media including video, installation, film, and performance. Selected venues and festivals include: The Oakland Museum, Oakland, California; The Autry National Center, Los Angeles; The REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles; Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica; Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico; LA Freewaves Ninth Annual International Media Festival, Los Angeles; The Fifth Festival International de la Image in Colombia, South America; and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus. Publications include: The Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, Yosemite Art Of an American Icon (UC Berkeley Press), and Extensions: Online Journal of Embodied Technology at UCLA.
Christine Frerichs, Artist
After receiving her B.F.A. from University of Arizona, Christine Frerichs lived in Brooklyn, then moved to California to complete her M.F.A. at UC Riverside. She also attended the intensive residency, Painting’s Edge. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Riverside, Tucson, Boston, Chicago, and New York and has been published in the 2005 Northeastern Edition of New American Paintings. Exhibitions include “New Work: Christine Frerichs,” Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside; Painting’s Edge, Riverside Art Museum; Works on Loan from the 21st Century, Riverside Art Museum; and My Buddy at UCLA New Wight Gallery.
Amy Green, Artist, Curator
Amy Green received her B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Tennessee in 1995 and an M.F.A. in Studio Arts from CalArts in 1997. Her paintings have been shown nationally and internationally and appear in numerous private collections. Exhibitions include Rolf Ricke Galerie in Cologne; the Neues Museum in Nurnberg; Galerie Monika Reitz, Frankfurt; Kunstverein St. Gallen in Switzerland; Evelyne Canus Gallery, Paris; Cirrus Gallery, Susanne Vielmetter, Sea and Space Explorations in Los Angeles; and Cohan Leslie and Browne in New York, among other venues. Reviews include: New York Arts Magazine, Art Issues, the Basel Art Fair Catalogue, and Neues Museum Catalog Essays. Recent exhibitions include “New Works” at 24Hr Gallery, “Let the trees decide”, at Glendale College Art Gallery, and “Cosmos Factory” at Cirrus Gallery. Amy Green is represented by Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Cologne, Germany.
Curt LeMieux, Artist
Curt LeMieux received his B.F.A. in Painting in 1998 and his M.A. in Sculpture in 1999 from the University of Wisconsin at Superior. He received his M.F.A. in Drawing and Installation in 2001 from the Claremont Graduate University. His works have been shown nationally and internationally and appear in numerous private collections. Exhibitions venues and events include The Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus; The Sixth Festival of International Images in Manizales, Colombia; The Berkeley Video and Film Festival in Berkeley; The Santa Monica Museum of Art in Santa Monica; Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles; and Sea and Space Explorations in Los Angeles.
Asher Hartman, Curator
Asher Hartman is a painter, performance installation artist, and filmmaker. Hartman’s work has been exhibited extensively in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Venues include the Whitney Biennial in collaboration with Charles Long and Wilderness, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, The Images Festival (Toronto), Recontres International (Paris/Berlin), and The Beijing Open International Performance Festival. Solo and collaborative works in Los Angles include exhibitions at Track 16, LACE, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Highways Performance Space, Sea and Space Explorations, and New Image Art. Hartman served as co-director of Crazy Space, a gallery for experimental art and durational performance at the 18th St. Arts Center in Santa Monica (2000-2005) and teaches at the University of California, Riverside. He received a B.A. in Theater from UCLA and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from CalArts.