Rochele Gomez
Giacometti In My Head
Opening Reception is Sunday September 25, 4-7pm
September 25 – October 16, 2016
“Slab!” -Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, 1953)
Maybe more than with most materials, you come to know brick as a barrier but also as something that gets built up, laid, one by one in successive rows of red rectangles and grey mortar. It goes up. Imagine laying slabs of brick in a perfect circle around your body up to your entire height, layer by layer. That might grow to feel dark and claustrophobic. Or even more unlikely, imagine pushing a Giacometti sculpture, the big bronze recognizable tall ones, across a floor. That might feel heavy or injure you.
This hypothetical forming is the closest to what I can describe Rochele Gomez’ new body of works, and it does so in intentional and political terms. Gomez asks, “What kind of living situation does not allow for light?” By way of entrance rather than by barrier, she plays with the image of a brick wall in the form of stained glass. Bricks is made up of eight sections of meticulously assembled red and brown stained glass placed over the existing gallery windows, allowing in only their hot red glow to illuminate the space. This glow bleeds onto the same wall where Gomez has projected a video featuring the re-imagination of Swiss sculptor, Alberto Giacometti’s, most iconic figures. Framed in Flowers is made from cardboard and a single frame shot, where an elongated figure is pushed across a living room floor and is at once recognizable in it’s Giacometti esque form but then slowly becomes more squiggly, more long, more abstracted. Bordering this scene are fiber optic flowers. Normally borders are used as devices for containing, corralling, or refining. Again, Gomez flops this orientation. The flowers, presumably relics of her childhood which you might find on a nightstand, do not contain but instead open up to humor and obscurity.
What are the relationships between Giacometti and a living room floor, between Gomez and Giacometti, between fiber optic flowers and brick? These bodies, these things, bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of languages (as taxonomies, as methods, as systems, as vernaculars, as images, as histories) is part of an activity, or a form of life, which gives language meaning. They force us to think about what we are seeing (something taken for granted even in art) and to celebrate a marriage of ideas and records of experience, which are magical and meaningful in their difference.
-Amanda McGough
Rochele Gomez received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine (2014) and BFA from California State University, Long Beach (2006). Recent exhibitions include, Caza: Rochele Gomez, Margaret Lee, Alejandra Seeber at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (2016), and A Fireplace and Its Mirror at LAXART (2015). She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present new work by Rochele Gomez. Organized by Amanda McGough.
Opening Reception is Sunday September 25, 4-7pm
September 25 – October 16, 2016
