Press Release:
MARISA SAYAGO:
"OF FEARS AND LOVES / DE MEIDOS Y AMORES"
View Invitation
MAY 1 - 30, 2013
Artist Reception Saturday, May 4th, 2013, 3pm - 5pm
Conversation with the artist: 4pm
LA Artcore at Union Center for the Arts
120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Gallery hours: 12-5pm, Wed-Sun.
Through techniques in clay of modeling, hand-building, casting, slab-and-pinch along with drawing and painting in various media, Ms. Sayago investigates and maps the direction of the human form relative to humanity's ever-morphing fabric. Her works arise liminally, out of personal and collective dialogues that is to say, her works mesh the unstable interior and exterior self into a combinative whole and are given character, definition and range through her chosen mediums.
Early in her career, Sayago trained not only in observational and technical formats apprenticing under Argentinean sculptor Alfredo Cantarutti and, during her undergraduate studies at West Texas A&M, but as a gymnast gaining a firsthand account of the body's physicality and its mechanics. Following her undergraduate studies, Sayago made the transition from the foundational skills she had honed in her craft toward questioning its representation and how to capture a particular feeling, circumstance, condition or event by distorting or exaggerating the figure in various ways.
This evolution from bare skills toward incorporating them into a functional framework of conceptualizing, adjusting and executing manifests as a systematic approach that Sayago developed throughout the duration of her MFA studies at the University of North Texas. Sayago states that this development discovered in graduate school, led her work to, "...become more solidified and the approach became more systematic in that I think about the work more in my head before it goes on the paper, canvas or clay."
P. Reddy
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Press Release:
SUTHAT PINRUTHAI: "THE LAST CHAPTER"
View Invitation
MAY 2 - 30, 2013
Artist Reception Saturday, May 4, 1pm - 3pm
Conversation with the Artist: 2pm
LA Artcore Brewery Annex
650A South Ave. 21
Los Angeles, CA 90031
Suthat Pinruethai has a history of relational art, taking an interest in the representational space of artist and audience. He reshapes the gallery to hold both object and presence, preferring to create a stream of time than to completely hand off our awareness to the artifice of a finished object. He often displays personal effects, sometimes in assemblage, (an exhibit in 2010 with Rirkrit Tiravanija featured a recreation of his bedroom), accompanied by performance. During that exhibit his voice increased the personal concentration of the event, chanting as performance the Buddhist suttas he ordinarily performed each day, in the privacy of his home. Looking at the relationship between viewer, the artist's private and public life, and the nature of the art space, his work oscillates between the very real and the very representational, as he seeks to break down the 'fourth wall' that includes the viewer’s own perceptions.
There is an overt urge in Pinruethai’s work to demonstrate that no element of our life is any less important than another, uncovering an objectified time, and more importantly, trying to illustrate the substance and nature of our own attention. From meditative practice, a great deal of discernment is developed that reveals the distinction between an isolated object we are observing, and the layers of importance and meaning, emotion and projection we pour on top of everything we see. He is very interested in stacking relational elements, demonstrating that nothing, not even the language we use, stands alone when it comes to human consciousness, and revealing how involved we are in the ‘being’ of the everyday objects and ideas that surround us.
Pinruethai’s work is also informed by a relationship to language… as a northern Thai, the artist experiences the English language as an exotic collection of objects and ornaments, every bit as curious and full of discovered associations as his assemblage works. Ranging from curiosities of the past that are laden with postcolonial meaning (for their manufacture and culture-specific nostalgia), to the simple delight of wordplay that can only be fully appreciated by someone for whom English is a third language (his first is Thai, his second is Pali, the ancient language of the earliest Theravadan suttas that he recites each day), he has arrived at a wholly organic way of deconstructing language. In addition to his installation, he will perform a work that involves text projected against his body. This recalls Jeanette Winterson's aesthetic work Written on the Body, which opens, "Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille." Pinruthai has found himself not in a space of analysis, but through his travels between cultures and modes of expression, he found a physical relationship to subjects that are most typically taught in a theoretical framework. For this artist, the curious intersections of time, object, language and meaning are sensual and best understood by encountering them within a living (lived) frame.
R. Seitz
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