Layering by Beanie Kaman and Kristan Marvell at LA Artcore, January 2020. Image courtesy of the artists.
LAYERING
Beanie Kaman
Kristan Marvell
with soundtrack by Zane Wood
January 9-30th, 2020
Opening Reception - Saturday, January 11th, 6-8 pm
LA Artcore at Union Center for the Arts, Little Tokyo, Downtown L.A.
120 Judge John Aiso St, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Media Contact: Pranay Reddy at info@laartcore.org or 720.480.7115
(Los Angeles) LA Artcore is pleased to present Layering, a collaborative and experimental exhibit by Los Angeles artists Beanie Kaman and Kristan Marvell. This exhibit finds each artist's work maintaining fluidity between their signature bodies of work while opening up their works to physically interact across the gallery.
Marvell's architectural light projections filter through and onto Kaman's collaged textiles creating a new context for both to be seen anew. Independently of one another, each showcases their recent developments: Kaman with her handsewn textile works–previously buoyed in the imagery of everyday domestic objects–now leaps into geometric abstraction through diverse textile sources, threads, and construction techniques. While Kaman's works still are rooted in narratives of interior states of being, their abstract forms are generated through experimentation of formal possibilities: the textile's material traces and the relationships between scale, color, contrast, shape, texture, and pattern. Expressing boundarilessness between painting and sculpture, Kaman's works are presented unstretched both on walls and freely suspended throughout the galleries.
Marvell's raw sculptural expression of nature's grandiosity and magnitude were conveyed decisively using large blocks of styrofoam and a heat-wire gun. The process of calving the styrofoam is not unlike the automatist impulses of the Abstract Expressionists and created for dramatic forms that changed with the conditions of light. In the artist's Paint the World project, Marvell's inspiration with light took him to the far reaches of the desert to project light of all primary and secondary colors onto natural rock formations. The results are captured in both photography and video, and through its stark and immediate visual dialogue, position humanity's relationship to nature as enchanting, surreal, and hopeful. Marvell will present works in both photography and sculptural light installation.
Together, the artists of Layering's choice of collaborative conditions ask the question of how does our context change when boundaries of presentation and individuated expression become fluid? The exhibit will activate these questions and more as their works shift between individual works and overall environments. Adding further narrative dimension to this exhibit will be an audio element by Zane Wood that layers both composed music and ambient sounds.
Viewers are invited to the opening reception party on Saturday, January 11th from 6-8 pm.