LOS ANGELES, CA.- Edward Cella Art + Architecture presents Death and Life of an Object, a three person exhibition featuring sculptures and installations by Lynn Aldrich, Laurie Frick and Tim Hawkinson. The transformation of everyday objects and materials into artworks has been a pursuit of all three artists in this exhibition. Whether they are materials found on the street, at a garage sale or at Home Depot, each of these artists has utilized the abundance found in a modern consumerist society to their advantage.
The transformation is, however, the key to this exhibition and their work process. By re- contextualizing and altering the materials or objects, the artists have made them their own. Reference to the object’s or material’s original use may be relevant to the newly transformed artwork, but it is what the artist has done with these items that induce new life, meaning and purpose. Curated by Carl Berg, the exhibition offers insights into innovative strategies for additive sculpture and installation.
Los Angeles based artist, Lynn Aldrich, features several sculptures using everyday materials including a large-format work entitled, Hydra Hydrant (2009). The work is a direct expression of the possibilities of a particular, ordinary material to take on transcendent meaning through complex associations. In Greek mythology, the Hydra is a many headed monster, a water snake, growing back two heads for each one cut off, killed by Hercules who cauterized its reproducing tentacles. For Aldrich, the do-it-yourself plastic downspouts are constructed into a “hydrant” which seems to emerge from the ground in a spurt of growth or energy. For her, it represents the problems associated with a consumer-driven culture and the increasing urgency of unchecked growth within a limited natural environment. Simultaneously, it is a humorous, yet wryly elegant “fountain” which blesses the viewer with a kind of implied renewal.
Texas based artist Laurie Frick adopts a daily regimen of self-tracking that measures her activities and body, and in doing so shapes a vocabulary of pattern used to construct her intricately hand- built works and installations. Her quantifiable patterns, like her heart rate, the duration of her sleep or body weight are some of the metrics that inspire her colorful and complex works. In Walking, Week- 42, Frick constructs an immersive collage recording the length and directions of her daily walks with paperback book covers and scraps of paper she finds en route. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a large format installation assembled from the surplus color and pattern samples of an Italian manufacturer of laminates. Corresponding to her systematic tracking of her moods, the mural of kaleidoscopic color chips reflects a familiar human rhythm and replays something inherently unnoticed back into the physical world.
Tim Hawkinson is recognized for his transformation of everyday materials into complex sculptural systems though surprisingly simple means. Hawkinson is an alchemist bringing life from the inert: magically transforming common material into living artworks. This exhibition features three series of his sculptural work that explore the human body. The first are portraits made from sculpted foam and found eyeglasses. These three dimensional wall mounted works suggest topographical maps but also are humorous caricatures with their shallow reliefs and bent eyeglasses depicting facial contortions.
Hawkinson's continued exploration of his own body is featured in the two remaining works in the exhibition. The first is Foot Quilt (2007), a large-scale sculptural work that is an enlargement of his actual footprint. Draped from the gallery wall extending onto the floor, the quilt presents an outline of his foot embroidered as its pattern. Especially made for the exhibition, the other work is the artist’s latest piece and represents an enlargement of his fingers posed in an unusual position. Accurately portraying his appendage, the details of every line of his fingerprints are revealed.
