FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Maddy LeMel: “Embedded Histories"
Arthur Tress: “Wheels on Waves--California Skate Parks”
July 16 - September 3, 2005
Artists’ Reception: Saturday, July 16, 6-9 PM
Louis Stern Fine Arts
9002 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069
310-276-0147, Fax 310-276-7740
E-mail, <gallery@louisstern.com>
Web site, <http://www.louissternfinearts.com>
Gallery hours, Tuesday – Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-5pm
Maddy LeMel, "Plus One", 2005, plex boxes, wire, paper, thread, 25 x 31 x 7 inches.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Maddy LeMel: Embedded Histories
Collage, sculpture and installation artist Maddy LeMel is the most meticulous of scavenger/poets. A significant number of her primary materials such as thread, bits of photos, old nails, rice paper, wood, wire and transistors, would appear to be the seemingly useless remnants of daily routine to less inventive eyes. However, as transformed by LeMel, the objects function as collaborators in a provocative articulation of a delicate yet utterly tireless force of life.
LeMel’s pieces reference contemporary phraseology to marked effect. Housed in wire-framed plexiglass boxes, these works consist of a variety of unsprouted grains and paper. In Weapons of Mass Destruction, there is nothing more destructive than nails. Most of this new work showcases a cloudy textured plexiglass, providing the compositions with a dreamy half-veiled field. In a poignant balancing act, each work animates a new physical reality even as memory of the old remains intact.
Ms. LeMel’s work is included in numerous public and private collections and has been featured in exhibition throughout California. She exhibited in our Imaginary Realities/Surrealism Then and Now group exhibition in 1996 and this installation marks her first solo show with the gallery.
Arthur Tress, "Skater on Crest, California", 2003, silver gelatin print, 10 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present the photography of Arthur Tress: Wheels on Waves--California Skate Parks
As a young man traveling the world after graduation from Bard College in the early 60’s, Arthur Tress initiated his professional career as a photographer marketing his ethnographic documentary images. In all his subsequent and celebrated imagery, Tress has retained his documentarian’s gift for finding the extraordinary or the provocative moment inside a seemingly ordinary routine. This deftly surreal eye, along with the artist’s early formal training as a painter, are showcased to mesmerizing effect in his evocative new studies of the skate park culture.
Skaters and their silhouettes carve elegant lines across the steeply sloped skate ramps. Jagged graffiti patterns offer a textural counterpoint to the smooth arcs cut by the riders. Sunlight floods the scuffed background surfaces and the skater’s shadow appears to be sailing through the ramp itself. In all the photographs a strong sense of implied movement somehow co-exists with the transcendent esthetics of a dream.
The artist’s previously published photographic series include The Open Space in the Inner City (late 60’s), Dream Collector and Theatre of the Mind (70’s), Facing Up (late 70’s), Teapot Opera and Fish Tank Sonata (80’s), Hospital (late 80’s) and Requiem for a Paperweight (90’s). Mr. Tress was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972 and was the subject of a major retrospective at the renowned Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 2001.
Mr. Tress’ work is included in numerous private collections and the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
