FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NOW
March 15 – April 26, 2008
Opening Reception Saturday, March 15th 7– 9 pm
Robin Hill
Tanja Rector
Pamela Grau Twena
William Ransom
YaYa Chou
Curated by Yossi Govrin
ARENA 1
A project of Santa Monica Art Studios
3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA. 90405
Directors: Sherry Frumkin and Yossi Govrin
(310) 397-7456, fax (310) 397-7459
E-mail, sabine@santamonicaartstudios.com
Web site, http://www.santamonicaartstudios.com
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 - 6 pm
(l. to r.) Robin Hill, Tanja Rector, Pamela Grau Twena, William Ransom, YaYa Chou
ARENA 1 is pleased to announce NOW, a group exhibition curated by Yossi Govrin, which includes the work of five contemporary artists. The exhibition opens on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 with a reception from 7–9 pm and continues through April 26th.
The title of the exhibition reflects the idea that all the works have been created specifically for the space and that they represent one particular idea each artist is addressing at this moment in her/his practice. While the art world debates whether painting is alive or dead and an artist of the stature of Tony Smith describes his work as “presence” rather than sculpture, there really are no rules for what contemporary art is now. NOW is just what is happening – and it exists in the context of all the schools of art practice that came before.
Robin Hill’s pieces rest in a state of suspended animation, speaking of possibility and potential rather than articulating a finite resolution. The subject of the work is work itself. Loosely construed accumulations of utilitarian materials or images figure as inventories or collections. Presumed hierarchies between disciplines are dissolved through their interchangeability and service to each other. The vantage point of these pieces is from inside form, describing the hidden order that underlies all living things.
Hill received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. She has received grants and awards from the NEA, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work is in the collections of the UCLA Hammer Museum, The Fogg Art Museum, and The Richard L. Nelson Museum. She resides in Woodland, California and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and is Associate Professor of Art at UC Davis.
For William Ransom, direct hands-on interaction with the material comes first and fore most. Using found and reclaimed wood and allowing it to retain pieces of its own history, he makes sculpture that engage the viewer through memory or nostalgia, reference to human forms and the play between man and nature. He grew up in a rough-sawn world on a dairy farm in Vermont where a physical, working relationship with various materials was a daily practice. The work in this exhibition expresses his affection for wood for its “corporeality with our own bodies, and how easily its vitality and strength can remind us of the biological processes of growth and decay, loss and regeneration, consumption and excretion that we, as living organisms, are as inevitably susceptible to as everything else alive in this world.” Ransom is pursuing his MFA at Claremont.
YaYa Chou’s sculptural installation is a depiction of her relationship with her sister after she passed away. Instead of drawing sources from a memory of her, Chou creates works based on her sister’s “symbolic reappearance in my life at present and my desires to maintain our sisterhood.” The installation “A Woman Tired of Life” was based on excerpts of an Egyptian poem her sister wrote. Using her sister’s hand writing as a starting point she attempts to fathom her sister’s emotional activities during the planning of her suicide.
Other sculptural works are physical representation of their intangible relationship. “My connection to her has elevated to a level at which it is difficult to grasp in a fixed frame of time and space. I wish to translate these experiences into visual forms to help me comprehend and memorize them. This is not a series of works about mourning the lost, yet a celebration of the sweet tingle that emerges in our lives.” YaYa Chou earned her MFA in animation at Cal Arts. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Tanja Rector calls her work “memory maps” which she created through a fascination in the population growth in the town in the Netherlands where she grew up. She began these works by studying publications of the “bos atlas.” In these wall works, she built up a surface with layers of acrylic and water-based mixed media, each one clear or tinted. Starting with an ink drawing of a map of the town as she had remembered it, she cut into this surface, removing areas that she then filled with color. The smooth monochromatic areas are organized more by memory than accuracy, holding common or easy spatial relations in suspense, “in that double sense of preservation/stillness and anticipation/tension.” Two sculptures of house-like structures made of wax and cement sit atop wheels, their compact mass and scale rendered toy-like and impermanent by the ease with which they could be moved away. Rector lives and works in Santa Monica. .
Pamela Grau Twena’s large installation titled “Fragile Fragments of Beauty” appears as a color field that reveals itself as a pattern of painted fabrics curled into waves of color and shadow. The work is poised between chaos and control, impulsivity and structure. It is an attempt at piecing together fragments of in a search for beauty. Using dyes, silk and poly-resins, this new work is constructed with by-products of a repetitive process that includes creation, destruction, evaluation, re-construction and surrender. Pamela Grau Twena lives and works in California.
