26 Apr 2008 to 14 June 2008
Hours - Tuesday - Saturday 10 - 6 pm
Opening reception: Saturday, May 3, 2008, 6-8 pm
Sandroni Rey
2762 S. La Cienega Blvd,
CA 90034
Los Angeles, CA
California
North America
p: +1 310.280.0111
m:
f: +1 310.280.0808
w: www.sandronirey.com
Sandroni Rey is pleased to present an exhibition of Soo Kim’s newest body of work “Superheavies.” This will be Kim’s 3rd solo show with Sandroni Rey. “Superheavies” is a suite of 17 photographs; a series of portraits interspersed with several images of backlit trees reflected in the windows of a church in Palos Verdes, CA. The title refers to a discovery made by a team of Russian and American scientists who created new chemical elements, called superheavies due to their enormous atomic mass. The new elements opened new possibilities at the furthest edge of the periodic table of undiscovered elements. Kim takes these scientific breakthroughs into consideration as she points to unknown dimensions of time and space in her photographs.
Kim’s portraits freeze moments of a subjects’ continuous movement as she traces imagined images onto a glass table with her fingertips. Each unique photograph is differentiated by cuts-outs made by Kim that relate to the posture of the woman in each piece and range from representational images of the natural world to more graphic depictions that suggest movement in time and space. Each photograph in the series is linked to the figure’s movement as it comes alive in a type of dance that flows through the photographs. In this way, each photograph is reminiscent of the next. In the same way that a dancer’s steps are linked together to become fluid choreography, each step in the Superheavies series is experienced within the context of the series as a whole.
Placed between the portraits are shots of Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, CA, a glass church designed by Lloyd Wright as a “tree chapel” that considers the trees as a frame for the architecture, and the space created therein as sacred. These uncut photographs work in tandem with the photographs of the young woman to consider a type of liminal space present in both architecture and photography.
Soo Kim received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and now lives and works in Los Angeles. She teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2004 California Biennial. She has also shown at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and the Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.
Sandroni.Rey Project Space
lan Cooper & Anna Craycroft Fiction Friction
Heather O'Rourke: If I try hard to really consider how often my character Carol Anne and I were walking that tightrope, and how many screens it was happening on, or in, its dizzying.... There might well have been a moment, a minute, a few seconds even when I was never there, or here, at all.
Emmanuel Lewis: I guess there is a parallel in my experience, I similarly came to see myself through a doubling or multiplication.. But in my case the effect was more a suspension of time than a continual replay. By inhabiting the role of Webster Long, I was able to repeat and extend my early childhood indefinitely. - Excerpt from script of Fiction Friction
Fiction Friction: The Big Bang and the Bonsai Tree is a rumination on New York based artists lan Cooper and Anna Craycroft's shared attraction to the trappings of childhood. Cooper and Craycroft's allegory for this state were the careers of 1980's child actors Heather O'Rourke and Emmanuel Lewis. Dressed up in proper role-play with Craycroft as Webster and Cooper as Carol Anne Cooper and Craycroft sit on a mock television set to discuss in character the parallels of their childhood experiences.
The artists chose O'Rourke and Lewis as subjects for their collaboration specifically because of the psychological and physical toll that their on-screen portrayals had on the actors, literally halting their growth. Already developmentally stunted due to a physiological condition, Lewis' portrayal of the Webster character cast him in a role 5 years younger than he was, replaying the years he had just grown out of. O'Rourke died tragically of an intestinal rupture during the filming of the final Poltergeist film, abruptly ending her life at age 14, and forever cementing the entanglement of her own identity with that of her fictional character. The cultural representation of childhood is a common theme in the artwork that Cooper and Craycroft make independently of one another, and tor Fiction Friction they wanted to explore their shared seduction to repeat this period of their own lives. O'Rourke starred in the "Poltergeist" series as Carol Anne Freeling, and Lewis was the star of the 1980's television sitcom "Webster".
lan Cooper is a New York based artist who has shown at Sandroni Rey once before. He has also exhibited work in group shows throughout the United States and Europe, including most recently "News from USA," Annarruma 404 in Naples, Italy, "The Line of Time and the Plane of Now" at Harris Lieberman in New York and "EAF 2006" at the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. He and Anna Craycroft, also based in New York, have collaborated on several projects before. Craycroft recently opened a solo show at Tracy Williams, Ltd. In New York and has shown extensively in group shows including "Greater New York" at PS1 and "Art in the Parks," a citywide installation of projects in NYC parks.
