10 May 2008 to 14 June 2008
Wednesday - Saturday 11 - 6pm
Opening Reception: May 10 6-9pm
See Line
1812 Berkeley Street
Santa Monica
90404
Los Angeles, CA
California
North America
p: 1 310 829 1727
m:
f: 1 310 829 3164
w: www.seelinegallery.com
See Line Gallery presents "The War Is Over," featuring new works by Liat Yossifor and Aaron Sandnes. To consider the war at home means to begin reminding oneself of the sheerness of its perception in contemporary culture. The words and images of war on the radio and the newspaper barely touch the emotional register of our communities. It seems already understood that our national investment in such a deleterious conflict has largely been met with impassivity and silence. In this, we experience a gap in the knowing of war and the being in the midst of war, a place where one's presentness is suspended, and a time where the peripatetic slogan "War Is Over" can be real. It is within this perceptual gap that Liat Yossifor and Aaron Sandnes posit an imaginary figure of momentary identification with the violence and suffering of others as well as an introspective consideration of the conditions of one's own occupied space.
In Liat Yossifor's small monochromatic paintings, the head of a figure is presented that is a subject of violence and pictured in various scenes of death. This figure is suggestively rendered in dark, claustrophobic spaces so as to not give away her identity and the precise conditions of her demise, but to leave the viewer repeatedly wondering how one is relating to the figure and the picturing of such violence. In wondering about the identity of the figure, weremember our own corporeality in relation to suffering and the wrecked distances between our comfort and their pain.
Liat Yossifor graduated with an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recently, Yossifor exhibited her new work: in a solo show at the Pomona College Museum of Art entitled "The Tender Among Us," in a group show at the Torrance Art Museum, and a project show at the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects entitled "The Dawning of an Aspect.
"In "The War Is Over", Aaron Sandnes' sculpture can be characterized in part by its disruption of the narrow thresholds through which one makes meaning and finds grounding in a certain reality. Using the immediacy of sound and the strangeness of de-contextualized objects, Sandnes takes cues from post-apocalyptic films, thetactics of torture and D.I.Y. broadcast radio. Sandnes earned a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine in 2003, and a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007. Exhibited both nationally and internationally, Sandnes recently had his second solo show "Strange Attractor" at Groeflin Maag Galerie in Zurich, Switzerland. His work will be included in the upcoming 2008 California Biennial organized by the Orange County Museum of Art.
