“Touch the Moon” Exhibition

Louis B. James Gallery

poster for “Touch the Moon” Exhibition

This event has ended.

“And if space did not actually become a medium for universal communication, it was frequently associated with the idea of universal communication as an aesthetic, technological, and social ideal.”
Stephen Petersen, Space-Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-Garde

Louis B. James presents Touch the Moon, a group exhibition featuring thirteen contemporary artists whose work evokes outer space through handmade processes and materials found in the home. The exhibition includes drawing, collage, painting, photography, sculpture, and video. Touch the Moon was conceived of and organized by independent curator Kristen Lorello.

At the height of the Space Race in the 1950s, artists such as Richard Hamilton and Lucio Fontana explored the relationship between outer space and consumerism and outer space and technology. In contrast, many artists working today re-envision the cosmic through objects and materials that surround us daily. Doing so, they offer examples for the way ordinary humans might possess the hopeful, cosmic, or dreamlike promise of outer space here on earth.

Some artists propose the celestial as a component of earthly experiences. Josh Slater juxtaposes magazine clippings of scenes of earth and sky, compressing the experience of gazing towards the sky and standing on the earth within one visual plane. Similarly, Scott Alario’s photographs evoke imagination and play by relating the sun, sky, or planets to the day-to-day activities of a child, such as looking out from a playground tent. Appearing as if landed from outer space, Kelly Jazvac’s rock sculptures are actually unsettlingly terrestrial readymades, “plastiglomerate” formed by the fusion of oceanic lava and plastic from the Pacific garbage patch.

Other artists use common goods found in the home as the surface through which to seek a new dimension. David Malek incorporates painted sponges onto canvas, transforming the surface of painting into a cratered texture. Anna Betbeze applies gesso, dyes, watercolor, and ash onto wool, resulting in an alien planetary terrain. Anna Sew Hoy foregoes the rectangular plane, replacing it with a loose rectilinear structure of trench coat seams that record her act of cutting away at a surface. Demetrius Oliver uses broken umbrellas to create abstract drawings resembling the linear structure of a constellation map. Chris Caccamise approaches the household item through paper, cutting, gluing, and painting paper into household objects that he assembles into spacecrafts.

Adam Shecter and goldiechiari use contemporary technologies to reflect drawn imagery or to record a film set made of items found in the bedroom. In goldiechiari’s Cosmic Love, a constructed set of sex toys has been filmed and edited into a vision of orbiting planets, while Shecter’s moving animation of an otherworldly plant projects itself to the viewer as a hologram.

Conveying his interest in science fiction, Bret Slater distills the color palette of images he finds in comic books, science fiction, and fantasy fiction, into a bi-chromatic painting of orange and green. The theme of the book also comes to play in Kara Tanaka’s drawings on paper, inspired by a surrealist novel by René Daumal, while printed images of hand-held magazine covers provide the surface for Christian Dietkus’s lusciously painted ovoid portals.

[Image: goldichiari, Cosmic Love, 2008, video, 5‘15”, still image]

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Schedule

from December 12, 2013 to January 26, 2014

Opening Reception on 2013-12-12 from 18:00 to 20:00

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