Exhibition dates: March 10 – April 21, 2007
Opening reception: March 10, 6-9pm

KAIROS!

Organized by Rob Thom, Kairos! features work by Brian Bress, Josh Callaghan, Krysten Cunningham, Aaron Garber-Maikovska, Nathan Mabry, Aaron Morse, Avigail Ross, Chris Lipomi, Jasmine Pasquill, and Jonas Wood. Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the “right or opportune moment, a time in between, a moment of an undetermined period of time in which ‘something special’ happens. In the context of this exhibition, Kairos encapsulates this “time in between” which although not clearly defined, is, reflective of a specific point and time when people are exploring primitive times and culture in relation to the present and future. For Thom, Kairos is about the past and the future and how each individual epoch and its particular sensibility informs the other.

Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s photographic documentation of himself engaged in performance explores instinctual and fluid body movements. Clothed in a svelte unitard or body stocking, Garber-Maikovska appears animalistic, albeit faux, as Cheetah while on the phone. The irony in this work is encapsulated through two conflicting elements—the primal and the modern, the natural and the mechanical.

Joshua Callaghan’s sculpture, Lots of Future Shock, is comprised of hundreds of books bearing the same name first published in 1970. The pop cultural manuscript postulated that due to the endless advancement of technology society could not process information quickly enough consequently, leading to an induced stupor. Callaghan became interested in accumulating copies of the book as a way to reunite the mass-produced objects after their commercial life. As a sculpture, Lots of Future Shock documents the wear and discoloration of each volume as well as its own history because incidentally, the future in Future Shock has already passed.

A portrait of a prehistoric palm-like botanical by Jonas Wood is posed and elevated on its support system, a pair of crates. The lattice design is painted in such a way that visually recalls a woven basket while the overturned and therefore abstracted script that adorns each crate bears a resemblance to pictography.

Jasmine Pasquill’s ink drawings that derive their compositions from nature have a pure and organic sense to them. Instinctual in execution and content, they conjure a diverse range of ideas and things from lore to medicinal and homeopathic remedies and shamanism. For Pasquill, the drawings function as an escape and means of coping with contemporary culture.

Wih Di (Empire), a large-scale wall sculpture by Chris Lipomi, is suggestive of a ritualistic alter that functions as a procession of materials and concepts. Merging together diverse visual elements, both domestic and exotic, with a formal structure verging on Western European Baroque, Lipomi explores the notion of ‘colonial collage’, a layering of cultural markers reconstructed through the lens of art history.

Although Krysten Cunningham’s woven sculpture entitled, Black Hypercube, is based on geometric principles, the 4-dimensional cube takes on an organic character through its materiality. The work’s multidimensional form evokes a multiplicity of objects from modern dwellings to imagined objects of the future such as satellites or more specifically, Darth Vader’s personal jet fighter, the TIE Advanced x1.

Timeline, by Aaron Morse, is a densely composed vertical collage that depicts events from the Big Bang to an imagined future. Disproportionate visual space is given to things here on earth, with groups of figures simultaneously ordered and chaotically jumbled.

Brian Bress’s photograph depicts a set used in his most recent video, Under Cover (2007). The constructed environment mimics the standard television color bars, referencing the technology of video production. However, the physically fabricated set’s use of traditional art materials (wood, canvas, paint) recalls production methods of the past. Additionally, Bress’s formal geometric arrangement of objects in the set hints at a myriad of historical moments, including bronze monoliths, minimal sculpture, color field painting, and futuristic constructions.

Nathan Mabry’s mud flap with Cuneiform script references past and present cultures and subcultures. Aesthetically, the thickness of the flap’s rubber materiality resembles an ancient tablet and therefore appears to be of importance. However, paradoxically the prehistoric lettering reads “Whatever” hence negating the success of translation with a modern term of indifference or detachment.
Avigail Moss’s multipart drawing is reminiscent of the Rosetta stone with its white script and fossilized forms on black ground. Conflating musical and visual elements along with references to Los Angeles’s own prehistoric La Brea Tar Pits, Moss’s piece appears like a treasure map or a blueprint document of some indistinct point in time.

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