CLAUDE COLLINS-STRACENSKY

May 20 - June 24, 2006

In the Project room Claude Collins-Stracensky will show a group of images and objects that deal with the mediation of emotional experience through material and form. Working from where formalism opens onto an emotional understanding of material and space, Collins-Stracensky explores the shared human experience of sex. The sculpture, “Untitled (sex),” channels the emotional and transcendental experience of sex. Its foundation stems from a formalism like Ikebana and a minimal spiritualism like the spaces built by Donald in Marfa or Jorge Oteiza’s investigations in finding spirit in constructed form.

Collins-Stracensky draws also from the traditions of assemblage, like Rauschenberg’s Combines, and the found object as a way to link personal kinesthetic understandings of how we navigate the space around us.

Born in 1975 in Lakewood Ohio, Collins-Stracensky studied in Cleveland, New York and San Francisco before moving to Los Angeles in 1999. He received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2003. He had a solo exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and has appeared in various group shows in New York and Los Angeles.