Downtown, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Deep Superficial Perceptions
CES GallerySamantha Bittman, Julia Bland, Matias Cuevas, Alex Ebstein, Aaron Farley, Doty Glasco, Erin Morrison, Loring Taoka CES Gallery is pleased to present Deep Superficial Perceptions, a group exhibition that surveys ongoing studio explorations of material experiments in two dimensional formats. The history of image making inevitably begins with painting. This process becomes increasingly complicated as technology evolves, as perception is altered by media, beginning with the invention of photographic methods and now rapidly changing with the flow of the Internet. Traditional art forms such as photography and painting now regularly commingle, often seamlessly, with plastic, concrete, textile, veneer, rubber, and other household and industrial materials. These complex material decisions express a love of the tactile and a nod towards ever-evolving artist experiments, such as minerals ground into linseed oil or silver salts suspended in gelatin. The artists in the show – Samantha Bittman, Julia Bland, Matias Cuevas, Alex Ebstein, Aaron Farley, Doty Glasco, Erin Morrison, and Loring Taoka – demonstrate a dedication to material formal exploration that reveals a prolonged interest in how material becomes idea. Taoka meditates on perception through seamless sculptural interventions on industrial materials. Doty Glasco’s photographic silk prints depict the landscape as a symbol of geologic time embedded into an ethereal material that ripples with the viewer’s movements. Farley’s interest in photography as an expression of the unreliability of perception results in the manipulated display of photographs that similarly provokes viewers to question their physical relationship to the object. Using the now ubiquitous texturized rubber of yoga mats, Ebstein creates interlocking collages of faux-modernist abstract compositions that metonymically shift the viewer into a contemplation of contemporary self-reflexivity. Cuevas sets common nylon carpeting on fire, melting it into abstract paintings with paint thinner before actually painting onto each surface. Bittman weaves her own textiles to create surfaces for painting, disrupting the hierarchy of two dimensional materials and allowing paint marks and woven patterns to be equally important. Bland, also known for her textile paintings, presents smaller meditations on weaving and painting more akin to geometric drawings or artifacts used in ancient ceremonies. Morrison creates concrete reliefs that are stamped, dyed, and treated, resulting in an object that vacillates between painting and sculpture, image and object. Integrating unusual materials into wall based works requires a playfulness and resourcefulness familiar to all these artists that provides each viewer with space to question their own perception.