Landskin

Landskin

Sophia Allison, Autumn Harrison, Li ‘n Lee, and Jaime Ursic

August 21– September 24, 2010

Opening Reception: Saturday, August 21, 6:00–9:00pm

Brand Art Library Art Galleries

Glendale Public Library

1601 West Mountain Street

Glendale, CA 91201

Phone: 818-458-2051; Fax: 818-458-5079

http://www.brandlibrary.org/

Gallery hours: Tues./Thurs., 12-8pm; Wed., 12-6pm; Fri./Sat, 10am-5pm.

Closed Sun. & Mon.

The Brand Art Library Galleries is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring artwork by Sophia Allison, Autumn Harrison, Li ‘n Lee and Jaime Ursic. Through installation, painting, printmaking, and sculpture, Landskin explores emotional and psychological environments, both observed and imaginary.

Sophia Allison’s art is inspired by the organic environs of her childhood home in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina and her neighborhood in Los Angeles. Her sculptures and installations reference specific places and points in time, both physical and psychological. The “Blue Ridge” series consists of structures built from cardboard scraps. Their forms undulate like abstracted mountain ranges. Untitled (Shadows) is comprised of watercolor paper from which abstracted shapes are hand cut; their cast shadows are based on local vegetation around her Los Feliz neighborhood. Allison’s work addresses the connections and disconnections that result from revisiting the past, including the fragmentation of memories and experiences that meld and shift over time.

Autumn Harrison is interested in the discarded, decaying and abandoned materials of city life. She is influenced by the scaffolding of an unfinished construction, a half-eaten cake in its decorative box, or puckered balloons pulling each other across a sidewalk. Together these elements create an aesthetic language that conveys something about a city’s hidden emotional landscape. Her current sculptures and installations borrow from the colors, shapes, and physics of city detritus and are created from a variety of materials including plastic sheeting, acrylic paint, wood, cement, latex balloons and bakery foil.

Li ‘n Lee’s over-life-sized paintings-cum-sculptures evoke mythical islands full of impossible canyons, valleys and roiling waves, but also draw upon the very real setting of Los Angeles and all that it entails, including but not limited to palm trees, the people, the ocean, freeways and urban graffiti. This most recent body of work began as a translation of Lee’s longstanding pen-on-paper drawings of miniature, imaginary cityscapes motivated by a fascination with maps and the complex juxtaposition of chaos and order within metropolises. For her new painting-sculpture hybrids, Lee first begins with a free-form paint pour onto linoleum flooring which she eventually cuts out and adheres to wood. Drawing on her paper-making background, Lee cultivates a new process in which thin sheets of dried latex paint are treated like paper as she meticulously cuts, tears and pastes tiny organic shapes. Lee explores the manipulation and potential of the material, including experimenting with frosting bags to pipe out acrylic paint. Lee’s new works, with their multi-layered references and meanings, are like the city of Los Angeles itself—full of disparate people, places and things that are seemingly contradictory but ultimately complementary.

Jaime Ursic takes her inspiration from her environment; the phenomenon of the mundane vista and timeworn surface connected with the places she inhabits. In her recent body of work, Ursic reinterprets the SoCal landscape by drawing on her introspective observation of a location distilled to its most microcosmic elements. Working in a variety of media including painting, drawing and printmaking, Ursic’s work demonstrates an emphasis on process. Each mark serves as a visual homage to her craft— building up surfaces, layering subtle color tonalities, printing and embossing textures. Her images invite the viewer to peer closer and discern the drawn marks and delicate patterns incised, pressed and layered as surfaces.

Media contact: Cathy Billings, Gallery Manager, 818-548-2713, CBillings@ci.glendale.ca.us