FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT
Lorraine Molina, Director
213.621.4055
BANK
125 W. 4th St. Los Angeles, CA 90013
Gallery Hours: TUES. – SAT. 11am-5pm
lorraine@bank-art.com
http://www.bank-art.com
Sprawl
David Hamill, Ann Diener, Bari Ziperstein, Sebastian Lemm & Keith Lord
July 15 - August 19, 2006
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 15, 6 – 8PM
"Sprawl" critiques man's impact on nature and the landscape. With the effects of urbanism and overpopulation, the landscape has transformed itself into a strange hybrid of the artificial and the natural. This exhibition brings together five artists working with photography, works on paper and sculpture that are influenced by the human mark on the land.
David Hamill's large-scale drawings intend to mimic a system of organic growth. Using software for architectural design, Hamill creates groups of box like structures resembling a city grid then extrudes and stretches the shapes into an abstraction of piercing forms and planes. His process mirrors the growth of a city over a period of time; beginning simply yet growing beyond control.
Sebastian Lemm's photographs of trees reflect a hybrid between architecture and the organic. Much like David Hamills' process, Lemm also extrudes architectural forms from preexisting planes. Rather in Lemm's work, the shapes grow from leaves and shrubbery taking on the effect of hidden or camouflaged architecture within a natural terrain.
Santa Barbara based Ann Diener creates densely layered environments in her large-scale drawings. Stretching a long as 96," these drawings reflect the transformation of the California farmland by the migrant worker. For Diener, the landscape has become a place of transition with marks left by the worker in the form of objects, traceries and ghosted images. Rich with complexity, the drawings manifest as dynamic and otherworldly.
By contrast, Bari Ziperstein uses landscape and architecture as metaphor in her collage work. Common threads in Ziperstein's work are ideas of over consumption and consumer excess. For this exhibition, Ziperstein creates a series of collages that depict idealized domestic scenes selected from home decor magazines. Within these scenes she adds stark white beams mutating from objects in the room, creating an environment that is overgrown, monumental and artificial.
Known for creating miniature worlds visible only through a peephole, Keith Lord creates a new pair of sculptures using mirrors to enclose and reflect. Continuing his signature mark of using miniatures, Lord fabricates two landscapes - one that is natural and the other urban. Their small scale forces the viewer in, yet one finds their reflection over powering these small and vulnerable worlds.