Support Structures
“Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists, corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens. Support Structures is a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.” -Céline Condorelli
Support Structures is an exhibition focusing on a less frequented, yet indispensable notion – that of support. While ‘support structures’ are fundamental to our everyday, these conversations are often displaced or disregarded. While they help foster the creative process, they are rarely seen as a means to an end.
Taking as their starting point the text from Céline Condorelli & Gavin Wade’s 2009 publication Support Structures, the six Los Angeles-based artists have assembled an exhibition of new and developing works that demonstrate their individual and collective responses to the subject and necessity of support structures. Working across drawing, painting, sculpture and video, the artists explore societal frameworks such as commerce and migration; the underlying myths that feed into our urban environments; and the immersion of technology into contemporary life, and the effects of this on human interactions and physicality.
In conjunction with Maiden LA – a county-wide network of art happenings throughout the month of August – Support Structures is part of a larger conversation about the network that can be found within the art world, one that is often unseen, but which offers encouragement, corroboration, and helps substantiate the ideas of individual practitioners.
untitled series
Scrambled Euphemisms
Salomeh Grace
Salomeh Grace uses interdisciplinary approach to consider relationships between context and form in how they inform identification. Salomeh currently resides in Los Angeles, where she works as the assistant director of Cirrus Gallery and Cirrus Editions Ltd.
Husk
You Inside Me
Sarana Myers
Sarana Myers’ work examines the body’s relationship, whether personal or universal, with technology, trauma and self through the use of various media including drawing, painting, film and sculpture. Her most recent work explores the hyper contemporary reframing of the body by technology, whether through the use of cell phones or medical imaging, to find that in this evolution there linger remnants of our primitive past. Even as the body becomes distorted and fragmented these images become the markings and intonations of the body politic. While using these themes in her work for Support Structures, Sarana also explores the body in crisis. She looks at the body as therapeutic machine and how it restructures itself to become a visceral fortress in times of chaos.
I Should Have Been a Boxer
I Should Have Been a Boxer (sculpture)
Motorscape
Cadmium Paper Roll Box
Box Stack of 3
Molly Schulman
Molly Schulman’s work dissects the absurd and often amusing meaninglessness and dysfunction of technology, language and perception. Through painting she explores how as our visual culture becomes more and more saturated with imagery, our language has similarly been reduced to pictorial exchanges. In her latest sculptures, Molly uses boxes as a way to connect convenience culture with pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon where one perceives patterns where there is none. Additionally, she is interested in the obstacles of navigating Los Angeles without a car and how in doing so, life slows down while seemingly inconsequential moments arise and magic is revealed. Through simple materials and clumsy construction techniques, Molly’s sculptures emote a human or experiential quality that lends itself to the Support Structures theme.
Mobile Vista Girls
Anna Tanner
Anna Tanner’s work investigates the hallucinatory potentialities found in the everyday that offer support as people seek validation in a contemporary climate where man’s place in nature is not certain. In her latest series, these moments of possibility are represented as subcultural phenomena, where the phenomena has been built into the structure of the oil painting, protruding from the surface, but otherwise invisible and not directly a part of the surface subject matter. These landscapes differ, but often they work in terms of binary relationships, for example urban characters engaging in contemporary activities, unaware or disconnected from their actual surroundings. The peripheral glimpse is a support structure that reminds us about the ambiguity of perceptions and the nature of mankind to infinitely imagine and discover.
ATV Sunset
Fountain Tower, Echo
Desert Latter Run
Weight (Walsh)
Patricia Valencia & Emmett Walsh
Patricia Valencia and Emmett Walsh’s work deals with the cultural structures and frameworks that arise from labour, capital, migration, and colonial shifts. Rather than showing the personalities that form the environments of our societies, their films and sculptures offer quiet views of the resulting activity and developments, in both states of rise and fall. They are interested in the intent and legacy of human built structures and their proximity to, and consumption of their immediate natural surroundings. Rather than the support structure that “bears, sustains, props, and holds up” their moving images and sculptural assemblages query the relentless necessity for materials being reincarnated and architectures being recontextualized.
La Floresta (still)
Riviera Maya (still)
Los Angeles (still)
Los Angeles (still)
Los Angeles (still)
