Sixteen:One Gallery brings together works by four Los Angeles based artists –Kathryn Andrews, Chris Lipomi, Donald Morgan and Stephanie Taylor in MONGREL, an exhibition organized by Kathryn Andrews. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Saturday, August 11 from 7–10 PM. The exhibition will be on view through September 8, 2007.
The exhibition’s title encourages consideration of each of the artists’ interests in crossbreeding incompatible subjects. As an overarching rubric, “Mongrel” also underlines with a question mark the dynamic of the group exhibition where aspects of artists’ practices do and do not interrelate.
Kathryn Andrews exhibits discreet sculptures alongside installations and gestures that are interdependent with the work of other artists. By mixing “self-contained” objects that partake in the languages of Pop Art and Minimalism, with works that use strategies of appropriation and process, Andrews calls into question the experience of the art object and the exhibition – specifically, the degree to which meaning is determined by perceived contexts (historic and immediate).
Chris Lipomi marries cultural relics of bygone days, culled hunter/gatherer style from a wide array of sources, into fantastical objects and environments suggestive of a post-modern primitivism. Much like a colonialist engaged in pillage, Lipomi displaces his finds from their every-day source of origin, inserting them into new contexts that highlight their aesthetic qualities. His resultant combines – which have taken the form of sculpture, collage, installation and performance – while poking fun at the odd ways culture self-samples and reinvents itself also complicate popularly held notions of originality and authorship.
Donald Morgan investigates the paradox of human desire to know the “natural” world. In playful sculptures of things like rocks and snow with machines – fashioned from a wide-range of materials – Morgan investigates how through witness, collection and classification, humans alter the pure state of their subject of inquiry. Morgan’s discovery is an object in the form of question: What is being perceived, if the encounter of perception renders its subject other than what it is in its unperceived state?
Stephanie Taylor uses rhyme to suggest logical relationships between everyday objects and subjects, including animals and story-book like characters, that co-exist by chance. Her process involves linguistic game playing that results in farcical narratives that support unlikely pairings. Her work is both an illustration of her process and a materialization of its absurd by-products. It, like that of the other artists in Mongrel, toys with the viewer’s need to make sense of what he or she encounters.