Project 21: Sandeep Mukherjee
January 20 – February 22, 2004

Sandeep Mukherjee work links playful intent and sensuous materiality with intellectual rigor, exploring through evocative figurative abstractions the illusive terrain of subjectivity, cultural specificity, and hybridity. He brings together a multiplicity of references—the Baroque, Pop Art, Minimalism, Pattern and Decoration, Indian miniature paintings, illuminated manuscripts, classical figurative sculpture—to explore phenomenological relations among light and space, to question traditional notions of representation, and to alter profoundly our expectations of art and consciousness.

In fields of glowing color, Mukherjee draws exquisitely rendered figures and forms that hover and float through an enigmatic space. He creates these poetic visions by means of a precise and painstaking process—sheets of Duralene (a translucent vellum-like paper) are airbrushed with brilliant hues, then the opposing surface is delicately drawn with fine pencils, and both sides are embossed with scribing/etching tools. For this exhibition, the artist presents a new monumental drawing installation that further expands the scope of his work by adding new layers of meaning and new devices of scale. Using the same techniques as previously, the artist has now shifted his content into an arena that conflates Asian landscape painting conventions with a postmodern image of subjectivity as presented through the shifting scale of the figures and the poetic ambiguity of the narrative content.  More...

Blue Sky: Visionaries, Romantics, Dreamers
January 20 - April 4, 2004

Sharon Ellis, Four Seasons, 1999, alkyd on canvas, 38 x 30 inches, Collection of Christopher Grimes, Santa Monica.

This exhibition explores ways in which a select group of contemporary Southern California artists employ fantastic or imaginary subject matter to mediate the interaction between the unconscious realm and the real world. The term "blue sky," defined as that which is idealistic, impractical, or visionary, is a term also used by designers and architects to note the brainstorming or conceptual stage of a project. The exhibition proposes this concept as a common theme linking diverse artists.

The artists included in "Blue Sky" transform their inner visions and experiences into something highly inventive and often painstakingly rendered, creating idiosyncratic narratives that examine our ambivalent relationship to nature and culture. Throughout the history of art, numerous artists have looked inward, to the creative imagination, in an attempt to comprehend the greater mysteries of the universe through the extrapolation of dream states and the invention of personal cosmologies and imaginary realms. Others have turned their imaginative energy outward, mining the fertile realm of history, popular culture, science, and science fiction in order to make sense of the social landscape.

The exhibition is organized by Steve Comba, assistant director, and Rebecca McGrew, curator. Artists include Russell Crotty, Sharon Ellis, Nancy Jackson, Tom Knechtel, Kelly McLane, Vally Mestroni, and Hillary Mushkin. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays by Amy Gerstler and Kristina Newhouse.



Project 22: Shirley Tse
March 6 - April 4, 2004

Shirley Tse, Power Towers (detail), 2004, High-density polyethylene, therapy putty, polystyrene, found plastics, Installation size variable

For almost ten years, Shirley Tse has worked exclusively with plastics—synthetic polymers, Styrofoam, polystyrene, and vinyl—to create enigmatic sculptures and installations that explore the connections between the organic and the industrial. In this exhibition she presents a new sculptural installation, Power Towers, which extends her research into the cultural history of plastic, particularly the notion that it is the quintessential modern material. In addition to exploring plastic’s formal qualities as a substance that can be or do almost anything, Tse plays with both its sociological and cultural references as everyday consumer packing materials for transport and shipping and with its philosophical associations with fluidity, multiplicity, paradox, and contingency. Tse’s work puts plastic—a material often discarded as secondary to the object packaged—in center-stage, exploring the ways in which its blank, identity-less surface, its malleability, ubiquity, and functionality can be used to evoke worlds of possibility. More...