ARTIST STATEMENT: BARI ZIPERSTEIN

My artistic practice is engaged with the architectural history of Los Angeles and the effect of consumerism on urban landscapes. I have produced site-specific sculptures, installations, collages, and photographs that examine and deconstruct the relationship between spaces and the consumables that occupy and adorn them.

Many of the sculptures reflect an interest in three types of materials: architectural beams and columns that serve as the building blocks of modern architecture; objects of modern commerce which are partially consumed and abandoned and the various packages and containers used to store consumer goods.

Standardized storage dimensions delimited my early work. I placed cardboard boxes in serial arrangements that highlighted their modular utility. The configuration was designed to maximize space, but at the same time question the need for spatial order and the demand for storage, itself. Each box was meticulously tagged, catalogued and inventoried prior to its placement. The boxes were later reconstructed and rearranged, including as tightly ordered collapsed stacks of raw material sandwiched between pallets; and as ephemeral architecture, leaned against the gallery wall and coated with bands of neon paint, a metaphor on how color is used in product design to allure consumers.

My current work continues this investigation of America?s consumer society and its material surplus and waste. Over the past year, I have created a series of small collages that deconstruct idealized domestic scenes that were culled from home decor magazines from the 1950s thru the present, including the popular commercial publications Better Homes & Gardens and Architectural Digest. I transform posh interiors into absurd but highly structured environments by laying in paper cut-outs of stark white architectural beams that protrude, contort and escape out of everyday functional objects, such as chairs, tables, chandeliers and dish ware. These works on paper function as studies for sculptural interventions on a grand scale.

I am especially interested in the way material things reflect socioeconomic strata. For example, I have built minimal, geometric sculptures around outmoded lamps, mass-produced wine racks, kitschy figurines, and ornate picture frames from thrift stores specifically because they were designed to be cheaply purchased and quickly discarded, for the ultimate and continual profit of their distributors. Consumers have attached or declared no value - sentimental or economic - onto such products, yet they create a constant demand for new production. By shopping for cast-off and resale goods as sculptural material, I am hyper aware of, but only nominally participate in, the marketplace.

For my last project, I realized the collages in three-dimensional space of an actual domestic setting, my Spanish style apartment built in Los Angeles in the 1920s. Over fifty site-specific sculptures, made of foam core and plaster, mutated out of decorative and functional objects, rendering their temporary environment overgrown, monumental, illusory and artificial. I lived among the sculptures for three months and literally negotiated the space in awkward and precarious ways on a daily basis.

Because the sculptures were temporary and site-specific, they were documented in large format color photographs. The photographs replicated the quality of a high-end magazine spread because the work was a comment on the utopian lifestyles proffered by home décor magazines. The photographs illustrated decoration consumed by architectural outgrowths—an interior design gone very much awry. These absurd structures, which lacked function and sustainability, were a direct response to consumer excess in America.

 

ARTIST STATEMENT: KAREN ATKINSON

My work for the past 20 years has used revealing aspects of history, which have a profound impact on our contemporary culture today.  In the current climate where many believe history has no relevance, I find myself continually returning to those aspects that are often hidden or misrepresented in the “official” recordings for posterity.  In my varied and diverse approaches to making art; installations; public, curatorial and web projects, the context of the work has an impact on the work’s relationship to the viewer.

My work ranges from the context of the street to museums, movie theaters, to presentations of sound through parking meters.  Often focusing on the trappings of power and the rituals needed for it’s effect, or evoking the traditional distancing of the supplicant by those in power, giving voice to those who are often unheard, or revealing the power of language through history.  The work takes on various forms intended to draw in the viewer as co-author and witness, create new and unpredictable cycles of thoughts and associations, providing an experimental chance to challenge one’s perceptions, perspectives and assumptions.

My current project, “Prisoner of Love” is a multi media installation with a projection of a 41 minute Director movie on a glow in the dark screen made by the artist.  There are bus benches for comfortable seating, and a sound track with multiple interviews, music and sound.  When the images are projected on a glow in the dark screen, it charges the screen so that when the image changes, it leaves a trace of the image before it, often affecting the image which comes next – in a way that history does the same.

“Prisoner of Love” is a multi layered story about the my great aunt and uncle, who were married illegally in 1934, in Tijuana, Mexico.  She was Caucasian (Danish American), he Japanese American.  They were included in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.  Although my grandfather grew up with a Japanese American as his best friend, when his sister married, she was shunned by her brothers and sisters.  When the local newspaper found out about their marriage a few years later, it hit the front pages of the local newspaper.  This project is a complex layering of stories, revealing the contradictions inherent in the lives of this once close knit family, and their subsequent “recovery” from extreme bouts of racism. 

Art remains as a strong contender of how we share our thoughts and ideas. Throughout history, art has survived the tidal wave of information, and remains an unpredictable source of imagination.  It has the possibilities of changing one’s thoughts, opening new ideas, and borrowing through received ideas so common to our educational system.  I have no grand illusions that art will create a revolution in the traditional sense, but have witnessed the powerful changes it can make in an individual.  Just one new idea can change a persons’ perception.  The world may not change in an instant by art, but it’s slow and insipid spread into the active part of our brains lives to tell the tale.  It may leave the studio and make it’s way around the world, and yet come back to the studio where any thing can happen.

The use of materials in my work is calculated.  I am often looking for avenues of the unexpected.  An ironic twist to images or things you might expect.  Or their combinations.  Provoking a participant to new and perhaps unexplored territories.

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