About this Event
On May 16, join us for a conversation with artist Carrie Paterson and Christopher Michno (Assistant Director of Pitzer College Art Galleries).
This artist talk is held as part of solo exhibition, Beneath the Earth, the Sky. Join us to learn more about Paterson's exhibition on display in the IAO gallery and her creative practice.
Beneath the Earth, the Sky uses the sculptural idea of inversion to contemplate the current moment within a history of contemplative practices. Miniature landscapes and olfactory sculptures serve as mnemonic devices for “home” and temporal experiences. Glass vessels construct models of the cosmos and cognitive psychology — the processes of humans’ understanding of self within the contexts of body, society, world, universe, and the imagination of the invisible, immaterial beyond. Several works are specifically designed for spacefarers, featuring orientation and navigation in combination with olfactory chemistry and cues. The artworks embrace open systems, unpredictability, and feature some degree of stochastic decay.
Carrie Paterson’s art-technology practice uses research and haptic experience to explore memory, renewal, and sensory experience. She enjoys a good critique of phenomenology as it reveals itself in nationalism, cultures of extraction and accumulation, scarcity capitalism, extortion, violent ideologies, and blood-and-soil Heideggerianism. Using displacement, temporality, and nomadicity as counter valences to phenomenological readings, she traverses meanings of place and territory with a spatial philosophy that redirects the outward journey to the internal, grounds the metaphysical in the secular, and pays close attention to the human-earth/nature “metabolic rift” (Kohei Saito) while investing in cultures of care.
Via periodic orientation in language and mapping, Paterson recalls familiar natural forms and building materials, combining them with speculative devices humans use to deepen and expand perception of the world. Her collaborative partners are plants and trees — those architects of our pasts and our futures — as well as stones and the wisdom of the inner body, which are on a temporal continuum with the energy of the cosmos.
The other important subject in her work over the past 25 years is gravity – its latent effects, our attempts to escape it, and the temporary freedom of weightless experience. Implicit in the inability to completely excise gravity from her sculptural vocabulary is failure, wherein surrender and dissolution eclipse production.
ABOUT CARRIE PATERSON
Carrie Paterson, born 1972, grew up in a small mountain ski town in Colorado, former home to the Ute tribe before nineteenth-century silver mining. Her father and grandfather were Viennese-Jewish exiles, survivors of WWII; her mother’s family were immigrant farmers from Schleswig-Holstein who cultivated land in Minnesota before the Dakota Wars, with her grandfather “called” to become a Protestant minister later in Iowa. She is currently based in the diversely aggregate population of Los Angeles, which includes members of the Gabrielino and Tongva tribes, along with descendants of other ancient settlers on this land. Paterson completed her MFA at UC Irvine in 2001 and has a previous Literature degree from Yale. Awarded several grants over the past 25 years, she also loves being a finalist: for the Howard Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture, for the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, and twice a finalist for the IAO’s Sadakichi Award for Experimental Scent. She currently volunteers in the bonsai nursery at the Huntington Gardens and, with her husband, runs an animal leisure home in Eagle Rock. See more about her work and read her art critical texts at: cpworks.org.
LOCATION
Location: We are located in Los Angeles’ historic Chinatown neighborhood, on a pedestrian street that also hosts galleries, souvenir shops, production companies, design studios, and two very cool parrots. The IAO is wheelchair accessible.
Street Address: 932 Chung King Road Los Angeles CA. 90012
Voicemail: (213) 616-1744
To find us: Chung King Road is a pedestrian-only road that runs parallel to Hill Street, between Hill St and Yale St. See more information here: http://artandolfaction.com/visit
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Institute for Art and Olfaction, 932 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, United States
USD 0.00
