Accumulation. Buildup. Mass. Pile. Heap. Most collections of art in group shows are cobbled together from favorite things or known quantities: friends and friends of friends or other organic couplings, whatever is laying around. The mixtures are often haphazard, faulty; the exhibitions look like a bunch of stuff, roped together under some shoddy intellectual premise.
Let's step back and try something else. The organizing principle here isn't a fake idea transferred to an agglomeration of things, but, as the title says, a harmonious mix of objects.
No tomfoolery or phony assertions. It's a bolder statement to put things together that flow and change and shift in imperceptible, even graceful, ways, things that are together because they belong together. We all know that couple that shouldn't be dating, yet they're the happiest amidst all the other half-hearted stabs at love.
And the artists... Recycled and recast records and books transmogrify in the hands of Michael Brown. Ceramicist Shio Kusaka formalizes forms. Exorciser of influence and exotic reconstructor, Chris Lipomi platforms out. Tia Pulitzer connects the deer with the headlights under a surreal and slick automotive finish, though this time her strange creature catches gold. Neal Rock shapes squirming sculptures that splatter on the wall like the back splash of a slasher film. Torbjorn Vejvi extracts intimacy from abstraction with his naked sculptural mysteries. Jason Kraus reclaims the warped remnants of common objects and accidental music. Conceptualist Ceausescu survivor Miklos Onucsan maintains his sense of humor.
There's some cryptic connection, some tension between surface and the internal landscape, something very LA, but let's just call it like it is. An unlikely love affair, the graceful unity of disparate things, it's quite simply better to say only this: a harmonious mix of objects.
- Andrew Berardini, March 2010
