Letha Wilson, Kimberlee Venable, and Youmna Chlala, through Saturday, June 29, 2013
Art in General presents solo exhibitions by three young New York-based artists whose works are inspired by landscape from America’s mythic west to modern Cairo, to the surf at New York’s Jones and Long Beaches. Using photo-based sculptures and video, the site-specific projects charge their architectural environments, investigating our universal and personal relationships to memory, nature, and site.
Letha Wilson: Landmarks and Monuments
6th Floor Gallery
Kimberlee Venable: All this Comes Back
Storefront Project Space
Youmna Chala: Days of Being Wild
Musée Miniscule
Letha Wilson: Landmarks and Monuments
Letha Wilson’s new series of photo-based sculptures explore the magnetic pull of the American West, alluding to landscape’s intrinsic role in our own myths of reinvention, endless possibility, and inevitable promise. Photographs of expansive canyons, mountains, and vistas are tied physically to the gallery, in some cases embedded directly into the walls, floor, and ceiling, blurring the lines between image and object. Using architecture as both frame and armature, Wilson reclaims the photograph, exploring the medium’s inability to encompass the site it represents.
Kimberlee Venable: All this Comes Back
All this comes back presents a unending video loop that fills Art in General’s Storefront Project Space. Filmed on location in Jones Beach and Long Beach, Long Island, the black and white video stretches and skews tidal imagery, positioning us at the water’s edge. Waves approach and recede, creating a hypnotic rhythm that is both common and uncanny. Though filmed at specific beaches, at specific times, Venable has created a work that denies its specificity, becoming a stand-in for our relationship to the ocean, and the vastness of the world at large. All this comes back, seduces passersby, pulling us closer, and suggesting that a small sliver of an all too familiar site is enough to make us take pause.
Youmna Chala: Days of Being Wild
For her Musée Miniscule project, Youmna Chlala presents a new video, Days of Being Wild, filmed on location in Cairo, Egypt. The video documents a walled balcony where two small children play soccer, illuminating the vertical mosaic of city life. Though universal in subject matter, Chlala’s video lovingly documents modern Cairo, where life and leisure occur above the city, behind walls, blurring public and private space. Presented within the compact interior of the Musée Miniscule, the intimate size of the Days of Being Wild mirrors Chlala’s original vantage point, highlighting her voyeurism, and compounding how an audience witnesses, and is complicit, in an innocent private act.
For media press release and more information, visit www.artingeneral.org or contact Maureen Sullivan at maureen@redartprojects.com.
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