PREVIOUS EXHIBITION
Kelli Craig, "Umbra and Penumbra"
June 3rd - 26th, 2011
Opening Reception Friday, June 3rd, 7-10 pm
WEEKEND is pleased to present Umbra and Penumbra, an exhibition featuring the works of Kelli Craig. The show consists of three bodies of work that explore the dialogue between photography and painting and stems from a studio practice comprised of the photographic study of light upon polyester holographic diffraction films. The three sequences illustrate the results of her experiments.
During her time as a Quality Control Manager for a holographic film manufacturing company, Craig performed tests on holographic films, ensuring that no flaws went unseen after optical embossing techniques and before and after metallization. It was during this time that her intense observation of the surface of the films created an obsession with the reflective properties of the materials. Craig began her investigation by photographing the films in her studio, arranging lighting to enhance their holographic surface, noting their unique qualities of reflection and diffraction. Folding and crumpling the films increased the dispersion of light, creating rainbow-like patterns upon the surfaces as well as blotted-out areas of reflected hot spots. The series, Stray Light, is the result of those formal studies.
In the series, Manipulation of Seduction, Craig responds to the glamour of the photographic surface that she created in Stray Light by painting over certain areas of the photographs. She does not entirely obliterate the underlying imagery, rather, by cancelling out certain areas of the image with space-flattening paint, she heightens the abstract formal qualities and constructs a dialogue between flatness and space, image and reality. This phenomenal relationship produces an immediacy, a reterritorialization of the photographic with the application of paint. The paint does not converge with the photographic, it denies the glamour of the photograph's seamless surface with eruptive shards of negation. In this way, the two mediums are placed in constant conversation.
This exchange is carried a step further in the series, Phase Three. The abstracted photographic planes are removed from the painterly frame and photocopied images of the crumpled holographic paper are placed whole and objectified in landscape dimension. Tactile monochromatic clumpy paint is configured in parallel to the crumpled forms, mimicking the shapes created by multiple-generation photocopies; the relationship remains unsettled and in flux.
In her work, Craig triggers a self-conscious approach in the viewer when confronted with the photographs in Stray Light, the overpaintings in Manipulation of Seduction, and the corresponding forms in Phase Three. What we begin to understand is that what we see is a flattened field of carefully represented information that combined may lead us to truths not inherent in any individual medium.
Kelli Craig studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze, Italy, and has shown at various galleries in Italy, Los Angeles, and Orange County.
W E E K E N D
4634 Hollywood Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90027
Official gallery hours of operation: 11-6pm, Sat&Sun, and by appointment. The work is also available for viewing if the gallery lights are on.
contact: info (at) weekendspace (dot) org
