Janne Larsen
Big Haul
Sept. 2-11th, 2011
IMAGES

Sibyl Wickersheimer
Big Haul
Sept.16-25th, 2011
IMAGES

Art21Interview with
the artists

 

WEEKEND is excited to present Big Haul, a site-specific "call-and-response" exhibition between Los Angeles-based artists and award-winning set designers, Sibyl Wickersheimer and Janne Larsen. The project will consist of two separate installations at WEEKEND. Larsen's installation will be exhibited first, opening Friday, September 2nd, and running through the 11th.   Wickersheimer's response will open on Friday, the 16th, and run through the 25th. This will be Wickersheimer and Larsen's second exhibition of Big Haul.  

Big Haul is a collaborative dialogue between two artists whose background in theater informs their artistic practice. Each manifestation of Big Haul is informed by the previous, creating a traveling, ongoing dialogue between exhibition space, gesture, material, and form. Utilizing mass-produced materials such as tape and netting, each artist maps out and territorializes the exhibition space for themselves, responding to the space and to what the previous artist created.

Taking into account both artists' shared backgrounds in theater, Larsen and Wickersheimer utilize these materials to intuitively explore the absence of the "stage" in these site-specific works. Without the demarcations of constructed "real" environments of sets and actors to perform their roles, Larsen and Wickersheimer are free to respond to the more nebulous and idiosyncratic "stage" of the gallery or exhibition space, creating an open-ended setting in which the viewer may travel and participate. Ultimately, the gallery visitor becomes an "actor" in the installations, thereby inverting and dissolving clear designations of audience and performer and completing the performance of the installation itself.

These ideas have become at this point tenets in the history and continued practice of installation art. In a curious way, however, Larsen and Wickersheimer's starting point in theatre and subsequent expansion into the traditional framework of installation's immersive environment contextualizes this notion of the theatrical and art even further, adding another layer of complexity to the experience of installation.  

Janne Larsen has designed theater, opera, dance and installations throughout Los Angeles and New York. Her work has been seen at Symphony Space, Bootleg Theater, Pomona College, Cal State L.A, Caltech, CalPoly, Los Angeles Municipal gallery, HiLite gallery, Workspace, BetaLevel, Telic Art Exchange, Outpost for Contemporary Art and The Washington Museum of Art.

Sibyl Wickersheimer is an artist, set designer, and an Assistant Professor in the USC School of Theatre. Her set designs have traveled throughout the U.S. and internationally in Hong Kong, Australia, Greece, Spain, and Mexico. Sibyl has exhibited photography and installation art in Gallery 825, Bergamont Station, Andrew Shire Gallery, and the Pacific Asia Museum among other galleries in Southern CA.