Current Exhibition

JUNE 27 - SEPTEMBER 6, 2009
Klara Kristalova

To enter a gallery populated with Klara Kristalova’s creatures is to enter a vaguely sinister and weirdly personal fairy tale. The hand-painted ceramic and bronze figures speak directly to the artist’s interior life. A ceramic bust of a woman besieged by moths and another of a woman with vines coming out of her eyes where tears should be both vibrate with the clarity of a dream image you can’t forget, but whose context you can’t remember. The absurdity of the imagery is paired with simplicity in presentation; works are placed on white cloth-covered tables, plain pedestals or directly on the floor. This combination, along with the intentionally handmade quality of her sculptures, gives the work a classical presence despite its idiosyncratic nature.

For her exhibition at SITE, her first in a U.S. museum, Kristalova will push the boundaries of her practice. One gallery will contain new works, some created especially for this exhibition, which will envelop the viewer in Kristalova’s idiosyncratic world. Anchored by a display that will present works like a whimsical cabinet of curiosities, this portion will include ceramic and mixed-media sculptures of varying size and scale. A second gallery will present sculptures culled from the last few years of Kristalova’s production, offering the viewer a chance to engage with a range of works. Overall the exhibition will offer a survey of approximately 45 pieces.

Kristalova is part of a generation of artists who came of age in the 80s and 90s when the cerebral, impersonal rigors of modernism were being questioned. Within this context, the emphatically handmade and figurative character of her work should be seen as a critique of modernism. Working alone in her studio in rural Sweden, Kristalova has created works that have garnered international attention. She has had one-person exhibitions at galleries in Stockholm, Paris, and London, and has completed several important commissions for public sculpture in Sweden. Born in 1967, Kristalova lives and works in Norrtälje, Sweden.

Funding
This exhibition is generously funded by the Board of Directors and by The American-Scandinavian Foundation, The International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS), as well as by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This announcement is partially funded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax.

Klara Kristalova
Days and Nights, 2007
Stoneware; 62 x 55 x 48 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris

JUNE 13 - SEPTEMBER 6, 2009
Ruben Ochoa

Los Angeles artist Ruben Ochoa investigates the ways that class and race are expressed in the built environment. Drawing equally from international conceptual practices of the last thirty years and the funk and humor typical of the West Coast scene, he makes photographs, public art interventions, sculptures and installations from concrete, rebar, dirt, metal fencing, asphalt and related materials. His best-known project, Fwy Wall Extraction (2006-07) injected photographic murals into a slice of LA’s Interstate 10, alluding to the landscape that the retaining walls blocked from view, and creating the illusion that sections of the wall had been removed. For Ochoa, retaining walls may provide protection, but they also very obviously reference borders, and an effort to keep some things out of the way. Retaining walls are meant to prevent erosion; to keep nature from intruding on the man-made space of the freeway.  Physically and symbolically they reinforce the divisions between neighborhoods, often drawn along class lines, created by the construction of the freeways.  Ochoa uses the tensions latent within the material structure of the built environment to engage larger geo-political and social issues. In his work, Ochoa shows an interest in exploring issues of containment and transgression within a number of spheres.

SITE Santa Fe had commissioned Ochoa to make new work for his first major one-person museum exhibition.  Ochoa’s installation at SITE will build upon the foundation of his works like Fwy Wall Extraction, while exploring new directions.  This work will continue his engagement with ideas such as the conflict between the natural and the built environment, the real and the illusionary, and the disruption of the sanctity of the art exhibition space.  Monumental sculptures will meander through the galleries like giant rebar and concrete creatures, creating a very visceral experience for visitors.  Taking their form from the material of the exhibition space itself, these sculptures will be partially constructed from the concrete of the gallery floor.  While the elegance of their form demonstrates the hand of the artist, this exist in tension with the feeling that these sculptures are autonomous objects that have forcibly dislodged themselves from the fabric of the museum.

A recipient of grants from the Creative Capital and Rockefeller Foundations, Ochoa was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He has exhibited his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, among other venues.


Funding
This exhibition is generously funded by the Board of Directors as well as by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This announcement is partially funded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax.

Ruben Ochoa
If I had a rebar for every time someone tried to mold me, 2007
Rebar, annealed wire ties, dobbie blocks
9’4” x 16’6” x 18’6”
Installation view, Susanne Vielmetter Project Space
Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles

JUNE 13 - SEPTEMBER 6, 2009
Brent Green

Pennsylvania-based artist Brent Green is known for his stop-motion short films in which he combines hand-drawn animations, rickety handmade sets, and which he narrates in his distinctive, tremulous voice.  These works reflect his abiding interest in the strange characters and local stories of his childhood in Appalachia.  His 2007 film Carlin, which first drew national attention to the self-taught animator, was a darkly comic tale about the slow death by diabetes of his Aunt Carlin.  Shot in the farmhouse where Green grew up with life-sized handmade wooden characters, the film was imbued with the southern gothic haze that suffuses all of his work.

For his SITE Santa Fe commission, Green will exhibit both animated films and new sculptural works. Green draws equally from Wagner (in the way that he works in many mediums, giving each equal importance, forming a “total work of art”) and from Faulkner (in the bleak, heart-breaking humor of the stories that he tells). The sculptural installations Dim Light, Eulogy for Thomas Edison, and Watts and Volts Across a Field, relate to the film “Tinkerer” Used to be a Trade Green’s new film about the life of Thomas Edison, which will premiere at SITE. These three integrated works feature over life-sized sculptures made from layers of plywood, typical of the everyday materials that Green favors. Like a film-still expanded, and brought into three dimensions, these sculptures saturate the gallery space with their eerie presence.  The figures in these installations fend off crows and dirigibles that swirl overhead or find themselves startled by an inexplicable cone of light, echoing the plight of Green’s filmic characters.

In addition to premiering “Tinkerer” Used to be a Trade, Green will screen Carlin and the 2009 film Weird Carolers. Weird Carolers tells the story of Beethoven going deaf at the end of his life, but continuing to compose, biting his piano to feel its vibrations in his teeth, throwing hammers and shoes around in his second-story apartment in Salzburg, and inducing nightmares in the downstairs neighbor.  In this most recent body of work, Green expands beyond the characters of his strange Appalachian childhood into historical and mythical ones.

Brent Green has had one-person exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.  His films have been screened at numerous venues including the Sundance Film Festival, UCLA’s Hammer Museum and the Walker Art Center.  Green was the recipient of a Creative Capital grant in 2005.


Funding
This exhibition is generously funded by the Board of Directors as well as by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This announcement is partially funded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax.

Brent Green
Stills from Carlin, 2007
Animated film
7 minutes 30 seconds
Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York