Second Skin - Opening Night

Thanks to everyone who came out for the opening of Second Skin - it was a fantastic show with sculptural works from Blake Hiltunen and site-specific video works from Cristobal Cea. 

Check out the photos from opening night and the statement about the work:

The objects and images from Cristobal Cea and Blake Hiltunen appear as if they have passed from our reality into another space only to return again: back from the dead, their original bodies reconfigured. What was once flat, clean, or constant is now crumpling, disrupted. The forms come back to us from this other place twisting like a car wreck or as fine fabrics carefully staged for a lost Neoclassical painting. Potential energy is converted into contracting or expanding volumes, masses displaced.

These dreamlike reflections of our rigid material world transmogrified into a pliable skin, suggest that what we believe to be solid and lasting is far from it. Our shared delusion of stability is present in our built world of contiguous surfaces, flat planes, and right angles.  

The earth spins, tectonic plates move- the sand shifts beneath our feet whether we feel it or not. We may luck into a rare moment of heightened perception when we sense the swirling of something beyond the surface, sublime currents sweeping us along.

Fragment of Sister Head - Opening Night

Thanks to everyone who came out last night for the opening at Lens Gallery - if you couldn't make it, you can see what you missed in the timelapse and read the statement below.

See you all again next month! 

Fragment of Sister Head Opening Night from Andrew Edman on Vimeo.

Mysterious monuments, isles illuminated by a glowing firmament, blobby overgrown forests bursting with ripeness, rot, or both.

These are places that exist on their own. The environments seem far away in some other time until they are abruptly populated with figures cartoonish but not unlike us- a mix of aloof and skeptical; roaming through surroundings where they do not quite fit.

The forms of land, stones, trees and architecture seem durable, certain to outlast the efforts and activities of the figures traveling through them. It is only briefly that our activities (whether frantic or placid, seeking pleasure or violence) animate these old, knowing places. If the world is like a stage, the stage persists with its ancient indifference, having watched drama after drama play out. In the highs and lows of art we preserve these activities for a bit longer - a dozen, one hundred, maybe a few thousand years.

Through art we may look on and look back, to see something of ourselves and imagine that we have arrived at greater understanding, insights and awareness beyond those early times. So too will others look back at us with a mixture of amusement and nostalgia at our little lives of struggles and successes. We build new monuments even as societies fall, cultures displaced. Like cartoon reruns, the absurd poetry continues, with or without our watching.