Coleen Sterritt solo exhibition, TORQUE

another year in LA

Coleen Sterritt - solo exhibition - TORQUE

November 14 - January 3, 2014

Press Release

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Exhibition Postcard

Exhibition Installation Images

Exhibition Pricelist

PRESS RELEASE

Coleen Sterritt—Torque

Recent Sculpture and Works on Paper

November 14, 2013 - January 3, 2014

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 14, 5-8 PM

Another Year in LA will present Torque, an exhibition of recent sculpture and works on paper by Los Angeles artist Coleen Sterritt. Sterritt is a bricoleur who uses the detritus of the studio and construction dumpster as her media source—places where the discarded and depreciated can (in Sterritt’s hands) reemerge evolving in both material and form. Her sophisticated eye selects vernacular materials (like old doors, household fixtures, masking tape, milled lumber, furniture, building materials) that are often reinterpreted into more abstract compositions with strong polarities; a combination of forms that have a compelling resonance while being familiar and unknown at the same time. Her works on paper, which are tangential to the sculpture, and incorporate geometric and organic forms, refer to both man-made and natural forms and structures.

With a nod to Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space", this current body of work alludes to the house and its consumer comforts. For Bachelard, the house is a body of images that gives the illusion of stability. Although Sterritt’s structures display a certain precariousness, there is no illusionistic trickery a involved, as they possess their own autonomy and materiality to varying degrees, moving toward suggestions of figuration and narrative imagery while retaining a sense of abstraction. As critic Peter Frank wrote about her work, “you never quite know what's going to happen with/in/at a Sterritt structure - except that, for all its piling-on of discrete units, it's going to balance, against all odds, with an entirely unlikely dignity.” The raw materials and basic DIY quality of her wall tableau And Then Some, upsets the original use of its components yet none has been skewed so radically that it is not immediately recognizable. When hung on the wall, they form a sculptural haiku. Over and Over is vertical assemblage, done seemingly in International Style, distinguished by the pull of gravity, which is unalterable. Nothing is skewed here, as vertical becomes our standard direction. And when centrifugal force pushes and compresses all material into a whirligig of circular mass, Sterritt’s horizontal and flattened Rond de jambe seems ready to implode, shattering its feet of clay (actually plaster).

Collectively, the sculpture in Torque appears as if it is the residue of the perfect storm, a still point (neither still nor in motion) amidst a tsunami of chaos and material excess.

For the past thirty years, Coleen Sterritt’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe and is in prominent public and private collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art L.A., Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, Scripps College Collection, Claremont, CA and Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, NM. She is a recipient of residencies, grants, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Matters, The Roswell Museum and Art Center, the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts /California Community Foundation and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (COLA) from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Based in Los Angeles, Sterritt holds a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a MFA from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles.

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