Laura Aldridge

Earth Minutes
Laura Aldridge and Leigh Maida
Andrew Kreps, New York
02/07 – 15/08/2014

Curated by Alhena Katsof

The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present the two-person exhibition, Earth Minutes with artwork by Laura Aldridge and Lee Maida, in the 535 West 22nd Street gallery. Aldridge and Maida’s three-dimensional works evidence an interest in color, the legacy of images and the malleable, textured life of material. The exhibition embraces these works as conduit-vessels, which transmit the labor of creative process (built, pressed, cut, stitched, thought, imagined, analyzed, read, touched). In the artists’ work, ‘material’ can be understood in triple-form: as textile, as a substance from which an artwork is made, and as a subject of inquiry. The latter, compiled from a field of references, including the figure, feminism and the history of art. Earth Minutes is assembled like a Surrealist poem to accentuate the interplay between shapes, content and desire, as they resonate throughout the show.

Laura Aldridge’s freestanding and wall mounted sculptures are reminiscent of upright bodies with arms widespread. They bring to mind images of people carrying protest banners or perhaps wearing sandwich boards, large flags on a windless day or laundered clothes draped over a line. The banners are composed of vibrant fabrics in colors such as electric orange, saturated lavender and minty green. These wide sheaths are then suspended across a thin tube of wood or plastic acrylic, which hangs from a tall, slender metal pole. When light comes through the porous material it illuminates the ‘moves’ that the artist has made – cutting out sections of cloth to create pockets of translucency or sewing together layers for increased opacity. This mode of assemblage is prevalent throughout Aldridge’s work and extends to her use of images, which she prints directly onto the fabric. Using a combination of found images and her own photographs, Aldridge mutates fingers, stone pots, plants, pear trees and faces into hyper-real flotsam of home/studio life. The exhibition also features Aldridge’s gleaming sculptures made of glass vessels, filled to the brim with dyed rice and stacked one over the other. Each glass tower is topped with an emergent lump of fluidly molded, bisque fired clay. The ceramics are oceanic and unadorned. Through an exploration of scale, form and posture, as they manifest in her materials, Aldridge elicits a unique, visceral proximity between the viewer and her work.

Lee Maida’s reliefs are equally fluent in the language of sculpture and painting, though they hardly seem bothered by either one. Laid out across the floor or pressed up against the wall, they consist of layers of ripped textiles (faux leather, rubbery vinyl and electric or moldy colored cotton blends come to mind), which are held in place by hardware store nails. The nails do two jobs at once, temporarily securing the layers of fabric, as well as plates of thin, undulating kiln-dried clay. The fabrics’ many colors are revealed through slits and rips that run the length of each piece while the ceramic forms have been molded and sliced, then pinned on top of or laid out across the fabric sheaths. These works are made from a composite of image possibilities: specific references to a particular painting’s content, color and mark making; generalized image grabs from magazines and blogs; impulsive and personal pictures from the artists’ own archive. Mashed together, they tug on our psyche. They are screwball and familiar in equal measure. In tandem with the reliefs, the artist creates drawings, watercolors and sculptural assemblages that flesh out the different aspects of any given subject. For the show, Maida’s suite of works, are drawn from her observations of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Compressing aspects of the painting together with randomly generated images of lunch in the grass, she creates yet another humorous tableau.