Alien installation view (Ana Velasco, Ayae Takahashi and Melanie Schlossberg)

ALIEN Art From And About Elsewhere

June 11 - July 10

Opening Reception: June 11 @ 8 pm

curated by Kanishka Raja

ALIEN brings together artists who occupy various locations in the vast psychological territory mapped out by the title of the show. They are a diverse conglomeration of young artists whose work is informed by or inhabits arenas that are not quite here: life, as it were, is in the elsewhere of the subtitle. The exact nature of this extra-familiar landscape of course, remains fluid and open to each artist's invention. The coherent impulse of the show is to address the varied implications of what is alien -- from the remembered to the imagined and from the personal to the political -- on an emblematic level, in the language of art.

Laylah Ali's lushly painted hooded, cartoony figures for example are no doubt human, yet they markedly proclaim their otherness by simultaneously being many different, apparently contradictory things at the same time: they are wearing pointy white hoods, they're definitely not white, not quite black (they're brown), they are women and some of them are doing the "Black Power" salute! Who are these people?

< Tyler Evans, Melanie Schlossberg>

Both Tyler Evans and Melanie Schlossberg on the other hand, work with distinctly otherworldly environments and organisms. Schlossberg's creatures, while made from humble, wholly recognizable decorative materials, possess an eerie presence, having been transformed into beings not altogether familiar. Evans invents sculptures and environments that allude to the possibility of life outside of our knowledge and comprehension. His Life Cycle is a five part steel and glass view of the evolutionary cycle of an unidentified organism from another world. For this show, he has also made a series of miniature tableaux that create portals into a parallel dimension.

By deconstructing a Fifties Hollywood alien flick, Paul Turano's video, Them! 1955 Revisited poses humorous, but ultimately serious, questions about our shared distrust of all things unknown. Turano appropriates the conflict between curiosity and security by sampling the classic "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality used to deal with the alien found in the film.

The other three artists in the exhibition, Koji Shimizu, Ayae Takahashi and Ana Velasco are foreigners living and working in this country for the past decade or so: aliens here, in the known world. Each, in his or her own way, is driven by some urge to look back, to reclaim and freshly define the evolving relationship between cultures and themes left behind in the context of their newly claimed geographic arenas.

Ana Velasco's paintings thus become feats of reconstructed memory. Her images, populated by soccer players, soldiers, dead bodies, bullfighters -- all coexisting in a magical and meticulously ornate nocturnal landscape -- begin to create an identity for herself that encompasses her dual status as an involved witness and a removed observer.

Koji Shimizu's disarmingly scrawled images of fighter planes and soldiers and policemen on tracing paper confront his renewed understanding of and personal relationship to the troubled, often unspoken history of Japanese military aggression in the twentieth century -- a direct result of having gained some distance from his point of origin.

And Ayae Takahashi takes, as her source of departure, the narrative threads of the fairy tale genre -- both Western and Eastern -- and makes of them something else entirely. Her astonishingly complex pencil and graphite drawings are peopled with fantastic creatures in vivid, surreal landscapes. By reimagining and powerfully reconstructing childhood memories she manages to take the work to a place that is ultimately unhinged from cultural specificity, locating it in a realm completely of its own making and oddly alien.

ALIEN opens June 11th and remains on view until July 10th. The opening reception is on June 11th, from 8 - 10 pm.

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