In Situ: A Summer Exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Summer Group Show  In-Situ   Renae Barnard, Hazing Period, 2014 Renae Barnard, Vera Bauluz, Tofer Chin, Abdul Mazid, & Patch Wright In-Situ July 19-September 06, 2014 Reception July 19, 2014 5pm-7pm Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present In-Situ, a summer group exhibition by emerging Los Angeles artists never before shown at the gallery.  Working in a variety of mediums, the selected works by Renae Barnard, Vera Bauluz, Tofer Chin, Abdul Mazid, and Patch Wright offer an invitation to think about the relationship between place and identity and the ways in which the artists' hand and materials of choice are inextricably linked to critique.  Here, each artist either re-purposes, re-articulates, or re-imagines a given material and imbues it with new life and new meaning. Renae Barnard creates soft sculpture from paper, thread, and ribbon, materials and tactility typically associated with women and ascribed little consequence in the world.  Each of Barnard’s sculptures with their intricate twists, coils, folds, splits, and tears challenges the viewer to see beyond traditional and conventional modes  of identity representation. Vera Bauluz presents found objects (janitor’s mops, brooms, and shoes) that alone have little meaning to the world aside from signifying another’s undesirable labor.  Bauluz covers these heavily coded objects with gold leaf and at once blurs the distinction between the mundane and the worthless with that of beauty and value. Tofer Chin explores the relationship between architecture and the natural world, illuminating ease and delicacy in the angular and rigid with his paintings and sculptures.  As part of an ongoing series, Chin’s re-imagined stalagmites symbolize living and breathing beings in an environment.  They command attention while at the same time blending into their surroundings alluding to the contentious relationship between human and nature. Abdul Mazid is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who selects materials already imbued with heavy symbolism (sports collectibles, glitter, razor wire, Middle Eastern rugs, etc) and re-works them until they have a specified social and political meaning.  For Mazid, born to a Syrian father and Mexican mother in California, identity and place inform much of his work.  Mazid’s singular coupling of mediums and ideas reflects his own experience of hybridity. Patch Wright works in the realm of the uncanny creating objects that are simultaneously familiar and other worldly.  The chasm between the viewer’s perception/experience and the artist’s work is precisely the space from which Wright finds strength.  Demonstrating mastery over his materials, Wright pushes up against all conditions of possibility morphing the grotesque into the beautiful and the minute into the colossal. For more information please contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com