Of Rope and Chain Her Bones are Made
Bakersfield Museum of Art
September 29, 2022 - January 7, 2023
Presented by City of Bakersfield and the Bryce & Florence York Fund, with additional support from Andrea R. Hill, CPA, AAC, and Brandy Sweeney.

Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, sought to “write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.” Analogies between artistic inspiration and human form are equally embodied in the work of the nine LA women in this exhibition. The evidence of their hand is revealed in the use of elemental materials, dichotomies of physical strength and fragility, as well as palpable manifestations of energy. There is a bodily relationship between artist and material, a corporeal coalescing of anatomy with the raw earthly matter of clay, fibers, and fire. Tactile and raw materials are employed by these artists in repetitive acts and rhythmic processes. Systems of production result in patterned arterial forms not unlike the work of famed sculptors Eva Hesse and Ruth Asawa.

Artists include: Lavialle Campbell, Syndey Croskery, Pamela Smith Hudson, Taylor Kibby, Christy Matson, Blue McRight, Brittany Mojo, Claudia Parducci, Diane Silver

California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks
On View February 18-July 31, 2022

"With the natural world rapidly changing around us, and the fabric of our landscape evolving, our exhibiting artists provide important examinations of our surroundings, making this a timely moment to think more critically about what the earth is and how we live with it.”

— Lynn Farrand, Senior Curator, CMATO

Landscape Through the Eyes of Abstraction invites modern contemplation of the concept of landscape art – one of the most popular artistic genres with a long and established history.

Through an array of mediums, internationally renowned artists Luciana Abait, Kim Abeles, Charles Arnoldi, Laddie John Dill, Cynthia Ona Innis and Claudia Parducci explore the possibilities of landscape from a conceptual perspective, offering a provocative and inspired take on a subject that has remained a fixture in the history of art, stretching the boundaries of traditional landscape art.

More details here.

ARYANA MINAI
CLAUDIA PARDUCCI
ANNA ELISE JOHNSON

Ochi Gallery is pleased to present Mythopoeia in Three Acts, a group exhibition on view from October 24th to December 19th 2020. Through varied explorations of the materiality, Aryana Minai, Claudia Parducci and Anna Elise Johnson’s practices contextualize everyday artifacts and experiences, abstract the phenomenology of the built environment, and engage in revisionist myth and monument making.

Rendering her paintings through collage, paint, plaster and sanding, Minai reveals the delicate edges where her memories transmute into layered surfaces, reminiscent of bodily architectures that are simultaneously sites of nostalgia, erasure and imagination. Parducci’s bronze cast ropes, some protruding from the walls, others slung over mounted worn wooden sawhorse handles– familiar objects cast in unfamiliar arrangements–linger as if to suggest an accident, an incomplete task, a morbid joke that the viewer isn’t quite in on. By casting the desert floor, or working with ash from an extinguished fire, Johnson creates earth-toned palates that tell stories of remnants–the works gesture towards the impossibility of creating an experiential index of the Anthropocene, of capturing an ephemeral lived moment within the limitlessness of nature.

Aryana Minai engages with the memory of site with a focus on the built environment. Reflecting upon Islamic and vernacular architecture of her childhood in Iran, she crafts monoprints of geometric patterns on handmade paper. Her designs are guided by an organizational logic of modular flexibility, rather than rigid systemization. Forms migrate across the surfaces of supports, occasionally slipping out of sequence, past the edges, or atop one another. While utilizing bricks to emboss these permutations, the works themselves also become architectural. They extend from the walls and the ceiling to structure the movements of viewers’ bodies. Through the use of resin, several works function like translucent windows that simultaneously demarcate and bridge two spaces. Minai ultimately envisions architecture as a living entity that continually sheds and acquires memories as bodies pass through its spaces. Minai moved with her family to Tehran when she was five months old. The family returned to Southern California when Minai was fifteen and she subsequently earned a BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (2016) and an MFA from Yale (2020). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Perrotin, New York; Arvia, Los Angeles, Ed Varie, New York and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

LA based artist Claudia Parducci’s work spans a multi-disciplinary practice that includes drawing, painting, and sculpture. Since receiving her MFA from CalArts in 2006 Parducci’s work has been shown in Los Angeles, nationally and internationally, exhibiting most recently at Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne, Germany and the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, California. Parducci’s work comes out of an interest in histories of destruction and reconstruction. While her earlier work focused on the impact of human conflict and natural disasters, her most recent work shifts toward the nature of the cycle itself–the idea that we are always somewhere in the process of building and tearing down. She explores survival strategies, including the labour and fantasy that go into re-imagining a future after destruction. Beginning with the line as a foundation, Parducci develops her sculptures out of the line drawings. Labor intensive methods such as hand-knitting and dying, highlight time, labor and craft, particularly those associated with the feminine, and hint at the possibility of a society designed by women.

Anna Elise Johnson received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2012 and her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2005, with a major in painting and a minor in art history. She was born in Starnberg, Germany, and grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. After completing her BFA, Johnson worked in the arts in Baltimore and Denver and as an assistant to her father, who is also an artist. Afterwards she lived in Berlin, Germany for years and worked as an artist assistant for Julie Mehretu. After completing her MFA at the University of Chicago, Anna Elise was a fellow at the Core Program in Houston, TX. She now lives and paints in Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions across the United States as well as internationally in Germany, England, Delhi, and Slovenia.

Semblance | Sunshine traces the material and aesthetic influence of post-war Los Angeles on minimalist art within Southern California from the 1960s to today.

After undergoing a massive phase of industrialization throughout, and after, the second world war, California had become home to 140 military bases and the focus of immense government spending. This sudden economic boom generated a factory-focused workforce, which made the state one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of aircraft and automobiles. Civic projects, like the development of roads, freeways, bridges, and housing, not only helped shape Los Angeles’s unique urban landscape, but also aided in accommodating the mass of workers continuing to migrate or return home after the war. Ubiquitous signifiers such as runaway tract-housing, fashionable consumer goods, and glistening high-rise office spaces all contributed to a romanticized view of Southern California as a destination for wellness, new-age style, and financial prosperity.

Artworks in this exhibition play to these familiar tropes as they draw on industrial materials to illustrate an aesthetic lineage and ideological approach to art-making within Los Angeles. These un-conventional practices break away from regimented traditions of “painting” & “sculpture” and instead present reductive art objects that are informed by local Southern California environments, sub-cultures, and communities. From utilitarian products and Mid-Century design to sleek surfaces that are reflective of the landscape itself, the objects here challenge conceptions around LA’s enigmatic legacy while also reconciling the fluidity that comes with the city’s perpetual social and economic transformation.

Artists include : Lynn Aldrich, Math Bass, Juan Capistran, Laddie John Dill, Sam Durant, Lauren Halsey, Anna Sew Hoy, Alex Israel, Claudia Parducci, Helen Pashgian, Kaz Oshiro, Aaron Sandnes, Roy Thurston

Opening: Saturday, September 7, 2019, 4pm
Opening Hours: Tue-Fri 11am to 6pm, Sat 12-6pm and by appointment
Special Opening Hours on the occasion of the Düsseldorf Cologne Open Galleries

Galerie Thomas Zander is pleased to share new documentary landscape photographs by Mitch Epstein to present with drawings and sculptures by Claudia Parducci. The works are political and social reflections of our present historical moment. They formally and symbolically release levels and powers in order to address existing tensions and gaps, but also to point out possibilities of action and communication. Their juxtaposition continues the series of thematic double exhibitions to which the gallery is dedicated this year.

Mitch Epstein's photographs deal with relations between society and the landscape in the USA. Born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Epstein is considered a pioneer of color photography in contemporary art of the 1970s. Most recently, he turned to the series New York Arbor and Rocks and Clouds of black and white photography. In the exhibition is Epstein's current project Property Rightsto see that documents the struggle of various groups for their right to American land. For some, it is about their health and their way of life; for others for profit and power. The series also includes the complex history of landscape photography in the settlement of the American West. Looking at our present, the artist succeeds in becoming aware of the underlying historical levels when we ask who the country belongs to, with whose authority, with what right. Photographing these locations has become an act of resistance for the artist himself: in 2016, thousands of Native Americans and so-called water protectors gathered on the Standing Rock Sioux Reserve to prevent the construction of an oil pipeline through Holy Land, which threatened to contaminate important sources of fresh water. Epstein also photographed in the increasingly militarized border area between the US and Mexico, where resistance was provided in the form of humanitarian aid to refugees and migrants. Some of America's natural landmarks have been deprived of protection by the Trump government, and these areas are now cleared for mining and fossil fuel extraction. The impressive photographs in Property Rights testify to the perceptible anxiety that connects America's supposedly disparate landscapes. Epstein's works are featured in the collections of major international institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Tate Modern in London, and the Musée d ' Style modern de la ville de paris.

The work of Los Angeles-based artist Claudia Parducci stems from her interest in the history of destruction and rebuilding. Her earlier works deal with the effects of human conflicts and natural disasters, the latest works are focused on the cycle of nature in which we are at all times in the cycle of arising and passing away. It examines survival strategies and the work associated with reconstruction and the necessary creativity for destruction. Drawing is a fundamental part of their practice. Starting from a single line, Parducci also develops her sculptures from line drawings. Like the title Friction HitchIn the repetition of lines and structures, the works investigate the interconnectedness and inextricability of forces and tensions. For example, in After Murrah , a rope sculpture suspended in space, whose structure holds itself in a limbo between rising and falling. The skeleton of a building is what is visible during construction and what remains behind when it is bombed. It also proves the fragility and structures and their resilience. The work is based on photographs of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995 in Oklahoma City, which also inspired a series of charcoal drawings Parduccis. The installation 23 columnsconsists of hand-knotted jute columns that extend from the ceiling to the floor. It discusses gender aspects of work as well as the importance of remnants of Western history. The natural fibers have material properties of both strength and ductility, so that a continuous fiber strand can form a whole structure. Another wall installation consists of several pieces of bronze cast in bronze, seeming to come out of the wall. Here, the rope becomes a rescue strategy, something to cling to, representing the connecting line that binds people to each other and to the ground. Parducci even uses her rope drawings as utopian architectural plans by floating the drawn rope in the air or linking it to endless loops. Their works challenge expectations and reveal the ability to simultaneously sustain two conflicting ideas, such as the idea that a structure rises and falls, that a material is rigid and supple, idea and object. Since Parducci's studies at the California Institute of the Arts, her work has been widely shown in the US and internationally. We are particularly pleased to present Claudia Parducci's works for the first time in the gallery. Since Parducci's studies at the California Institute of the Arts, her work has been widely shown in the US and internationally. We are particularly pleased to present Claudia Parducci's works for the first time in the gallery. Since Parducci's studies at the California Institute of the Arts, her work has been widely shown in the US and internationally. We are particularly pleased to present Claudia Parducci's works for the first time in the gallery.

A catalog for the exhibition will be published by the publisher of the bookstore Walther König.