Blend

Alison Foshee
Robin Szidak
Melissa Thorne

October 7 - November 22 2002

Blend brings together three Los Angeles based artists whose works deal with notions of systems and control, pattern and form, and the exploration of the limits that these methods can impose. Each artist incorporates otherwise banal sources into these unexpected modes of painting. The resulting works are highly defined, sometimes obsessive interplays of oddly recognizable forms that oscillate between abstraction and representation.

Foshee, Szidak, and Thorne assert the Duchampian values of the avant-guard, yet reinvet them through a postmodern sensibility. These artists deny the supremacy of the automatic gesture, a hallowed tenet of Abstract Expressionism, Modernism's peak, by using systems to distance themselves from the work, and the viewer. They challenge assumptions of high art by attaching currency to otherwise low art models. The pushpins, paint-by-number kits, and afghans, are all, in effect, ready-mades. Duchamp's anti-art declaration that the idea is what has value is reinforced. These works, which explore systems and their arrangements, playfully rearrange our own expectations of art.

Ruth Trotter
Curator
Professor of Art