Chris Warr. If The Shoe Fits Surrender The Form

About

The diverse materials have been collaged, steamed, molded, bent, and stretched to create elegantly specific, yet perplexing arrangements.  Warr’s hybrid sculptures harness intuitive relationships with material and biography to construct chimeras of the self. Like mythic composite animals, the objects present multiple associations, while they resist classification to make way for alternate realities. 

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Warr employs recycled elements to create simultaneously airy and dense assemblages. Though heavy with association to their original use, and ideological legacies of style and motif, the physical and symbolic materials are imbued with a wiry and light sense of play. Like a rusty fence that must be climbed to reach an unknown destination, the compositions appear equal parts commonplace, thrilling, and menacing. The works embody a certain dynamism, whether twisting in the wind, or animated by the viewers movement in relation to them.  

Their ornamental flourishes and jerry-rigged appearance convey an intuitive sense and nonsense. Upon further analysis the disparate forms are combined in a complicated system of joinery and balance, and also bound with rich references to decorative arts. Crusty remnants of glue, text, or paint bear traces of the materials past life and transformative process. Surfaces attract and repel the viewer. The sloppy grey gunk of junk-mail soaked in glue, a dirty footprint, and a rogue phone number take on decorative qualities like the Rococo flourishes and exaggerated heads that bristle from his structures.  An underlying attraction and repulsion to dialectics of beauty and disgust, good and evil, truth and lies, play out in the heads that he carves, molds, and sculpts as well as the materials he chooses to transform.

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Chris Warr lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been shown in the United States and abroad, including: San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA; CEART, Tijuana, Mexico; CEART, Ensenada, Mexico; Orgy Park, NY, New York; Mesa College, San Diego, CA;  Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA; Helmuth Projects, San Diego, CA; SPF15, San Diego, CA; XVY Art Design, San Diego CA. He was the cofounder and Gallery Director of Space4Art, a studio and gallery complex in San Diego California from 2010- 2015. He participated in the Parkfield Residency in 2013 and is a recipient of the UCI UGS grant and the Elizabeth Byolin Award. Warr is a 2020 MFA candidate at the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts. This is his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.