Claudia Parducci + Melinda Gibson

About

SLOAN PROJECTS is proud to announce its inaugural exhibition of paintings and collage by two gifted women artists: CLAUDIA PARDUCCI + MELINDA GIBSON opens Saturday, March 7. The exhibition is on view through 4/15/15.

Los Angeles artist Claudia Parducci deftly navigates the border between humankind's elevated worldview and its destruction and collapse. Inside her work, we experience free fall; the foundation of what we believe begins to dissolve and the tools we use to situate those beliefs no longer apply. Both on and off the canvas the artist articulates the contemporary catastrophe we face in environmental terms and in terms of the shifting nature of our culture's dominant visual language. In her painting, I See, I See, Parducci encapsulates the crisis we face as a civilization and as individuals placing an increasing level of faith in visual information while being fully aware of the fallible and often duplicitous nature of images and image making. Parducci’s expressive handling of paint conveys this dissolution while the Morse code phrases included in the work signal hope for communication that is both universal and unquestionable.

UK based artist Melinda Gibson also questions the power of images and the origin of their authority. In her series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" she recreates Charlotte Cotton's seminal book of the same name, literally tearing into it and refashioning its pages into one-of-a-kind collages. Cotton's book canonized a specific group of photographers when it became the most dominant text in academic photography departments post 2004. Gibson's treatment of its pages highlights how particular images earn historic merit and why it is important to question the image-hierarchy established and reinforced by academic institutions. ‘Having liberated these photographs from the conceptual and commercial confines of contemporary art... and by melding, merging and re- engaging with them in her own unique way, Gibson allows them to cross a particularly poignant threshold, into a more unmitigated and arguably more suitable realm: that of Photography itself.”