Cristian Andersen and Amy Brener

About

Cristian Andersen’s recent work continues to develop the artist’s examination of the relationship between sculpture and its pedestal, and how such concerns can be addressed through a context as specific and familiar as Los Angeles, where the artist also has a home.  The push and pull between the materiality and the metaphor of the urban structure is seen in the work Lincoln Heights (2016), where the clean lines and basic forms of the concrete block are held aloft by red, yellow, and green steel pipes.  Questions about urban planning, social justice, and tensions between public and private space are further brought into focus through such site specific works as Sundaymorning – Daybed (2015), which was installed in a public park outside of a church in Zurich.  By distributing form across context, materiality, and metaphor, Andersen breaks up the surface structure and negotiates a new environment for abstracted images to reside among, and within.

New York based Amy Brener embraces the primary concerns of sculpture – including surface, force, and materiality – in order to examine daily life through a geological sense of time and scale. There is tension in her work between ornament and functionality, between preservation for display and preservation for future use. This is suggested by the diversity of her materials and their potential applications. Dried plants, tech debris and consumer goods are embedded in resin or silicone, often with the addition of iridescent materials, and the effect is uniquely poetic and tactile. In Brener’s most recent series, which will be on view, abstracted silicone garments ask provocative and timely questions about surface, protection, and the body.  More than simply an affirmation that clothing is an armor or second skin, the Flexi-Shield sculptures embody fictional ecosystems and technological networks that address human fragility, interconnectedness and transcendence in our current moment.