New Mountain by Sonja Schenk

About

Show Gallery presents New Mountain by Sonja Schenk at their new contemporary art space in Hollywood. The exhibition includes 11 new paintings and 2 sculptures by LA-based artist Sonja Schenk.

The works in New Mountain explore the future landscape of Los Angeles. Positioned somewhere between dystopian and utopian, the exhibition centers on several large paintings (including the eponymous “New Mountain”) that feature white crystalline formations jutting out of pastel-hued gradients reminiscent of the smog-filtered sunsets of southern California. Often lacking a horizon line and cropped so that all identifying features of the landscape are obscured, “New Mountain” appears to depict, quite literally, the tip of an iceberg. But a closer look reveals that this is neither ice nor stone, at least not as we know it.

Schenk is “interested in figuring out how to paint time itself, to depict past, present, and future in a single painting.” Two diptychs most clearly evoke this desire. “Empire” consists of two uneven panels that appear to suggest both the distant past (the skeleton of a ship, perhaps of the Viking era) and the smoggy skies and unusual radiating lines of what might be the far-off future. It’s an interesting reminder that things that are old now may still exist in the future, older still, long after we are gone. Another diptych titled “Night for Day” hints at Hollywood and film. One panel features a sky-hued gradient and the other is a flat beige, but the focal object, a sort of mountain range made of polystyrene, spans across both panels, suggesting that it perhaps exists in two different times, at once.

The largest work, simply titled “The Mountain,” captures the landscape in the middle of explosive growth, with large white crags erupting out of what might be a “normal” granite mountain. Several smaller paintings and two sculptures round out the exhibition. Schenk explains, “These paintings and sculptures depict something akin to new landmasses or floating islands, something that might occur when the materials, diseases, and other hallmarks of the human race merge with organic elements of the earth to form new entities.” This hint of violence betrays the sublime superficiality and suggests a future world that is not quite natural, not quite serene, not quite inert.

About the Artist

Sonja Schenk is an internationally-exhibiting artist from Los Angeles. She began with video installation work and has since turned to painting and sculpture. She is was recently artist-in-residence at Cerritos College and also created a site-specific installation for the Joshua Treenial, a biennial in the Southern California desert. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Art and History (MOAH) in Lancaster, California and at Prescott College Art Gallery in Arizona, and she was commissioned to build an outdoor sculpture for Porch Gallery in Ojai, California. She was artist-in-residence at Shasta Whiskeytown National Park and visiting artist at the Thomas McKeon Center for Creativity in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has shown work at the Yokohama Triennial in Japan, the Musée du Papier-Peint in Switzerland, the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Brand Library Art Center in Glendale, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Berkeley Art Center in Northern California. Her work has been featured in Palm Springs Life, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Eastbay Express (Oakland, CA), La Liberté (Fribourg, Switzerland), and the arts journal AEQAI.

Show Gallery is an art gallery and artist residency showcasing local and international contemporary artists located in the heart of Hollywood.

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