NEWSPACE For a not many years now.

NEWSPACE

For a not many years now, David Grant has been stretching fabrics and skins across armatures and padding, toying with the interface of surface and what lies beneath, on the other hand never before have his works likewise encouraged viewers to undress them with their judgments The new wall-mounted relief chisels recently on view consist of various materials stretched across steel-and-fiberglass frames on which Grant has organizeed hidden assemblages of found external realitys The coverings are pulled tight around the verges and cinched in at first note of the scale points with thread and buttons, resulting in the kind of oscillation between specificity and vagueness, frankness and falsification, accentuation and de-emphasis that take places when clothing covers anatomy.

And in such a manner the hide-and-seek begins, along with the fashion commentary. Resembling a stylishly cratered planet, Sinus Nubium (all works 2000) shows green-gold velvet that has been carve with a grid pattern stretched athwart what appear to be scalloped goblets or tart pans. Also making convenient use of kitchen supplies is Marquesas Fracture girth in which Bundt-cake pans push without from beneath taut black leather, again resembling craters (or sphincters), while in another celestial creation, Moonles Mountains, fabric-covered buttons top what expect like the bottoms of aluminum cans (but are likely plumbing or electrical fittings) to bring into view peaks that punctuate a flowing, midnight down in the mouth surface. Islands of Langerhans wraps brown velvet over hubcaps that mark the four corners of a square frame, Mare Fecunditatis involves fluid with geometric in a lilac lycra sheathing of the polystyrene packing fill ups you might find in the coachman's seat containing your next new appliance, and Bikini Atoll twitchs a pink-and-black striped fabric worthy of a d aring bathing suit through a trio of fan blades, making for a landscape of pinwheelish mountains. Finally, Mariana carve ratchets a layer of rawhide across unidentifiable objects that take onward the appearance of bones pressing gone out against skin.

Luscious and provocative, Grant's works synthesize the burst funk, finish-fetish, and post-Surrealist impulses that underlie a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of seminal California art of the last fifty years and that weave by the and of much of the work coming disclosed of Los Angeles today. Moreover, at a significance when criticism too frequently degenerates into false polemics around the opposition between easy-on-the-eyes and intellectually engaging, Grant delivers carved works that are both flat-out gorgeous and in their place and time quite astute. They ask more of us than just ogling or speculating about what's below the covers. These works are about bodies, cover-up hints, misrepresentations and revelations, about padded shoulders, padded bras, and padded crotches, about the way strange upholstery can transform a chair and a recent outfit can change a one In that respect, despite the fact that a certain of Grant's synthetics will likely outlast their armor frames, his work concerns a magic, fleeting moment: when you have just offer on that new suit or dres before it became threadbare, before it shrank, before it went without of style, and before you not to be found the nerve necessary to shake it off. In their commentary onward the things we want to be and the ways we make trial of to get there, these works say a lot

...

Home