“Out of the Blue” by Arlene Shechet

 

   

 

 

 

 

Gallery SHOSHANAWAYNE, located in Bergamot Station Arts Center, Santa Monica, is featuring a solo exhibition by Arlene Shechet entitled “Out of the Blue”.

The entire exhibit hall is designed for the installation with several pieces of rope horizontally hung on the eye level, as if the whole place is the one great art piece. When you come into the main entrance, you eyes are captured by the finest pale blue crystal ropes which are wide spreading out on to the 3 walls in your front sight, connected with different length of ropes, looking like it’s stitched on the white square walls, and the ropes are continuing to stitch in the small room where a little scroll rope piece placed in the middle of the floor. Yet, you want to be in the middle of the exhibit hall with the empty feeling where your sense is cool dawn in the spacious airy atmosphere.

The fluorescent lighting is very calm and naturally settled, so you can’t even sense any light is there. The high ceiling of the loft and the plain white walls with the natural lighting creates the unique eastern meditation place in the motionless nature. However, your eyes are glued into the very little dim glower rope shape objects by the little light bouncing from the wall and moved to the next opaque meaningless white wall where it looks like; the rope is hiding behind the extended wall of endless enormous space. Furthermore, your eyes are continued to following to the next same styles of object, yet different sizes and/or finished with odd shapes, looking like transformed with dew dropping sense from the edges, by the lights are alternately absorbing and bouncing from the objects to the empty walls. When you keep following to the next objects turning to the small room in your right hand side, the one spot light make you focusing to the object on the floor as if you were the isolate piece left alone there.

Over all, this exhibit is designed for installation only with several characteristic ways. The entire space is the one timeless artistic concentrate mass without a single word. The main theme of the exhibition is strongly suggested the emptiness through the illumination of the spacious loft without any architectural influence. Also, the natural value of lighting methods produces a mysterious practice with inner spiritual fulfillment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OUT OF THE BLUE

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, L.A.

2004

, "...Arlene Shechet threads sections of a cast crystal rope into the wall. Ethereal blue in color, translucent, the brittle, frangible rope, once molten liquid, now solid, represents a number of transient and reversible states: the knotted and the loose, the bound and the free, attached and detached, the visible and invisible."

-Lilly Wei, catalogue, GLASS, SERIOUSLY Dorsky Curatorial Programs 2005