CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE | LAURA BALL

Project Space | FROM EVERY DIRECTION TO EVERY PLACE | KIRK STOLLER

January 9 - February 15, 2009

Artist Reception | Friday, January 9, 2009, 6-8PM
Artist Talk with Kirk Stoller | Saturday, January 31, 3PM at Swarm Gallery

Laura Ball, Transport for the Interior (2008), Watercolor on Paper, 32 x 52 inches

Laura Ball's work has always addressed real world battles and the ludic activities of play and competition. The characters in Ball's watercolors and oil paintings are represented by her sisters, her mother and herself often engaged in play-fighting, struggling against a torrent of water, or battling swords.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE explores fantastical characters of our minds, examining the journeys and struggles we undertake both as mythological characters and as ourselves. For this exhibition, the heroic journey of world myths and the events of the subconscious provide sources for conflict and struggle that move from the world into the depths of the psyche "...into unsuspected Aladdin caves ... where not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives." (Joseph Campbell)

Pivotal moments from the heroines' journeys inspire the paintings and watercolors, which can in turn be read as universal icons that map progress along life's path.

PREVIEW WORKS

PROJECT SPACE | KIRK STOLLER
From Every Direction to Every Place

With his stacked sculptural installation at Swarm Gallery, Kirk Stoller continues his exploration of using material and form to expose the intricacies of the world in which we exist. Using both the plane of the floor as well as the pictorial realm of the wall, the piece realizes its structural strength by relying on the objects below, above, and around it. In much the same way, everything and everyone, too, engenders this same influence on us in our daily lives. Transformations occur - our frailties often become our greatest strengths and our experiences allow us to move step by step towards an understanding of the world in which we exist. Kirk's piece is a rumination on the dissolution of form and the awakening to spatial consciousness that arises from it. Once we leave the limited world of hard facts and static material, we become aware of the interconnectedness of all things around us.

Connection and support are consistent themes throughout Kirk Stoller's work. With assembled and stacked forms he builds relationships between various items based on formal issues such as shape, size, color, and pattern, while also taking into account the evidence of past actions (i.e. a cut, a brush stroke, etc.) contained in many of the incorporated parts. For Stoller, these stacks represent the collections of life as we traverse through it. He is interested in narratives that are created when things are placed next to and upon each other. Often his work incorporates both the floor and wall simultaneously, creating a transitory aspect that is suggested when the work is read from the 3-dimensional plane of the floor and to the 2-dimensional space of the wall. In this way the viewer is transported both optically and metaphorically from the sculptural world where they themselves reside, into the illusionary realm of painting. Once this leap has been made, environments can then be expanded, walls can be traveled through, and simultaneous focal points can exist.