CRITICAL CHAOS
Erik Friedman + Ema Harris-Sintamarian

August 10-26, 2007
Reception for the Artists: Thursday, August 16th, 2007 6-9PM

Erik Friedman, "Fleeting", 2007

Swarm Gallery presents the two-person exhibition Critical Chaos featuring Erik Friedman + Ema Harris-Sintamarian.

Erik Friedman's work considers our understanding of how we use and manipulate the infinite amount of information at our disposal. Friedman, a 14-year East Oakland resident, recently began surveying information in his neighborhood. The qualities of his surrounding that were appealing 30 years ago are now gone. The area is now the most industrial part of the city, essentially a wasteland inhabited by lower income residents and encroaching white gentrification. Telephone poles where trees once were, abandoned autos everywhere, pillaged buildings, and the occasional visiting carnival; all interacting in relative cohesion, however abstract. Using layered ink and graphite drawings on mylar and other materials, Friedman brings to view the fractured, noisy detritus of a cultural landscape that exists in Oaklands backyard.

Similarly, Ema Harris-Sintamarian's work gravitates toward ideas concerning fragmentation, construction/deconstruction, and analogous structures. She parallels and fuels her ideas from various fields, methodologies, and artists. Of most interest are Passolinis excess of information and the ideograms of Concrete Poetry and its play on motion; Sir Edward Burnett Tylors ideas on primitive humans and Elizabeth Kings sculptures and understanding of animism; Gabriel Orozcos spontaneous and playful photographs and Roland Barthes understanding of text; Heideggers paradigmatic habit of crossing out the word being and Matt Mullicans architectural forms; Derridas Pharmakon and William Kendriges politicized images. After looking at magazines and seeing how dominated they are by advertisements, her work now reevaluates the idea of identity, consumption and the politics of being a socially active human. By using different cultural iconography, and by imposing and superimposing recognizable with more abstracted similes, she creates a matrix of images. Her working process tends to be intuitive and the work is serial. By working in different media and scale, she broadens the arena of possibilities for visual narrative, creating complex diagrams of personal thoughts and scenarios.

In PROJECT SPACE

Laura Kamian

Although Armenian, textile artist Laura Kamian doesnt speak the language, save for a few words: shame, underwear, and son of a bitch. The Armenian language has its own unique and independent alphabet, and after a recent trip to her homeland, Laura began sketching the seventy-six letters. Translating the sketches into fiber came naturally; the town of Gurun (now part of Turkey) where her family is from was famous for its fine shawl weaving.

This installation is made up of stencils of the 38 characters of the Armenian alphabet, in upper and lower case. The felted stencils are assembled to spell out words taken from memory of her grandfathers story of survival after the Armenian Genocide in 1915. The words are loaded with the symbolism of his survival: brother, cousin, mother, arsenic, spoon, orphanage, apricot, desert, antibiotics. Kamians exploration of the alphabet gives her a new tool to celebrate the stories of her familys life and to give permanence to her memories.

My work is about the universal experience of color and abstract gesture, and the distinct emotional response they create for each viewer. Viewers of the installation are invited to listen, learn words and/or try their hand at writing Armenian.