Fallen Lander, 2010

Klutch Stanaway: Altaira opens Saturday, July 3rd, with a reception for the artist from 6 – 9 pm.  The exhibition continues through August 8, 2010.

NASA explorations, ‘50s science fiction films, and household electronics are springboards for Altaira. The sculptures resemble lunar probes, modernist sculptures, and Exquisite Corpses with faux marble bodies on spindly legs. These forms stem from a landing pod that safely transported the Mars Exploration Rovers to the Martian surface.  Altaira refers to a character in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, who grew up surrounded by astounding futuristic appliances and her wild animal friends. The references in Forbidden Planet are multi-faceted, captivating, and yet ridiculous.  Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Freud, Greek mythology, popular science, the American military, and an amazing electronic score all blur to create a fascinating slippage of time.  Like the science fiction films of the ‘50s, the sculptures are layered with faux surface treatments, futuristic efficiency, and simulation.  Klutch Stanaway’s Altaira celebrates the objects we use to explore.

In the artist’s own words, “ I’ve made a fake boulder and some freestanding structures to transform the floor of the gallery into an unknown landscape. Wall units with colored lights transform the walls of the gallery into an interior of an unknown vessel. The boulder can roll through the space via remote control, flipping the notion of which objects are static and which objects are dynamic.  I’ve tried to embody a slight sense of anachronism in the space, and I used 1950s science fiction films as a model.”

To get a preview…follow this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyca45lLx7I


Los Angeles based artist Klutch Stanaway received his M.F.A in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2004, and is currently a sculpture professor at Fullerton College.  Stanaway has had recent solo exhibitions at Haus Gallery in Pasadena and Spacecraft Gallery in San Diego, and in the group exhibition Sound & Motion in 2007 at SolwayJones.

For more information, please contact:

Michael Solway or Angela Jones

solwayjones@sbcglobal.net

http://www.solwayjonesgallery.com/

By Christopher Knight

link to Los Angeles Times

In 1962, Andy Warhol used a stamp technique to reproduce 210 bottles of Coca-Cola on canvas as they might appear in a big supermarket cooler, 30 bottles across and seven rows high. Some were pictured full, others empty and still others only partially filled.

In “Naked Coke,” sculptor Koh Byoung Ok ups the numerical ante while adding a considerable degree of mystery. Eleven rows high, his aluminum shelves feature 264 unprinted, silver cans, polished to a high reflection, in regimented rows of 24. Their tops have not been popped. Whether the mute, light-reflective array of stripped commercial goods is full or empty is a question inducing an unexpected state of meditative stillness and tranquility.

Nearby in his show of eight sculptures at SolwayJones (his first with the gallery), an illuminated light bulb suspended from a cord dangles into water that puddles in the seat of a modern, mass-produced plastic chair. Potentially shocking, in a literal sense, the work twists Warhol’s 1960s silkscreen paintings of electric chairs into conceptual and perceptual knots.

Sculptural koans, where intuition transcends logic, Koh’s work draws its forms from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art, especially the work of Warhol, Donald Judd and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (perhaps significantly, all now deceased). Two of the most compelling works stop time — again literally, simply by affixing thread and yarn to the second-hand of battery-powered clock mechanisms affixed to the wall.

The tension and weight of the slender material is enough to cause the second-hand to jerk and quiver, rendered unable to move forward through the curve of space. The most compelling works in the show, Koh’s simple clocks warp expectation

Photo: Naked Coke, 2010

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