Float

Curated by Laurie Lazer

The Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco

Photos by Jay Jones

Float constitutes a vast and subtle meditation on the reality of urban living.

Recognizing absence as the presence of a conscious activity within the brain, these works are a result of a meditative process that engages what is considered trash, forgotten and unwanted as a starting point to honor the decay and the beauty of things modest, humble and impermanent. Impermanence (literally, “the pathos of things”) has probably the clearest link: the works embrace the wear, tear, and sometimes damage that comes with age. They reveal the transient and mystical as well as the mundane and obvious as features change.

A big rolled vintage raster film found in the garbage, was appreciated, taken and cut into pieces that led to eight large scale experimental handmade wooden silkscreen canvases. After a test print of all canvases on a paper surface, the first piece of these works appeared, transforming the medium of silkscreen into painting.

The paintings were created using in studio silkscreen techniques, which translate the defaults and irregularities of the process into an aesthetic that simplifies the form and prioritizes material experimentation. In these works, the actual silkscreen canvas takes the place of the brush and when the ink comes in contact with paper or cotton, instead of a technique for mass production, the process becomes a way to produce unique prints. The result sometimes appears blurry – as if frozen in a permanent state of becoming, like the ethics of Wabi-Sabi that focus on finding beauty within the imperfections and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.

By deliberately defying permanence, through a state of freedom and joy of being imperfect and incomplete, new ephemeral spaces are revealed and a whole body of work comes out naturally. These unique prints, defined by delicate forms which fully blend with each other, appear in the space in between; willing to alter expectations regarding gravity, the surfaces have no weight and assume an abstract meaning of floating where anti-gravity is visually natural. Floating has almost the same meaning as traversing, it indicates a mode of indeterminate human behavior. A shared common space.

June 14- August 10 2019

Saturday, June 22 | 1pm
Meditation with Scarlett De la Torre
Scarlett will lead us through a powerful manifestation meditation using monoatomic crystal bowls focusing on the sacral, heart, and third eye chakras as we join our voices together in an ancient Egyptian alchemical meditation of quantum sorcery.