Decorative Protection < Protecting Decoration
Solo Project Space, Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles, CA

March 27 - April 24, 2010
Opening Reception: Sat March 27, 7-10pm

Las Cienegas Projects
2045 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Bari Ziperstein’s inventive sculptures explore, through collage aesthetics and the lens of domesticity, America’s love of excess and desire to collect. For the Project Space at Las Cienegas Projects, Ziperstein will debut Decorative Protection < Protecting Decoration, a pair of forced perspective domestic window frames which transform a 33’ wall into a perceptual haven of uncanniness. While her previous work has been primarily concerned with the nature of domestic objects and the absurd culture of collecting, she now turns her attention to the domestic house itself, which protects those collected objects. Here, Ziperstein’s windows are treated as sculptural portals between the private and public world – concerned with the economy and security of domesticity.

Influenced by a 1980’s decorative metal gate advertisement urging Los Angeles residents to buy ‘non prison-looking bars’ for a key to their own security, Ziperstein’s mutated tableaux depicts a pair of skewed windows transposed with a photographic view of a lusciously overgrown domestic garden in L.A., decades of debris collected and scattered about including lamps, cars, shoes, rotting wood, and stage sets. This would-be future site of an archeologist’s dig on American culture is seen through a domestic curtain featuring hand-drawn security bars and offering sporadic views of the garden. Two altered slip cast ceramic figurines adorn the windows, equally protected with decorative armor hats shielding their faces. Engaging and fanciful, what initially appears as a celebration ultimately critiques the politics and economy of protecting ones security and domestic space. Ziperstein asks us who, what, and why are we protecting ourselves from modern living if only to feed into a paranoid American culture?

Bari Ziperstein is a site-specific sculptor, photographer, collage, and ceramic artist who is interested in activating space through intervention and organization. Her artistic practice is engaged with the architectural history of Los Angeles and can be read as an investigation of how urban landscapes are defined by consumerism. A selection of recent solo shows includes Project Space, Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art at Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamonga (2010); Perk, See Line Gallery, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles (2009); and (This Isn’t Happening) Popular Hallucinations For Your Home, Bank, Los Angeles (2007). Ziperstein holds an MFA from CalArts and double majored at Ohio University to receive a BFA in painting and a Women’s Studies Degree. She lives and works in Los Angeles.