Possible Impossible Dimension:
Six Artists on the Brink of Abstraction

Curator's Statement

Like many illuminating endeavors, this show began, for me, with a broad, naïve, and virtually unanswerable question: How, exactly, does abstraction work? Which, when I sat down and began to poke at it, splintered into a mess of equally impossible subset questions: What does it do? What can it do? What is its relationship to the world? What responsibility does it bear to lived experience? What makes it meaningful? What makes it good? But these are questions for theorists and the writers of graduate dissertations, of which I am, sadly, neither. I am a critic donning, in this case, the hat of a curator—one accustomed to approaching these issues artist by artist, work by work—so I decided to take a more personal route, sidestepping a little to ask instead: When does abstraction excite me and why?

This show is my initial response to that question—a treatise by way of a personal meditation. The patterns I saw emerging in the work I most responded to began to point toward an intriguing vein of practice among certain young LA artists, six of whom now make up this show: abstract work characterized, as I saw it, by a fundamental concern for spatial dynamics and a high degree of pictorial rigor, as well as a general lack of anxiety around that much-fraught line between abstraction and representation. In contrast to the long established tradition, in abstract painting (especially in LA), of flatness and pattern, these are artists who play with elements of depth, movement, and perspectival space. They flirt with the boundary between the imaginative realm within a given piece and the “real” world outside of it, whether by inviting that world into the work (as in Dan Bayles' use of plans from the future American Embassy in Iraq, or Dorsey Dunn's use of ambient sound from a park in Berlin) or imposing the logic of the work onto the world (as in Bari Ziperstein's collaged photographs of the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store). Even among the three ostensibly “straight” abstract artists in the group, there are moments of slippage: Chris Natrop's paper installations could easily be mistaken for landscapes; Max Lesser works with paper models to create his interweaving forms; and Brad Eberhard—whose commitment to pure abstraction had always struck me as bordering on the spiritual—showed up with a painting of an elephant of all things, hiding behind a billboard.

If the danger of realism, as decried at the dawn of (Western) abstraction in the early twentieth century, is slavish adherence to surface nature of things, the danger of abstraction, it seems to me, is the indulgence of detachment—from reality, from politics, from emotion, from lived experience. None of these artists could be accused of detachment. They're hardly a cohesive group—for every similarity I'm drawing between them here, you could point to a half dozen differences—but this commonality is clear. Employing abstraction as a tool rather than a dogma, they each create work of exceptional rigor and engagement. It's been a pleasure, for me, to work with each of them, and I couldn't be happier to share the result of that work here.

-Holly Myers, January 2008