Photography | Site-Specific Sculpture | 2006 - 07

BARI ZIPERSTEIN: (This Isn’t Happening) Popular Hallucinations for Your Home

January 13 – February 17, 2007
BANK
125 W. 4th St. Los Angeles, CA 90013

Bari Ziperstein's 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. Ziperstein’s work has often related to ideologies centered on mid 20th century American capitalism and consumer excess. For the past year, she created a series of intimate collages that deconstruct idealized domestic scenes selected from home décor magazines such as Better Homes & Gardens and Architectural Digest. Within these scenes she transforms posh interiors into quirky environments by adding stark white architectural beams protruding, twisting and bending out of chairs, tables, chandeliers and the like.

For her solo debut at Bank, Ziperstein realizes the collages in three-dimensional space within an actual domestic setting: her Los Angeles 1920’s Spanish style apartment. Over fifty site-specific sculptures, made of foam core and plaster, mutate out of decorative and functional objects, rendering an environment that is overgrown, monumental, illusionary and artificial. Ziperstein lived within this environment for three months while completing this ambitious project often having to physically negotiate the space in odd and precarious ways.

Because the sculptures are temporary and site-specific, they manifest only as large format color photographs. It was essential that the photographs replicate the quality of a high-end magazine spread because the work is a comment on the utopian lifestyles proffered by home décor magazines. The photographs illustrate decoration consumed by architectural outgrowths—an interior design gone very much awry. The result will be eight light-jet photographs to be exhibited in the gallery as framed objects alongside five new site-specific sculptures.

NEA photography fellow Grant Mudford took the documentation of Ziperstein’s site-specific sculptures and was assisted by Darrin Little. As a regular contributor to Home and Garden, Architectural Digest, and Architectural Record, Mudford applies his commercial and aesthetic sensibility in creating convincing interior photographs of Ziperstein’s sculptural interventions. Furthermore, he is intimately familiar with Southern California architecture, having been commissioned by MOCA LA to extensively photograph Louis I. Kahn and R.M. Schindler architecture, and by the Getty Trust to photograph Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Grant Mudford is represented by Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.