Los Caminos: Saturday, 19 May 2012

Creature Comforts
Opening Reception Saturday, May 19th, 7-10pm
May 19th–26th, 2012

Chris Bradley (Chicago), Lee Piechocki (Kansas City), Peter Pranschke (St. Louis)

For its first exhibition beyond the apartment gallery walls, Los Caminos presents Creature Comforts, an examination of the strange and familiar objects with which we share our everyday environments. Featuring artists Chris Bradley, Lee Piechocki, and Peter Pranschke, this exhibition explores the complex nature of the subject/object relationship, reevaluating the age-old hierarchy between humans and objects.

Inspired by the theories of French sociologist Bruno Latour and the recent embrace of “object-oriented ontology,” curator Francesca Wilmott presents objects that are more than just empty fixtures devised for human servitude and enjoyment. Rather, Creature Comforts sees such objects as dynamic forces that willfully shape human behavior. United by a formal exploration of their chosen mediums, Bradley, Piechocki, and Pranschke respond to the objects with which they cohabitate—plants, candy canes, cardboard boxes—with a mixture of humor and respect, fear and fascination. Lee Piechocki, has developed a lexicon of characters that reappear—mirrored, inverted, and doubled—in various arrangements throughout his work. At once compositional devices and surrogates in a world absent of humans, Piechocki’s characters reverse the subject/object relationship: with cool detachment, the
objects in his paintings neither affirm our human existence nor depend upon us for activation.

Amused by the detritus that fills our living spaces, Chris Bradley examines the dual role of objects as both companions and intruders. In his new series of shields, the artist evokes childhood games, in which cardboard scraps are effortlessly transformed into barriers that serve to both protect and provoke. With holes cut out for eyes, the sculptures invite viewers to take a closer look only to reveal their deceit—corrugated cardboard is in fact meticulously rendered and painted sheet metal.

Peter Pranschke dissects, isolates, and indexes his everyday surroundings in order to more closely explore their formal properties. In this exhibition, for example, Pranschke inserts strands of uncooked spaghetti into a found tree-trunk, imparting an anthropomorphic quality upon these two unexpected, though surprisingly well-matched, materials. While Pranschke is best known for creating illustrations that record the trials and triumphs of daily life, his sculptures similarly examine the oftoverlooked
characteristics of objects that we routinely encounter. Together, the works in Creature Comforts reveal an unspoken contradiction inherent to artistic production. As the objects and art spaces that we nurture and activate develop an existence autonomous from their creators, we must ask ourselves what happens when they no longer need us.

2637 Cherokee Street

St. Louis, MO 63118
(former home of Cherokee Photobooth)

www.loscaminosart.com