Bruno David Gallery: Saturday, 27 march 2021

LESLIE LASKEY: Then & Now
SARA GHAZI ASADOLLAHI: Gummies Tame Stones
SARA GHAZI ASADOLLAHI: Cast (Media Room)
HEATHER BENNETT Blueprint Kit for Lilly (Window on Forsyth)
Exhibition Dates: March 27 – May 29, 2021

Opening Reception will be Saturday, March 27th, from 3 to 8 pm (No appointment necessary.) To maintain safety standards and social distancing, masks will be required, and a reduced number of attendees will be allowed in the gallery at one time. Free indoor parking. 

Then & Now, an exhibition by Leslie Laskey. Laskey, who is 100 this year, has the ability to create and inspire, as well as challenge and amuse become ever more apparent with each exhibition. 

Gummies Tame Stones, an exhibition of new paintings by Sara Ghazi Asadollahi. “Alienation” is defined as "a withdrawing or separation of a person or a person's affections from an object or position of former attachment;" a detachment from the origin yet connected to it through invisible bonds, formally or conceptually. This body of work Gummies Tame Stones considers the concept of alienation and the dynamic between alienated objects and figures in empty spaces. Empty and abandoned spaces play a significant role in her work. Referencing an "original world," empty spaces provide a detachment from time and space and highlight the relationship between the objects within. The architectural forms in these paintings are painted from the sculpture pieces (made of cement and plexiglass) inspired by bunkers and abandoned places. Detached from their source, they represent fragments that simultaneously belong to the world of their origin and are torn from the real object of the derived milieu. Alienation could happen in different stages of life due to some internal or external changes, a separation from self, family, society, or community. Whatever the reason, it creates a pause in the status quo and leaves a void in the psyche. The void which opens a space for the alienated objects to challenge, embrace and deal with the estrangement. The gap is created to be filled with the representation of fragments, vacillating between a passage to the future and a world of fetishes.

Blueprint Kit for Lilly by Heather Bennett is an installation in the gallery’s vitrine space, WINDOW ON FORSYTH (Downtown Clayton, viewable 24/7). Photographic images have traditionally depicted space, revealing people and objects, they are the stuff of illusion. They are also things. At the intersection of these identities is a kind of gooey vacillation as we look at and through a photographic image in contemporary culture. This work seems to depict exactly what the series title, Photos of Gifts, describes, however, objects are often wrapped with magazine images complicating illusionistic space, as well as, obscuring object identities. Women acting as objects for magazine advertisements are subtly transformed here to the focused subjects of the images only to then be flattened, inextricable from the object portrait, as they are wrapped around that object and tied with a bow. The subject/ object reversal of the female form gets a sea-sickening treatment. The small act of wrapping a gift becomes a potent metaphor, exploding within its supposedly quiet, often assumed to be feminine place. In this window installation, a candied vacuousness is implied, even embraced. Glossy lips and curled pink ribbons float over a dusky pink carpet mimicking a cloying set for Teen Vogue. We don’t expect to find the critical here playing precocious as it winks and sways and just barely, gazes back.

Cast, a video work by Sara Ghazi Asadollahi, examines chance and accident. It indicates a rule in video games in which the world is not fully programmed, and the background is not an accessible part of the game, unless there is a connection to the next move/stage. The set design in the video was created using a painting and a sculpture by Sara Ghazi Asadollahi. Both came from her last body of work exploring the concept of ruins and abandoned places in a dystopian science fiction mode. Following the video games rule above, abandoned places featured a similar function in relation to the world: while still a part of the world, they have lost their original function. Like a sleeping monster, they are hiding in the background of the world as if waiting to be provoked by an accident to return to a banal cycle of the world.

Public Hours Tuesday-Saturday 11-5 pm, and by appointment. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Bruno David Gallery
7513 Forsyth Boulevard
Saint Louis, MO 63105
info@brunodavidgallery.com
https://www.brunodavidgallery.com
https://www.artsy.net/bruno-david-gallery
314.696.2377