The Grand Hotel Abyss: Art in California During the Great Recession, I
Opening reception for new exhibit by Shirley Tse.
When: Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Where: Left Coast Books, 5877 Hollister Ave., Goleta
Cost: Not available
Age limit: Not available
Categories: Art (opening)
Description: Exhibit runs 8/28 – 10/30/2010
Inaugurating its gallery space, Left Coast Books, in Goleta, California (5877 Hollister Avenue), is pleased to announce a one-person exhibition of artworks by Shirley Tse, opening August 28th. The recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, Tse was born in Hong Kong and has lived in Los Angeles for almost two decades, where she teaches at CalArts. Her work has been profiled in Artforum and exhibited worldwide.
For her solo show at Left Coast Books, Tse is exhibiting sculptures and a drawing. Critical to the understanding and appreciation of Tse’s work is her inventive and transformative use of materials, using nontraditional media such as Styrofoam, plastic, vinyl, correction tape, and other synthetic materials. A favorite material in Tse’s art, Styrofoam (or polystyrene) is widely used as a packing material and is usually discarded. Politically incorrect, a product of the petroleum and plastics industries, it has the added disadvantage of being nonbiodegradable. It shouldn’t escape one’s attention that plastic, for a person raised in Hong Kong, is practically tied to one’s identity, since the archipelago, in the postwar period, was the major world producer of plastic commodities, especially plastic toys ubiquitously stamped “Made in Hong Kong.” By the seventies, when Tse grew up, Hong Kong, under its imperial overlords (the British), was practically synonymous with all sorts of “plastic crap,” now widely despised for polluting the planet. Tse’s adoption of plastic and other synthetic materials is fundamentally ironic, for personal reasons, as a postcolonial woman, part of the Chinese diaspora—and also because the materials themselves are conventionally denigrated as commercial and anti-aesthetic.
The pieces in the current exhibition at Left Coast Books include a wall-mounted sculpture Purple Heart and a freestanding Untitled work with wheel “treads,” reminiscent of a tank—both of which evoke war and aggression. However, there’s nothing programmatically political about this work; on the contrary, the sculptures are polymorphously perverse. She intends to puzzle as much as provoke, with her strange, absurd, and often unsettling artworks.
The exhibition will be held from August 28th to October 30th, 2010. There will be an opening party, with refreshments and a jazz ensemble, Nostatic Quartet, in the backyard, on Saturday, August 28th from 4-7 pm.
This is the inaugural exhibition at Left Coast Books’ storefront gallery. Six exhibitions will be held annually. The Shirley Tse exhibition is the first in a series of exhibitions with the overarching theme: “The Grand Hotel Abyss: Art in California During the Great Recession.” A forthcoming website, www.grandhotelabyss.com, will document these exhibitions.
Contact: Simon Taylor, 805/698-2842.
Phone: 805-845-1212
Event posted Aug. 18, 2010
Last updated Aug. 18, 2010
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