Heather Cook
Analia Saban
Blurring the lines between painting, imagery, and objecthood
Los Angeles
20 November – 18 December, 2021
WORKS EXHIBITED
EXHIBITION VIEWS
PRESS RELEASE
Heather Cook leads us to moments where the material and immaterial blur and collide. Thematically, shadows have played a role in her work—as a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object and as an indexical projection of a physical body in space. In a series of works (Shadow Weave), she weaves yarn that has been painted with acrylic paint. Subtle vertical bands of different colors are the result of varied densities of applied paint on each thread of yarn. When woven, there is a painting inside of a painting rather than a painted surface. Another series of works, (Weaving Draft) uses weaving drafts that are drawing plans on traditional graph paper that dictate the set-up of a loom in order to make a weaving. Cook’s works are enlarged versions of these draft drawings painted on a woven grid and, in these works, a different color than the original draft. They depict the plans for how to weave the Shadow Weave works. Painted on the grid is all the information needed to set up the loom and weave theS Shadow Weave pattern leading to a striking design, and the mirror image of a “shadow.”
Analia Saban meticulously disassembles what was carefully made to reverse the process of its creation. When completed what remains is a relic that testifies to prior work, while at the same time disappearing and representing itself as the beginning of new development. She is interested in what physically constitutes the image in order to understand what makes the work's existence. Thinking artworks by stratum, lines, and material density, Saban approaches her work scientifically, using various strategies to disassemble the initial work to reveal a new form through the process of its conception.
In the Collapsed Drawings series, she plays with the notion of gravity’s hold on lines, brushstrokes, and shapes, seen not as two-dimensional planes but as three-dimensional objects with their own volume and weight. Appropriated from the works of historical masters such as Guercino, Dürer, Kandinsky, or Schlemmer, she separates the lines from the background and allows them to collapse from the drawing to the floor of the frame.
Striving to show the dexterity she brings to bear on diversifying her oeuvre, Saban underscores the intimate proximity between the act of weaving and the way she intertwines acrylic paint onto the canvas in a series of works that, like Cook, combines the skill of the hand with an individual artistic sensibility to create unique and radical works.
Heather Cook (b. 1980 Dallas, TX). She lives and works in Los Angeles. Heather Cook studied at the University of Texas in Austin and received her MFA from the Art Center in Pasadena. Cook’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Rosenblum Collection, Paris; Marianne Boesky, New York; David Kordansky, Los Angeles and Galerie Art: Concept, Paris among others. Cook’s works are represented in many private and public collections such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Rubell Family Colleciton, Miami.
Analia Saban (b. 1980 Buenos Aires, Argentina). She lives and works in Los Angeles. Analia Saban received a BFA in Visual Arts from Loyola University in New Orleans in 2001, followed by an MFA in New Genres at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2005. Important solo exhibitions include Analia Saban: Focus at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in 2019 and Analia Saban at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Texas in 2017. Saban’s workis held in the collections of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York; Norton Museum of Art in Florida; Centre Pompidou in Paris, and among others.
