Installation view
Chad Attie
C O N T E M P T
December 14, 2013 - January 25, 2014
Opening Reception: December 14, 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, January 11, 4pm
Klowden Mann is very pleased to present our first solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Chad Attie, Contempt. The exhibition features collage works presented on paper, canvas and light box, exploring themes of idealized love, alienation, mythologized beauty, and loss of innocence through the use of found imagery of figure and landscape. The exhibition will be on view from December 14th through January 25th, with a reception for the artist on Saturday, December 14th, from 6 to 8pm.
In Contempt, Attie uses a variety of found materials that speak to our investment in (potentially false) ideals, and in the objects we create to represent those ideals. Vintage paintings purchased at garage sales, imagery from cinema (the title Contempt is an homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s film of the same name), children’s book illustrations, fabric, and needlepoint all become fodder for re-examination, as Attie layers his imagery and then tears it away to reveal what lies beneath (which is more surface, more idealized representation). Attie’s found representational objects themselves have been vested with hope—of reconciliation and wholeness through love, of childhood imaginings, of land that has not yet been overrun with industrialization. Attie’s manipulation and composition of those objects acts to invest new hope through dialogue, while simultaneously ripping apart the very ideals to which they speak. Presenting the moment of recognition as taking place exactly where the ideal meets its own impossibility, Attie continually focuses in on the destructive potential of desire to override all other modes of seeing and being. In the surfaces of Attie’s works, he shows us the unconquerable distance between subject and object, and the struggle to find agency while an idealistic hope for unity still maintains narrative power.
Chad Attie was born in Los Angeles, and studied at UCLA and Boston University. He has exhibited at venues including Caro d’Offay in Chicago, Read Contemporary Art in Dallas, Andrew Shire Gallery, Frank Pictures, Carl Berg Projects and Newspace in Los Angeles, and Wooster Projects in New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles.