Installation view
REBECCA RIPPLE
Surface Tension
March 5 - April 2, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 5th, 6-8pm
Klowden Mann is proud to present our second solo show with Los Angeles-based artist Rebecca Ripple, Surface Tension. The show will be on view from March 5th through April 2nd, 2016, with an opening reception for the artist Saturday March 5th, from 6-8pm.
In this body of work, Ripple addresses the contemporary personal and political landscape as a space in which power has become diffuse, and alongside it anxiety has become both omnipresent and difficult to name or source. For Ripple, power and its projection are everywhere, fragmented as we drive down the streets of our (still) post-modern city. Territorialization, the nature of ownership, temporary/permanent mark making, the ever-present and constantly-signed surface, and the necessity of constant social performance and its corresponding sensation of isolation, are here paired with the anxiety of not being able to control, hold, or create meaning. As modes of viewing become faster and faster paced, we feel the sensation of constantly being questioned without adequate time to find the answer, the sensation that we cannot quite get a handle on something at the core of meaning in our daily experience. Surface Tension presents us with characters that reflect and act out this uncertainty; white steel gates stand in confrontational (yet permeable) formation as we enter the space, translucent plastics and aluminum are paired with human hair, mirrored surfaces undo and expand our reflections, and contemporary monsters made of plastic and metal rise up—simultaneously imposing and unraveled.
Rebecca Ripple received her MFA from Yale University in 1995. She has exhibited throughout the United States and in Italy, with at venues including Klowden Mann, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, Kristin Engle Gallery, Rosamund Felsen Gallery and the Brewery Project in Los Angeles, the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Tilt Gallery and Upfor Gallery in Portland, Ludwig Drum Factory in Chicago, and many others. Her work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, and reviewed in LA Weekly, Huffington Post, ArtScene, Artillery, Chicago Tribune, and American Craft. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has received multiple awards including a C.O.L.A. (City of Los Angeles Individual Fellowship) and a Nathan O. Freedman Endowment for Exceptional Creative Accomplishments Award. She teaches at California State University, Northridge, and Los Angeles Community College, and she lives and works in Los Angeles. Concurrent with Surface Tension, Ripple's work can currently be seen in the group exhibition Go Big or Go Home at Brand Library and Art Center, in Pasadena, curated by Rough Play (Ashley Hagen, Emily Sudd, and Elizabeth Tinglo).