Wall Installations

William Griffin Gallery is pleased to announce Wall Installations, a summer group show which includes works by Teresita Fernández, Kira Lynn Harris, Maya Lin, Richard Long, Karin Sander, James Turrell, Robert Therrien, and Peter Wegner.

Thousands of steel pins inserted directly into the gallery wall form a flowing and shimmering river in Maya Lin's Pin River – Tuolumne. Lin uses this installation, which depicts the endangered Tuolumne River in Northern California, to activate the viewer's relationship with the landscape and call attention to our fragile environment.

James Turrell's investigations into the properties of light and its effect on perception are beautifully illustrated in his Tall Glass works. Consisting of a core of LEDs individually programmed to carry out a subtle shift in color over time, these works are similar to the deliberate but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes throughout the day.

In 2009, Richard Long took a journey by foot through the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, continuing a long artistic practice of engaging the landscape through walks. The text work in this exhibition, Walking from a Full Moon to a New Moon, documents his experience of observing the waning moon while on his walk and makes his solitary experience communal. He states, "My work is visible or invisible. It can be an object or an idea carried out and equally shared by anyone who knows about it."

Often rendered larger than life-size, Robert Therrien's enigmatic and captivating sculptures of domestic objects live in a world between fantasy and reality. His No Title (red dutch doors) cuts into the space of the gallery and divides the line between abstraction and representation.

Teresita Fernández's interest in the psychology of looking and the allure of opposites is evident in her two Cameo works. Seen from a distance, the radiating circular compositions—one dark and one light—seem to flicker. Upon closer inspection, one notices that the marks on the wall are actually cabachons of marble and lapis lazuli.

Karin Sander's work in this exhibition borders on invisibility. Thin layers of lacquer are applied to the wall to create a reductive yet luminous surface. This minimal device highlights the typically overlooked wall and, in Sander's words, "renders something visible that is already present but that has hitherto escaped perception; that exists in a latent state."

Based on the ubiquitous paint chip used by commercial paint color manufacturers , Peter Wegner's wall painting BLAZING SUN / SUMMER SUNSET humorously locates two massive color fields—one a searing yellow and the other a dusk orange—in the upper and lower reaches of the gallery wall.

The Bradbury building in downtown Los Angeles has long fascinated Kira Lynn Harris, both for its architectural splendor and its link to science fiction (most notably Blade Runner). Within an enclosed space, Harris has drawn in perspective (in white chalk on black walls) a nearly life-size reproduction of a portion of the building's interior. The result is a room that seems to continue beyond the boundaries of the gallery walls, thereby destabilizing our perception of space.

Wall Installations

Künstler: Teresita Fernández, Kira Lynn Harris, Maya Lin, Richard Long, Karin Sander, James Turrell, Robert Therrien, Peter Wegner