at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Jody Zellen of Artweek
Pauline Stella Sanchez dedicates her latest exhibition: "For those with no face and no voice, yours truly," setting the tone for what is a visually engaging but obtuse synthesis of media and objects. The dominant objects are from Sanchez's "Head/bust series". These small, unpainted constructions appear to be architectural models in varying stages of disarray, as if entropy has taken over. The more precise modernist models that graced her previous exhibition have been transformed, or destroyed, yet are still presented here as 'busts' placed on top of lazy Susans. This presentation allows viewers to spin the works, and the artist to approach her work from all angles. In Sanchez's typically excessive way of constructing titles, each of the works in this series begins with a phrase that describes being stuck, overloaded or trapped in a mindset from which there is no escape: "My Head Stuck no Struck no TRAPPED as a Constructivist theatre stage, no sculpture, no architecture, no painting...see the butter as my brain, struck condition after viewing too much, with trap doors, solar panels and no floors simply four walls...get me out of here I cannot breathe...yes you may it is an unfinished object, shake it...no need to confuse the dazzle with the disruption when the standardization set in long ago..." If there was confusion about the intent or purpose of these objects, it is confounded by this statement. But this has always been the case with Sanchez's work, viewer must decide whether to seek clarity from her language, ignore it, or simply let it send one on a series of curious and intriguing tangents and references.
At the entrance to the gallery, documentation of a former work is displayed via two video clips playing simultaneously on a monitor by the desk. Yellow, blue and green smoke emanates from Chinese smoke bombs that have been meticulously placed inside Yves Klein-blue maquettes, signaling their transformation or destruction. As Sanchez views this exhibition as part of a trilogy, references to previous works make sense. The blue models (shown in her last exhibition at the gallery) have now morphed into collapsed, jumbled structures of a mostly uniform beige color– balsa wood and latex. Peaking out from the bottom of the wood, or underneath the latex are hints of fluorescent yellow (her other signature color), drips of which can also be found on the pedestals and the floor around them. The arrangement is also similar to her previous shows in the space, conjoining the two separate rooms on the east side of the gallery. Lines of photographs hug the walls, rolling around corners in fits and starts. Stray photos appear on the pedestals as well, sometimes in out of the way places. The exhibition was conceived of as an installation where each element has a role and a position. The sculptures can be seen as self portraits; each has a subtitle that references a facial expression: a wink, a smile, a yawn and a frown. Yet these works are imageless.
Sanchez, however, appears in most of the unframed digital images, though often seen in shadows, or in strangely distorted reflections. These images show the artist's travels, taking photographs of photographs, or other works of art in museums and historic houses. The casual snap-shots read like a visual diary, recording memories or ideas that could be incorporated into future works. That these images have indeed become the work provides an entry not only into Sanchez' process but into what she observes and references. The images are neither beautiful nor precise, though their arrangement is; if the sculptures represent what is inside Sanchez' mind, these seem to be what appears on the surface, reflections of thoughts and ideas. While the images alone may seem obtuse, their titles clarify, though only somewhat. For example, "Mondrian's Studio Heater In My Studio With No Heater, (I Know A Someone Who Is A Heater, And One That Is A Bookcase Too)" 2007 is an image of a photograph of Mondrian's heater in her studio, though one sees only the slightly askew photo and its frame, with a limited reflection of the room behind it. In another photograph, titled "In a JK Sun King," a cropped close-up of a silver bust of Louis the XIV (the sun king), the artist is reflected in three different directions. The narrative created by the photographs is a reflection of a journey, the journey of an artist looking, traveling and recording what she sees.
Sanchez presents bits and pieces– as digital images and as sculptural forms– in addition to synthesizing her ideas the video "A Place In The Sun Where The Curtain is Torn... (2008)," which is a kind of visual poem. In this work, many of the exhibition's images, as well as some of the sculptures, appear as fragments, as process or as memories. The video meanders through Sanchez's work and life, providing entree into her private world. Sanchez presents no answers, only questions and associations, allowing viewers to connect the dots and make order from the chaos of the mind.
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Chris Kraus of Artforum
Dedicated to "those with no face and no voice," Pauline Stella Sanchez's exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery concluded a trilogy of mixed-media shows, begun in 2001, in which the artist engaged with tropes culled from art history, cinema, and architecture. Her trilogy's untitled Part 1 exhumed astonishing confluences between modernist art and the contemporaneous cult of theosophy, while Part 2, the 2005 "It's Busted," clustered around allusions to control, grandeur, and power. Part 3, which was untitled, was concerned with seeing itself, and the ways in which sight is rendered as spectacle. Sanchez's point of entry to this philosophical subject was Russian Constructivism. The "no face" saluted in her dedication derived from Kasimir Malevich's Suprematist manifesto, an exhortation for visual art to reach beyond masks of social identity toward a state of "pure feeling."
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer confronted a group of five "Constructivist" architectural models displayed on white rectilinear stands of uniform height but varying sizes, strategically guarding the space like a series of obstacles. Made mostly of balsa wood drenched in putty-colored acrylic and latex, the models reprise Malevich's stage-set maquettes for Victory Over the Sun, the 1913 Cubo-Futurist opera. Deconstructed, collapsed, and mounted on lazy-Susan hardware, the sculptures all feature elements suggesting boxes (though they remain open at the top and bottom), which hold, but fail to fully contain, piles of architectural debris: rectangular panels and strips of balsa and poplar. Sanchez seems to embrace the Constructivist project as an active extension of Cubist formalism. Yet she also wants to bring the whole edifice down. Her stunningly effective #7 with wink and interpersonal deception theory, 2008, in which an overturned balsa-wood stage rests atop an assortment of cubistic shapes piled up like scrap lumber, evokes a migraine.
Characteristically, Sanchez title the series, dated 2008, as a run-on sentence that at first glance is baffling, but on closer reading becomes apt and profound: "Head/bust series with affect display 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 My Head Stuck not Struck no TRAPPED as a Constructivist theatre stage, no sculpture, no architecture, no painting… see the butter as my brain, struck condition after viewing too much, with trap doors, solar panels and no floors simply four walls… get me out of here I cannot breath… yes you may it is an unfinished object, shake it… no need to confuse the dazzle with the disruption when the standardization set in long ago…"
In this show, Sanchez renders thickets of concept and language into a highly refined and deliberate graphic display that is both sedate and ominous. Consequently, a surfeit of content circulates throughout the subtly defined negative space between sculptures.
As always, Sanchez's conceptual palette is dazzling. The ideas at stake in this show– which also included a twenty-one-minute cinéma poème and a series of thirty-four small ink-jet prints, titled "Self Portraits," 2006-2008– were monumental, and hence remained unrealized: The artist was attempting to locate the moment when, as she put it, "the standardization set in," and sight was rendered as spectacle.
Most of the "Self-Portraits" were shot in a museum or gallery, where Sanchez appears with her camera reflected in the glass protecting significant artworks, playing the roles of both viewer and photographer. This sequence of frozen double-exposures is interrupted by frames evoking the past (for example, an architectural portrait of Kandinsky's gambrel-roofed house) and pictures of a cyborgian four-year-old girl with Kool-Aid-blue hair and electric-blue fake eyelashes.
I'm struck by the disparity between the aggressive concision of Sanchez's visual work and the spiraling discourse surrounding it. Yet even here there's a method. The wide loops of language deployed in her titles keep the game as she wants it: fluid and open.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release, 2008
In her newest solo exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Pauline Stella Sanchez creates the third episode in her trilogy of shows involving sculpture, photography, and video. This complex work will further develop and simultaneously distill her engagements with “art history’s temperature of the sun, collisions with architecture and theatre staging, and various acts of transference.” Her means will be an intriguing series of busts in the form of captivating constructivist theatre and stage-like sculpture at architectural model scale. These busts– visual deconstructions of the artist’s response to the spectacle of art, design, and architecture– fracture open, residing in the conflicted status of what the artist defers as an “unfinished object.” In the intensely historical space of self-reflexivity, Sanchez alters the look and action of self-portraiture in the style of “neocubeconstructivism in order to speak of the repetition and imitation of style and form while meaning is squeezed out.” Placed on the lazy-susan devices used by portraiture sculptors, this new work conflates the processes and forms of portraiture, architectural proposals and object making, with subtle strands of humor.
Exalted for her linguistic meanderings and cinematic allusions, the artist employs many photographs in proximity of the bust displays. The types are variously referred to by Sanchez as “blue-girl portraits, self portraits viewing, google portraits, TV portraits, and still life in studio with heaters.” Also woven into this show is a “cinema poème entitled A Place in the Sun where the Curtain is Torn presented as a small video projection with cinéma verité scenes of viewers viewing, pacing, watching and exercising in our very highly produced art culture of scopic organizations,” and a souffleur box that contains years of Sanchez lecturing on the History and Theory of Cinema, something she has performed at Art Center College of Design since 1996. The show prospers full in Sanchez’s examination of the obscure and coherent, the complex and the absurd.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 from 5 – 7 pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
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by Contance Mallinson of Art in America
Describing Pauline Stella Sanchez’s recent work is somewhat like making a Hollywood pitch: Hitchcock meets Greek mythology meets Theosophy meets High Modernism meet Chinatown…. Her show “It’s Busted” (all works 2004) opened with Apollo and Daphne when Turner Saw Us, a small expressionistically worked up, polychromed porcelain figurine in the entryway. In the adjacent gallery was a group of wall mounted Ghost Drawings bearing bits of loopy text in thickly applied Day-Glo yellow paint, with such phrases as “I am from the sun,” “I wish I could have been your mother Norman,” or “Alone I listen to Erocia.” These fragments are distilled to a kind of sound-bite stream of consciousness in which Beethoven, Turner, cartoons and popular films all swim in the same consumerist pond.
Meandering through the same gallery was a group of seven small-scale sculptures – essentially architectural models – on rotating bases. With their clean columns supporting rectangular boxlike constructions painted Yves Klein blue (a Sanchez favorite), they look like modern riffs on Classical Greek temples. The interiors of the structures are filled with paint-splashed, multicolored Chinese smoke balls, their fuses strung together in neat rows as if ready to be lit in a dramatic performance. Artistic vision, imagination and intuition seem poised in tense opposition to order and rationality. The sculptures also function as transcultural objects: Chinese firecrackers inside the stereotypical modernist box suggest the potential release of art from the confines of history, culture and dogma.
This kind of past/present, European/Asian intermingling and hybridizing is likewise apparent in Sanchez’s video, Untitled or I keep wanting to call it vulture spelled backwards…erutluv. It begins with a screen filled with yellow and blue smoke from fireworks, continues with a mesmerizing speeded-up digital montage of four years’ worth of color photos from the front page of the New York Times, and concluded with a luscious sequence of footage shot inside the Vatican and a “home” video of Sanchez’s toddler niece. Throughout, Sanchez is drawn to the multitemporal and the interdisciplinary, without privileging the contemporary over the historical or high art over pop culture. The real poetry here seems to lie in the collective song of her wide-ranging and generous vision.
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by David Pagel of The Los Angeles Times
It’s often said that sculptures are not as popular as paintings because they take up too much space in a home. At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, three sculptures by Pauline Stella Sanchez resolve this problem playfully, compressing loads of spatial ambiguity into streamlined structures no bigger than an end table.
Pushing their relationship to furniture even further, the artist’s new works look like futuristic home décor. Each piece is a triptych made of two cabinet-shaped forms that stand on stainless steel legs and a third that sits on a functional lazy Susan. Although their flat tops tempt you to use them as extremely hip coffee tables, their sleek lines and monochromatic finishes endow them with the hands-off presence of Modern sculpture.
The sides of each of Sanchez’s works are where everything happens. Built of oddly angled pieces of wood that have been covered with many coats of luscious white paint, these fractured, quasi-Cubist compositions resemble architectural models. They also evoke Louis Nevelson’s relief sculptures. In some of their negative spaces Sanchez has placed neatly folded cloth sacks, glued idiosyncratic talismans and set abstract porcelain sculptures, whose small size is likewise belied by their visual dynamism.
In another gallery, she has hung three printed landscapes. One depicts a woman who appears to be walking on the sun, accompanied y a life-size version of one of the porcelain sculptures. The two others show trees uprooted by a tornado. Although Sanchez’s two-dimensional works add a narrative component, they are not as intriguing as her three-dimensional triptychs, which tell curious stories of their own.
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Carol Jackson of Frieze
Pauline Stella Sanchez compiles evidence to substantiate her aesthetic and experimental exploration. Included among this exhibition of sculptures are large-format giclée prints as well as a small erotic snapshot of the artist on the sun (Past shows of Sanchez’s work have also included this ethereal photograph). Variously titled “A Snapshot of Me…on the Sun with Sun Porn…” (1989-2001), or “Portrait of Me on the Sun as the Sun Queen” (1990-96), the image apparently verifies that not only has Sanchez been on the sun, but for the duration of her stay there she was a queen treated to oral sex from a torch troll. The remaining work in this exhibition was, for Sanchez, uncharacteristically somber. All but the smallest traces of painfully bright Klein Blues, and yellows derived from cartoon color, were absent, as were her familiar circular floor forms, which resemble sacred geometric landing pads. Sanchez’s is an epic endeavor in which scenic shifts occur but remain informed by the absence of previous motifs.
In the larger gallery were three sculptures, each similarly built from three base units consisting of a circular raised platform. Near by were two almost waist-high flat-topped rectangular structures. They look like first-aid kits, and are equipped with remedies in minutely varying formations: wood and lacquer pieces of differing shapes, cotton sacks, multiple tongue depressors arranged in circular shapes and ‘sun porn’ – figured and fired porcelain bisque retrieved from, or perhaps prepared upon, her approach to her destination.
The arrangement of these sculptures looked somehow rapid but not random. Sanchez’s obsessive-compulsive spirit of fabrication is frantic but never despairing; an ecstatic ‘better get it all just right’ rather than a fearful one. Poised between perceived grace and disaster, these assembly methods honored by Sanchez are not just a mystical stab in the ether. Reminiscent of Madame Blavatsky, the artist has, apparently, been instructed by her own solar masters.
Two large-scale photographs hugged the corners in a separate room like the wrap-around windows found in Le Corbusier’s ‘Machines for Living.’ Here a more explicitly narrative element was thrown into the mix. Were these large depictions of huge trees lying prone and uprooted documenting the result of a tornado or activity from the objects in the next room?
Perhaps perceiving the imperceptible is only possible when channeled through familiar fragments. Through a systematic investigation of aesthetic and scientific theories awakened by the Modernist project, Sanchez achieves something alien and disruptive. For the Theosophists – one of her sources and a belief system that both Klein and Mondrian shared – life is a grand school of being wherein the individual must use every means available to affirm the ‘hidden essence of being.’ Shunning categories such as religion, because religion implies faith, this school of thought explored no ‘new’ ethics since, according to them, all ‘truthful’ principles are identical and eternal. In this respect they abandoned a revolutionary mission or at least avant-garde errand before the term ‘postmodernism’ even came into being. They just kept the good stuff, as Sanchez has kept the best of the look of high Modernism to further her own work. The hope unearthed in her pursuit is exhilarating.
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Christopher Miles of Artforum
There’s a moment in every thriller when the protagonists realize they’ve entered a bad situation, having stumbled on an illicit drug factory, a mad dictator’s WMD program, or a mother alien’s nest full of eggs. In this exhibition, Pauline Stella Sanchez conjured the anxiety of such moments with all the craft of Martha Stewart.
The center of Sanchez’s show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery was a series of seven small wood-and-vinyl structures that resembled a display of architectural models. Each was drenched in sky blue paint, mounted on a turntable, and perched atop a pedestal. Collectively titled Gone Mad Blue/Color Vaccine Architecture or 3 state sculpture: before the event, during the event, and after the event. Seen here in before the event stage, 2004, the mini modernist buildings have elaborate, perhaps retractable, roofs lined with small, variously colored balls linked by a network of strings that suggest wires or conduits. Like case-study houses for the apocalyptically inclined, these places seem part of something bigger that one might be happier not knowing much about. Made of what the artist lists as “dominant cinema notes,” “neo-plastic memories,” and “meta-allegory of architecture as body,” as well as the more easily discernable wood, vinyl, resin, glue, and aforementioned balls (actually smoke bombs), these outwardly tasteful yet somehow troubling maquettes reveal Sanchez’s penchant for churning up logic and blurring fantasy, paranoia, and reality.
A comparable paradox crops up in a series of notational drawings that continue Sanchez’s ongoing exploration of life on the surface of the sun. Collectively titled “Ghost Drawings,” 2004, these fluid scripts rendered in bright yellow paint are like lyrical graffiti by some unearthly creature, finger-painting in its own luminous bodily fluids on subjects ranging from the fantastic to the utterly insane: We Saw Turner, reads one; I Am From The Sun, continues another; I Wish I Could Have Been Your Mother Norman, offers a third.
Rounding out the exhibition was a video projection bookended by sequences of footage shot inside the Vatican. Through the setting is recognizable, its role in Sanchez’s work seems to be a less specific reference to the papal headquarters and more a general allusion to grandeur, power, and perhaps secrecy. Between shots of vaulted corridors and guards opening and closing enormous, ornamented doors are, presented in rapid-fire succession, four years’ worth of photos lifted from the front pages of the New York Times. Certain subjects crop up repeatedly: George W. Bush; war; athletes; George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld answering questions; stock-market traders; protestors; mug shots; violence; natural disasters; and images related to September 11. Punctuating these are other, isolated shots: 2004 Democratic presidential hopefuls; a yoga class; Central Park after a snowfall; mermaids in an aquarium; Ronald Reagan’s funeral; the captured Saddam Hussein; a strutting Mick Jagger; various works of art; Charlton Heston brandishing a rifle; a hippopotamus; ballerinas; a sinking ship; Colin Powell addressing the United Nations. It’s a dizzying, disturbing, mesmeric barrage of pictures that moves almost too fast for the brain to process. Surrendering to the visual flood, we are forced to accept the paranoiac/fantastic implication that seems to underlie Sanchez’s enterprise: that all we do is skim the surface while wonderful, amazing, horrific things slide by underneath.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release "It's Busted," 2005
For immediate release:
The upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be:
New Sculpture and Video by Pauline Stella Sanchez
January 8 - February 5, 2005
In her third solo exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Pauline Stella Sanchez’s new work of video and architectural models/sculptures plays on the mythologies of transformation, including Apollo and Daphne.
Working and teaching in Los Angeles over sixteen years, Sanchez rigorously continues to explore the sociopolitical phenomena of a system of formal signs. Sanchez asks the audience to ponder how the use of color in the social space teaches us about our cultural history. In her sculptures, the splashes of illuminated yellow objects act as surrogates to the sun, often referred to as “cartoon yellow” or “surrogate sun yellow.” Through video she creates an iconic montage of selected New York Times images, by exploring color as the architectural building blocks of our shared political, social, cultural, and economic histories. Through the lens of structural and formal theories, Sanchez reminds us how they were and are political at the core.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. January 8, 2005 from 5-7pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Bari Ziperstein at 310.828.8488
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