Thinking about what things mean at face value, and then beyond influences the reading of Pieper's work. "Video Lamp" is a sculpture made from found objects that contains a video loop of a lit lamp. A typewriter table supports a vertical video monitor that offers constant illumination. Does the light come from the lamp or the TV? "Cart O' Plants" also plays with what is real versus what is represented. In this sculptural work Pieper, has videotaped five potted plants, arranging them as an animated still life of video monitors on an old wooden cart. The plants enjoy constant sun, however are caught in an infinite loop, never growing, yet always there. This work asks viewers to imagine the plants blowing in the wind and questions the relationship between the real and its videotaped image.

Pieper's works on paper and sculptures play off one another. While the works on paper are quick and literal, the sculptures go beyond a direct read. The juxtaposition of the old and the new, found and fabricated, the real and its representation, allows the sculptures to function on a metaphoric level. These pieces resonate beyond their form, and are witty challenges to preconceived expectations about art and nature.

For his first solo show at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery Joshua Pieper presents 18 framed works on paper in which he has fashioned drawings by collaging materials culled from the objects they represent. For instance, a series of cardboard box drawings are actually delicately collaged using cardboard. Seemingly simple but deeply enigmatic, Pieper’s collage/drawings insist on the literality between the mechanics of representation and the brute materiality of objects.

Along with the works on paper, Pieper presents a series of illuminated sculptures. Several incorporate video, such as Sandtire, a used truck tire filled with sand and a small lightly buried video screen with a short loop of a man digging endlessly on the beach, while others use an LED countdown timer or even a simple red light bulb which flashes periodically. Whether video screens or flashing lights, Pieper’s illuminations are always implicitly and explicitly about time, and their simple sculptural relationships to the objects that contain them perform a series of open ended parables about the infinity of endless time and the finitude of physical containment.

Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. June 2, 2007 from 5-7pm.

Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.

For more information please contact Edward Sterrett at 310.828.8488

Hyewon Yoon’s small, square paintings of belly buttons are certainly quiet, with their subtle, mottled flesh tones, but her subject ultimately comes across as quite daring, largely because of the obvious care and attention that she lavishes on this highly individual, somewhat intimate, but not quite erogenous zone. Yoon’s other frequent subjects are nipples and anuses: all private parts and all portals, in a sense, for fluids and secretions, nutrients and wastes.

The belly button in particular also has strong maternal associations. There isn’t any discernible theme to this show, but a maternal or domestic view does seem to characterize much of the work. Marie Van Elder prints her wide-eyed daughters, for instance, and Chris Thorson paints her feminine bedroom. Laura Ball’s paintings and drawings show young girls at play. Captured as if in a time-lapse photograph, they seem almost intent on hurting each other, with twisted faces and arms flung out angrily.

Kathleen Henderson contributes a selection of drawings and sculptures of rabbits. Her sculptures are shriveled and black, like pieces of charcoal or victims of a horrible fire. Her black-and-white line drawings show similarly wizened animal characters in more detail, in a style reminiscent of political cartoons. They engage in strange interactions, such as holding an ass, or holding guns on each other, sometimes wearing masks or suits. Seemingly an attack on the artifices of politics, medicine, business, the street – but mysterious and nonspecific – Henderson’s satire comes off more as an all – encompassing invocation against the evils of the world at large. Her sculptures in particular are like voodoo totems to put in your pocket and fondle late at night.

Joshua Pieper’s drawings are unpretentious and humorously subtle, recalling the work of such other local artists as Simon Evans and Tucker Nichols. Pieper works in pen and ink, and occasionally paint, on plain, white, unframed pieces of paper. Objects Drawn with Fangs, for instance, is just that: a paint roller, a screwdriver, a traffic cone, and a few dozen other items drawn in simple black lines, in a neat and organized grid, each with a set of small fangs attached. Peiper’s artworks might seem to come straight from the artist’s head, but at the same time they are clearly very carefully wrought. The deliberateness and focus behind his musings gives them their disingenuous charm.

The only artist in the show who works in an abstract mode is Laura Paulini, and even in her case, the titles of her paintings refer to the real-world instruments of their making: Chopstick, Dental Pick or Cardboard. Each canvas is the product of a single sitting. Using a pointed object, Paulini carefully and patiently stipples the surface of a swath of modified oil paint. While it might seem a bit obsessive at first, her process is much more an exercise in not-controlling, but rather allowing a rhythmic, methodical, unconscious process to take over the body.