October 3-31, 2020

Open House Saturday, October 3, 11am-4pm
*To attend, please RSVP to info@solacontemporary.org*

Zoom Artist Talk: TBD

TACTILITY

Award Artists Selected By Steven Wong and Holly Jerger

Artists Charity Malin, Carmen Mardonez, Kim Marra

Tactility brings together three artists examining themes of memory, presence, and domesticity through work that is highly textural.  The corporeal presence of the work demands intimacy and visceral engagement, by presenting the familiar through a contemplative and personal gaze. Artists Kim Marra, Charity Malin, and Carmen Mardonez each presents the viewer with a window into her own environment, using recognizable elements to evoke unexpected tension and mystery.

About Charity Malin

Malin’s current body of work is comprised of a series of Household Abstractions, which combine geometry, household objects, textiles, clothing and tools. Light and shadow play an important role, as the shadow lines become an integral part of the final composition.

Malin’s art has been described as a feminine perspective on minimalism. The soft, humble materials she uses in her work bring a fresh take to this art form, which has traditionally been explored with hard, industrial surfaces.

Malin aims to use minimalism to find truth by slowing down and considering those things that are most important. Malin hopes that by exploring minimalist sculpture through a love of everyday objects and textiles, she will enable others to pause and consider the essential truths of life.

About Carmen Mardonez

Chilean artist Carmen Mardonez has been living in Los Angeles since 2017.  Mardonez uses upcycled textiles to radically reimagine the intimate spaces of memory, dreams, and discovery, and explores the deconstruction of traditional embroidery to allow for less patterned, more experimental techniques, where color and relief are more important than mimesis and practical domestic use.

The pieces included in this series, collectively entitled “Emergence”, consist of hand embroidery on discarded bed sheets and pillows, that have been donated by the artist’s neighbors, specifically to be transformed into art pieces during the current pandemic. Bed sheets and pillows are objects that have witnessed the materialized, embodied repression, and centuries of indoctrination that women have experienced throughout history. They accompany restless nights, when the horrors of this world do not give truce. But even more importantly, they are the space of women’s wildest dreams, utopias of liberation and sisterhood.

Carmen’s creations have been exhibited in South LA Contemporary-SoLA gallery (CA), the Museum of Latin American Art-MOLAA (CA), TAG Gallery (CA), Gallery 263 (MA), and JDAC gallery (NE), among others. Carmen has been featured in different online and printed publications, including LA Times, La Cháchara podcast, CuratorLove and Create! Magazines.

About Kim Marra

After graduating from SUNY New Paltz with a BFA in Painting, native New Yorker Kim Marra spent three years living in New York City before permanently relocating to Los Angeles in 2016. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and has been featured in several publications. In 2018, Kim began curating and has produced four successful exhibitions around the Los Angeles area. In 2019, Kim helped co-found the artist collective Museum Adjacent. Kim’s bold, geometric oil paintings collage elements from her present surroundings and childhood homes, finding visual overlap in the memories and feelings these places recall for her. By living in the realm between abstraction and representation, the shapes and colors housed within each composition interact to elicit the illusion of space in an abstract reality.

Sarah Arnold, New Paintings

Sarah Arnold explores urban landscape painting as preservation, depicting Southern California’s fading architecture as it continues to be changed or replaced.  The solid, raised planes of paint on canvas capture color and light in a way that feels as fleeting as the neighborhoods, themselves.

About artist Sarah Arnold

As a landscape painter from Southern California, Sarah Arnold paints neighborhoods that were developed in the 1920s and ‘30s. Arnold began this work in Echo Park,and went on to depict other rapidly-disappearing swaths of diverse California bungalows, Spanish style houses and iconic Los Angeles apartments. These areas are often replaced with contemporary commercial buildings, without consideration for aesthetic proportion or their surrounding communities.  Arnold captures these vanishing places with thick, gestural brushstrokes that evoke their color, rhythm and patterns, frozen in light and texture as a captured moment in time.

Arnold’s work has been exhibited in Cobleskill, New York; CSULB, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; CSU Dominguez Hills; the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Downey Museum of Art and the Pasadena Historical Museum.