Kim Abeles 3.9

https://www.facebook.com/events/180711715932732/

Kim Abeles 3.9

Opening Sunday July 8th 1-4pm

in conjunction with the CSUN Arts Alumni Small Works Fundraiser

On view by appt. through August 5th

The Closet in Shoebox Projects

660 South Avenue 21 #3

Los Angeles Ca 90031

www.shoeboxprojects.com 

The Closet is a part of The Shed Collective

http://kimabeles.com/

"Beginning in 1994, I collected audio for an artwork entitled 3.9. I collected a minute of sound each day, noting the time, for 1440 minutes in order to capture a full 24-hour period. It took 3.9 years to reach 1440 days/1440 minutes. 

I’m compiling the tapes to create a version of 3.9 to be exhibited at The Closet at Shoebox Projects. I see this unusual space as a persona, enterable by visitors one at a time. Think of a sensory deprivation chamber with shifts of location and years made audible. Time and geography reorganize as minutes of a day. Taken from a master clock and ignoring conventional time keeping, the container of my life is defined by its own construct. 

The piece spans both sides of the equator, and the first of these audio fragments was gathered 24 years ago. My daughter Zoë, who can be heard often in the minutes, is now 29 and now has her own daughter. Voices of my grandparents, or friends like artist Karl Matson and gallerist Bill Bartman, all of whom have died, rise from the audiotapes as if it’s today. Conversations with lovers remind me of best choices and worst mistakes. The minutes range from snoring roommates, trips to the dentist, to city-wide cheers in Rio during a soccer match between Brazil and Ghana for the Olympics. 

I started 3.9 at a difficult time in my life, when a minute was about all I could bear in a day. I see now that it is an unabashed accounting of a life, excavated decades later, as if a ghost trailed to this moment." 

Funded in part through the Abeles’ 2015 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

KIM ABELES is an artist whose community-based projects explore biography, geography, and environment. She has created projects with the California Science Center, air pollution control agencies, health clinics and mental health departments, and natural history museums in California, Colorado, and Florida. Abeles received the 2013 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and is a recipient of fellowships from J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation, and Pollack-Krasner Foundation. In 1987, she innovated a method to create images from the smog in the air, and Smog Collectors brought her work to national and international attention. She is currently working on sculptural suitcases for Camp Ground: Arts, Corrections and Fire Management in the Santa Monica Mountains that embed artists in the Los Angeles County Fire Department to work in collaboration with the paid and inmate workforces. Her work is in public collections including MOCA, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, California African American Museum, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Abeles’ journals, books, and process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art.

THE CLOSET IN SHOEBOX PROJECTS is one of the sister galleries of the newly formed SHED COLLECTIVE, a group of “alternative to alternative” galleries located in Los Angeles, Ca. These spaces are not your typical run-of-the-mill galleries. They are tiny, located in residential backyards and other unique crevices where very cool and innovative art happens. 

This concept started out as a joke between the co-founders: Kristine Schomaker, Cathy Immordino, Sheli Silverio and Diane Williams, then recognized how much the art community needs more spaces to show art in fun and non-traditional spaces. So… they made it happen!