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Ocula Insight Images from Abroad: Lada Nakonechna at Galerie EIGEN + ART Phoebe Blatton, Berlin Images from abroad , Lada Nakonechna's solo exhibition at Galerie EIGEN + ART in Berlin, considers the barriers that exist between depictions of conflict and their viewers.
The LA-based artist Joel Morrison has earned international acclaim for his highly polished composite sculptures cast in stainless steel. Classical busts adorned with a forest of anvils, a cheekily positioned croissant, or other incongruous street objects. A giant weather balloon studded into a shopping cart. A punched-in disco ball in a bear trap. Immediately funny, arresting pieces that draw the viewer in, inviting a raft of association and meaning.
Read More'You have to laugh it off first, before you can have a serious conversation,' Morrison says, inviting us to look again. The weather balloon is in fact the sort that carries information about atmospheric pressure back to earth; the shopping cart a symbol of the disenfranchised, an LA homeless person pushing their belongings by the side of the road.
High and low; street and science; the future and the present. All these ideas suggested and explored in one work. But Morrison isn't forcing the point–he invites the viewer to draw their own conclusion, to enjoy the work on whichever level they land at. Just as Morrison explores concepts of high and low art, his own production methods contain that same dichotomy. Morrison came to the idea of stainless steel out of a fascination with a certain 1960s west coast aesthetic–a movement known as Light and Space–and wanted to explore the idea of reflective surfaces in his work.
Looking around him in downtown LA, the shiniest of the shiny were the polished-up car bumpers and tyre rims. And it was via the car industry there he found the expertise to cast his works into steel, in an industrial foundry. He works in close partnership with a team of industrial craftsmen who polish metal in body shops and factories–far from the usual art-school trained apprentices in some Koons-esque atelier. By assembling his collages and putting them through his unique process, that he could turn street objects into Hermès jewellery.
Text courtesy Reflex Amsterdam.
