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| Artist Statement
Aili Schmeltz - Artist Statement It's easy for us to judge the acts of others while sitting in our easy chairs. It's much harder for us to look at the actions of our own lives to see how these actions affect the larger scope. We drive to work everyday in our SUVs, drink coffee out of Styrofoam cups, become numb about the news, and the average person is convinced that the seem-ingly small actions of our lives are removed from global concerns. We are, for the most part, unaware of where our products and energy resources come from or what it takes to get these products to us; our water comes from the tap, our gas from the service station, our food from grocery store shelves, our electricity from the outlet on the wall, etc. We isolate ourselves in our own bubbles of comfort. We are complacent in this contradiction of belief, opting often for convenience and comfort, neglecting the connections between our daily worlds and their affect (for better or worse) on world situations as a whole. I am a product of suburban middle America. I am both repulsed and intrigued to watch the landscape of my childhood change from corn fields and farms into a land of mega plexes, super malls, convenient stores and corporate chains. Although I am disgusted at the alarming rate that development is changing the American landscape, I realize that I am just as much a part of the dilemma and landscape as everyone else. My most recent work is a series of small constructions that are intended to be dioramas that look at the interactions of architectural development and the natural world through a humorous lens. I am fascinated to watch the process of development as the workers come to a site, strip the land of it's natural landscape, build a structure or attraction (be it a prefabricated housing community, commercial building or golf course), then replant the landscape with plants and lawns that are deemed "desirable" and "beautiful". The result of this manicured landscape often strikes me as a surreal attempt to reinforce a standardized, controlled, separated attitude towards human interaction with the environment. The materials I choose are crucial to understanding the premise in my work. I choose materials such as vinyl, shag carpet, wood paneling, polyester and Styrofoam as emblems, snapshot memories of the 1970s tract home of my youth. These materials speak to the dualities inherent in the suburban landscape as hideous and seductive, kitsch and homey, humorous and heartbreaking. More info: www.ailischmeltz.com |
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Aili Schmeltz: "Mobile Amnesia" at Raid Projects In the dimly lit north gallery at Raid Projects blue light beams out from under Aili Schmeltz's sculpture-mobiles. It is the light of the freeway late at night, and it has the same kind of quietness. Schmeltz recently relocated to Los Angeles. Her project is informed by a description she encountered of LA as a city without memory. Having little in the way of memories of this place herself, her installation is a monument to this supposed amnesiac city imagined by one who is similarly unencumbered. Hybrid vehicles of a sort, the five sculptures graft glossy white edifices onto customized, brushed metal pedestals on wheels. These are tastefully striped in Winnebago earth tones then given a curiously unfounded suggestion of speed thanks to the blue ground effects. These sculpture-mobiles are richly confused metaphorical objects honoring Los Angeles. They are parked amid second-hand potholders-testament to the impressively fearless designs employed in domestic, hand-made objects-proliferating at their feet with the geometries and rhythms of city sprawl. Found styrofoam packing solids are stacked like blocks against two of the gallery walls. The exterior shape of each cubed piece holds the form of the box that formerly held it-and each piece bears an internal, abstract indentation from whatever object it formerly held. The styrofoam solid is itself the index of the space between the box and the object: the space around objects as they travel through the channels of commerce, out of one region and into another. The perimeter of the city is drawn out along the walls and across the floor of the gallery. The effect is an inversion of the distortion of maps in which a convex surface is transcribed onto a flat one. Schmeltz brings the map to another level of abstraction: from the curve of the earth to the flat plane of the map to the interior of a rectangular room. The scene reads as a cityscape but as one that has been folded up into three dimensions. The shape of the Greater Los Angeles region is thickly traced in reflective tape. The character of the tape causes this demarcation to disappear and re-emerge as you move through the darkened space. The form of the city is ephemeral, unified only in abstraction, as a shape on a map, or as a stereotype, or as an idea of a place (as in a city without memory). Schmeltz offers an abstract memento for the citizens of a city without memory-made of what she, a newcomer, had at hand: the unavoidable stereotypes of this iconic place, signified here where even sculptures (or buildings) have four wheels; and a careful collection of styrofoam pieces culled from the city's trash. Like a potion, this proposal has one part idea of the city and one part extract from the city. She merges the two in the sculpture-mobiles. Styrofoam honors the objects it held in its absurdly non-degrading material memory. From these objects, questionable in worth other than as memory incarnate, Schmeltz derives the form of the city's great buildings. They are plastic casts of the interior forms of the styrofoam trash. They translate well into architectural models, and sitting atop their mobile-pedestals, gleaming high above the colorful patchwork cityscape they are oddly majestic, like SacreL-Coeur or the Getty Center or some other human attempt at Mount Olympus. The whole installation-scavenged, constructed, replicated, organized-really points to the patch-up job that memory seems to be-whether or not you think you are living in a city that has one. - Dana Doyle
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