EMERGING ARTIST: LA artist, Kim Schoenstadt

We take the opportunity of that wonderful exhibition at Chimento Contemporary to highlight excellent Venice-based artist, Kim Schoenstadt.

Because of the consistency and singularity of her work with a constant evolution to it, Kim Schoenstadt is now part of our Selection of Best Ultimate artists.

“Sightline Construction Series and Book Truck #1″ by Kim Schoenstadt
@ Chimento Contemporary – January 9 – February 20, 2016

view of the exhibition at Chimento Contemporary in 2016

Below, an excellent article from Schoenstadt’s gallery in LA, Chimento Contemporary, which helps to understand how she processes

The Sightline Constructions are the most recent in the artist’s mash-ups of architectural sources and minimalist sculptures, manifesting in a combination of two and three-dimensional elements. Schoenstadt continues her investigation into interactive/collaborative art projects with Book Truck #1, a project inviting local artists and curators to loan a book to the show, creating a small library of what’s currently on the minds of LA’s art community.

Schoenstadt’s meticulously researched investigations are gravity-free, generating unsuspected meaning by depicting their attributes according to unconventional logics. Previously, her architectural exploration appeared primarily as sprawling wall drawings and large scale site-specific installations. For this show, Schoenstadt pulls back from the drywall to craft more discreet, intimate sculptural incidents. This new work limits its source content to three disparate, but conceptually interlocking architectural sources. Sightline Construction #2, for example, combines Fred Fisher’s 1989 Proposed Gorilla Husbandry Facility at the Los Angeles Zoo, The Hall of Doom from the 1970’s Hanna Barbara Super Friends cartoon series, and the fictional masterpiece of Modernist cantilevering that is the Vandamm House from the climax to Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). At the level of the drawn line, the work can be seen as a meditation on structures that enclose formidable power filtered through the artist’s wry humor and perspective on decades of Hollywood Modernism.

Book Truck #1 is inspired by an anecdote the artist Christopher Williams shared with Schoenstadt about when he was a student at CalArts: his teacher, John Baldessari, would often return from traveling to teach with a suitcase filled with art catalogues and monographs collected on his trip. Whole class periods consisted of rummaging through this portable library, crafting discussions and trying to make sense of what artists were doing on the other side of the world. Rather than reaching across oceans, Book Truck #1 invites local artists and curators to lend whatever book they are currently excited about, inverting the information flow from ‘what is of interest there’ to ‘what are we interested in here.’ The books will be housed for the duration of the exhibition on a specifically constructed book cart, and each item will be catalogued with a card containing lender information. After the exhibition a reading list or ‘finding aid’ will be available to viewers to ensure proper documentation and continued utility of the project. Visitors to the gallery will be provided a comfortable place to sit and peruse what Los Angeles artists and curators are currently look at and thinking about.