Arrested Development
By Kayla Guthrie
Opens Saturday February 2nd, 7pm through February 23rd
LES Gallery
1879 Powell Street

Gallery hours: Thursday, Friday 1-6, Saturday 12-5
contact: lisa@lesgallery.ca
www.lesgallery.ca

Statement: These works were made in Philadelphia and Vancouver, half a year after I finished art school. They integrate still life settings, arbitrarily shaped objects, and surfaces that look like they belong in home interiors. Blown-up Xeroxed images of charcoal studies intersect rough modeled shapes. The sculptures are inspired by contemporary “abstract sculpture”, often seen in craft exhibitions and anonymous public art, ersatz permutations of the modernist sculpture of Henry Moore or Constantin Brancusi. I’m attracted to the former viability, in the early 20th century, of simplistic forms as timeless metaphysical signifiers, but I’m equally interested in pop culture’s uptake of this iconography as shorthand for a mysterious, indecipherable expressionism: the symbolic, comic-book representation of artwork as a random shape on a plinth. “Arrested Development” is a series of paintings and sculptures that embraces these emblematic “forms of art” as transmitters for personal idiosyncrasies.

Bio: Kayla Guthrie models her sculpture, installation, and painting in bright, gooey textures that often resemble overgrown hobby art projects. This work is frequently accompanied by self-published zines of experimental writing. For her most recent solo exhibit, Personalities, at Blim, she created a 20-foot-high “3D mural” of papier-mache forms and paint on one wall as a theatrical backdrop for the recital of a collection of scripts, poems, and vignettes which took place at the show’s opening. Having graduated from Emily Carr Institute’s BFA program last May, Guthrie has been involved for the past five years as a singer in a variety of local noise music acts as well working as a writer at Only magazine. She has exhibited alone and in group shows at Blanket, Dadabase, The Helen Pitt Gallery, and Access.