Zara Kuredjian
Sandbox
July 20th - August 11th, 2024
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Sandbox, by Zara Kuredjian. The exhibition features an installation of objects from Kuredjian’s Blocks series, a scattered constellation of square stone-like objects that combine earth, hydrostone, and silver. Sandbox was inspired by Kuredjian’s fascination with volcanic sites throughout California as well as architectural elements from monastic complexes in the southern Caucasus.
Within Sandbox, Kuredjian explores relationships between density and levity through interactions between material, surface, light, and space. Consideration for various types of architecture, whether it be the mold, the room, or the frame, contributed to the development of Sandbox and the Blocks series. Each form and surface within the installation is both similar and different, with suggestions of the utilization of a mold and controlled process as well as the less governed movement of material through uneven surfaces, light reflection, and varying densities. The scattered, stone-like objects within the gallery also explore notions of chance, material agency, and controlled process through visible traces of activity within each object.
The idea of the frame is one of several important concepts within Sandbox and the Blocks series and takes on a variety of forms. Broadly, the concept of the frame can be thought of as a territorialization of chaos within the cosmos. It has the ability to enclose. To focus. To erase. To curate. It also has the ability to extend. To build outward into another dimension that otherwise may not have been made visible. The frame is an in-between. An abstract concept. An emphasis of isolation and focus on a particular. It has the ability to transform living bodies by isolating and concentrating some of the excesses of the cosmos. Moments of increased intensity and oscillation.
Zara Kuredjian is an LA-based artist with an interdisciplinary practice focused on materials relationship to liminality and the ethereal. She is deeply engaged with the porosity and liquidity of matter. Within her practice, material agency is a paramount consideration for how work is developed and the expression of a material's properties are considered through their inherent qualities as well as how they react to other materials and forces. Within her practice questioning human experience and its relationship to material is as important as thinking through matter and its relationship to the cosmos. This tenuous relationship between emergence and return, flesh and earth, is an idea that she often works through by approaching bodily relationships to material and site. Work is frequently presented in the form of sculpture, installation, and photography.