Fold Up Room
Kristina Lewis
9.20.2019 - 11.09.2019
opening Reception 9.28.2019, 5-8pm
Akimbo, Kristina Lewis, 2019. Found chair, acrylic, adhesive, 36” x 12” x 14”
Bass & Reiner is pleased to present Fold Up Room, Kristina Lewis’ first exhibition with the gallery. Beginning with common household discards, which she often further breaks or reduces before rebuilding, Lewis studies the relationship between an object’s dysfunction and potential for reinvention. Part collector and part (preemptive) archaeologist, she wonders how our trash might be revalued by ensuing generations. Imagined as future relics, items as disparate as Venetian blinds, hangers, or shelf brackets are given a second life.
In the artist’s words, individual pieces are “rebelling against routine, the commonplace is recontextualized as in a surrealist’s dream where objects are disassembled, edited, regrouped, and reformatted. The resultant forms resist the inevitability of their second life as trash. Their new functions are incalculable—they seem to be in transition, between past utilitarian servitude and a possible future as treasured artifacts. Devoid of any discernible purpose, they appear to reach toward something loftier.”
Through the arrangement of a series of sculptural modifications, Lewis conceptualizes and compartmentalizes the gallery to establish a path to a place where objects live outside of their predetermined expectations, folding and unfolding, making room for reconsideration.