Set deep into a darkened archway Aitor Lajarin’s video piece, Trumpet Ballad, emits the burble of a young trumpeter wobbily climbing and descending a C major scale. The notes plonk out into the gallery with a sense of incertitude - a sound hedged against its own success. The video takes a dive, dissolving through a closed window and into an unknown interior space. In this room a pair of boxing-gloved hands gingerly clasp a trumpet.
Crickets is an absurd theatre of comedy, a sincere composition of poetry, and a deadpan embrace of estrangement from inside the march of everyday life.
The east wall is painted with a 30 foot long mural of quarter-scale bricks that together form a dizzying expanse of flatness. Couched on its surface is a single small painting of an isolated paradisiacal island. Elsewhere, similarly sized 8x10” twilight paintings of urban domiciles dot the room - a high...rise apartment building, a stand-alone house - each yielding their own yellowing, brick-like fenestral glow. These miniature cityscapes continue back into the office and bedroom.
Finally, Sea Shell stands near the doorway - a knee-high cardboard cube with a pair of headphones plugged into its side. The piece offers a momentary escape from within that reframes its surroundings, suggesting a performance of relaxation from inside a crowd.
Crickets is a reflection on the distended poetics of art itself. A cricket’s chirp can sometimes be heard from a great distance. You may be able to sneak closer to its source, but only up to a certain point. Inevitably, amid a palpable closeness to the unseen target, you will find yourself in silence.
Exhibition Context is a six-part series of additive solo shows designed to throw focus toward the gallery's embedded conditions of presentation. It serves to maximize individual artistic platform while encouraging a collaborative approach. In this fourth of six shows, Lajarin has recontextualized works left behind by the first, second and third artists: Paul Pescador, Linnea Kniaz, and Ian James. Lajarin will then expand this context by leaving another work behind for the fifth artist to incorporate into her exhibition.
Crickets is a two part exhibition, with the complementary half occurring at Heritage Square Museum from February 19 – April 9, 2017. Heritage Square Museum is located at 3800 Homer St. Los Angeles, CA 90031.
Entrada actualizada el el 07 mar de 2017
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