Kim Faler
Everything changes everything
On View: June 14th - August 17th, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 14th, 6-8 PM
LaMontagne Gallery is thrilled to present Kim Faler’s first solo exhibition in Boston, Everything changes everything.
In her sculpture, photography and drawing, Faler explores nuances of domestic space within the white cube. She takes objects such as magazines, a chain link fence, a potted plant or a taxidermied bear and re-contextualizes them by shifts in scale and material. This transformation often causes our expectations of the objects’ functionality to fall apart in front of us. Drawing a chain link fence with spool of thread alongside a pencil inherently changes the structure of the fence and allows it to behave more like an unraveled sweater rather than any sort of functional barrier.
Faler also quietly folds time up against itself in much of her work, allowing the quick and the slow to function in unison. In Current, Faler stacks hundreds of weekly issues of the New England Journal of Medicine against the gallery wall. The structure is then dyed an intense blue at the bottom and fades to white at the top--making both the bottom and the top issues illegible to the viewer. Here, Faler plays with the notion of longevity and relevance of the constant flow of news in the medical field and beyond.
In Liberdade, Faler explores this idea further with an antique taxidermied bear covered with a hand drawn Brazilian newspaper, creating something akin to a life-size piñata. She plays upon the relentless (and now antiquated) nature of the daily newspaper by slowing down the viewer with hand drawn headlines, pictures and captions from the July 2nd edition of the Brazilian newspaper A Tarde. The caricatured bear stands atop a velvet lined armchair- towering over the viewer for a closer inspection.
In the end, Faler’s work re-explores our notions of truth, comfort and failure in the hopes of discovering something new along the way.
Kim Faler lives and works in North Adams, MA. She received her BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University and her MFA from Cranbrook. In 2008 she received a Joan Mitchell Grant, and in 2009 she received a US Fulbright Scholarship to travel to Brazil. She has shown widely at venues in São Paulo, Philadelphia, Detroit, and the Boston area. Most recent exhibitions include the 2012 DeCordova Biennial and the group exhibition Invisible Cities at Mass MoCA on view through February 2013.