Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist, April Street. Street’s focused presentation at the gallery will include 9 new fabric-relief paintings that use artifacts of body-imprinted nylons that spring forth, in three dimensions, from hand-painted frames or are suspended from bronze nails. Street’s new paintings recall and combine the material experimentation of 1960s/70s feminist practices with references to the theatricality, palette, and illusionism of 17th century Dutch still-life painting. April Street continuously repurposes her paintings’ material parts with displaced objects, personal narratives, and art historical references to ignite a conversation between viewer and the works about representation, duration and absence.
Street’s relief paintings emphasize an embodied process. Works in this series begin with a sequence of scripted positions for the body: she imprints her hosiery-fabric covered body into pools of acrylic paint. The paint-stained remnants of these choreographed performances are then stuffed, twisted, and re-painted; distilling the large swaths of fabric into three-dimensional paintings in a format many times smaller than their original yardage.
In Street’s work, nothing is as it seems. She constructs dialogues within these not-so-still-lifes that simultaneously allude to the human body and celestial bodies. Their material illusionism suggesting first fabric, then food or objects on a table, then a figure in a landscape.
The relief paintings are a direct evolution from Street’s previous series titled Wandering Limbs. Where those previous paintings explored the absence of the body, her new work insists upon physicality and presence; some semblance of its own embodied psychological awareness. Rich color traverses the swelling protuberances of the relief paintings, urging a renewed exploration of painting’s physical manifestation in space.
April Street lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied bronze casting in central Italy and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Kinman Gallery, London, UK; Various Small Fires, LA; Carter & Citizen, LA; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, LA; Five Car Garage, Santa Monica; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and The Underground Museum, Los Angeles. She is a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her solo shows have been reviewed by ArtForum, Art in America, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic and The Los Angeles Times. This is her first exhibition at the gallery.