Claudia Parducci + Melinda Gibson

7 March - 11 April 2015

---

Press Release

You realize that you can’t represent reality at all- that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.”

- Gerhard Richter

Los Angeles artist Claudia Parducci deftly navigates the border between humankind's elevated worldview and its destruction and collapse. In her work, we experience free fall; the foundation of what we believe begins to dissolve and the tools we use to situate those beliefs no longer apply. Both on and off the canvas the artist articulates the contemporary catastrophe we face in environmental terms and in terms of the shifting nature of our culture's dominant visual language. In her painting, I See, I See, Parducci encapsulates the crisis we face as a civilization and as individuals placing an increasing level of faith in visual information while being fully aware of the fallible and often duplicitous nature of images and image making. Parducci’s expressive handling of paint conveys this dissolution while the Morse code phrases included in the work signal hope for communication that is both universal and unquestionable.

UK based artist Melinda Gibson also questions the power of images and the origin of their authority. In her series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" she recreates Charlotte Cotton's seminal book of the same name, literally tearing into it and refashioning its pages into one-of-a-kind collages. Cotton's book canonized a specific group of photographers when it became the most dominant text in academic photography departments post 2004. Gibson's treatment of its pages highlights how particular images earn historic merit and why it is important to question the image-hierarchy established and reinforced by academic institutions. ‘Having liberated these photographs from the conceptual and commercial confines of contemporary art... and by melding, merging and re- engaging with them in her own unique way, Gibson allows them to cross a particularly poignant threshold, into a more unmitigated and arguably more suitable realm: that of Photography itself.”

Melinda Gibson received her B.A. in Photography at the London College of Communication and is an Associate Lecturer in Photography at the Camberwell College of Art & Nottingham Trent University. She was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award 2014, and was winner of the Foam Talent Call and Magenta Foundation Award in 2010. Her book “The Photograph As Contemporary Art” was awarded Best Book of 2012 by Photo-eye. Her unique publications are found in the collections of The National Art Library at the V&A Museum, Foam Photography Museum and numerous Private Collections. Gibson lives and works in the UK. This exhibition of her work is made possible through a collaboration with ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica.

Claudia Parducci received her BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Her paintings, drawings and installation have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally, in venues including Galleries Lara Tokyo and Eitoeiko, Tokyo, Japan; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tijuana, Mexico; and Nyehaus, New York. Her paintings were the subject of a solo exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum in 2011. Parducci lives and works in Los Angeles.