30 x 19 feet | tape on cut paper with stainless steel nails | 2006 | Solo Exhibition | Bank Gallery | Los Angeles
Into the Silver See-Through is a thirty-foot wall relief paired with a room-sized installation of suspended works at Bank Gallery in Los Angeles. The work is a broad meditation on my response to the L.A. landscape — recently arrived from Northern California, critiquing the hidden and visual structures of this urban space and its coexistence with nature.
Having recently moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I found my new environment a bit daunting at first — curiously disparate and seemingly disconnected. I wasn’t used to driving everywhere, so I felt kind of disoriented. That perception found its way into the work. I felt like I was finding the hidden essence of L.A. — a substructure of peculiar relationships. I love how plant life infiltrates and interacts with the city: how vines crawl up and descend from highways and overpasses, how towering weeds and grasses push themselves from the concrete. Into the Silver See-Through is a place where the usual environment is stripped away from its substructure, allowing roads, vines, plants, streaking headlights, and glinting chrome to subtly coalesce into their own world.
Bank’s space is very temple-like — super high ceilings, all white with old classical flourishes. I wanted the work to emerge from the space rather than fill it. The main gallery has a thirty-foot wall bisected by a recessed Corinthian column, and I couldn’t resist creating a site-specific wall relief that responded to the character of the gallery. The wall relief leads into the project space, where I built a sizable environment of suspended pieces. The whole thing took over three months of full-time work.
Review — Los Angeles Times
Interview — Chris Natrop by Caryn Coleman