Event

SnowballPost an Event »

Catharine Clark Gallery

February 26 - April 3, 2011

Info

248 Utah Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
Google Map »
Snowball leonardogillesfleur, Irreconcilable Differences 3, FITO, 2006-10
Reception Saturday, February 26, 4–7 pm Catharine Clark Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition SNOWBALL: new works in sculpture, photography, and video by the collaborative entity leonardogillesfleur. The exhibition opens Saturday, February 26, from 4 to 7pm, and continues through April 2, 2011. leonardogillesfleur is an alliance of two artists, Leonardo Giacomuzzo (b. Argentina) and Gilles-fleur Boutry (b. France). The two artists were collectively awarded one masters of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Straddling the genres of performance, sculpture, and video, leonardogillesfleur’s conceptually driven work uses a wide range of approaches to explore how the loss of individuality that can occur through collaboration and relationship can result in a third identity. For their forthcoming exhibit at Catharine Clark Gallery the artists have created three separate, but related, bodies of work—a group of installative sculptures, a series of photographs, and recent additions to the on-going series, Irreconcilable Differences, originally introduced in a solo exhibition in 2006 with a double front-ended tandem bicycle. As husband and wife, partners in artistic practices, and most recently parents to two children, the artists’ boundaries between individual and collective identities have become increasingly blurred. The collapse of individual identities is ever building—a snowball effect in terms of the loss of individuality. The growing loss of self that began at first as artistic collaboration has expanded into every aspect of the artists’ lives. It is at this intersection of building toward something more significant and the potential for loss, that the work in the exhibit exists. For example the installation Self-Reflection is a mixed media work composed of two independent pieces: Self is a life-size Puma that stalks its own reflection; Reflection is a convex mirror encircled by a reflexive rhetoric rendered in neon: I refuse to be what you want me to be; You refuse to be what I want you to be. Another work is a proposal for an action sculpture, titled In to You. In this project, the idea of two becoming one is presented theatrically in a video installation where one car is being inserted into another through the use of unorthodox sculpting tools. The most recent series of work in the exhibition is titled Villains and Heroes. The photographs are snapshots taken from real life in which a villain or hero is portrayed. One of the more monumental works in the exhibit is the sculptural realization of a signature photographic work from the Irreconcilable Differences series. The work is titled FITO and takes the form of a double front-ended, 1976, Fiat 600 (the Argentine version of the highly recognized Italian Fiat 500). This work humorously examines collaboration, relationship, and futility as a kind of pushmi-pullyu (pronounced push-me-pull-you). Similar to the characteristics of Doctor Doolittle’s "gazelle-unicorn cross"—a creature with two heads (one of each) at opposite ends of its body who, when attempting to move, is stymied by the heads trying to go in opposite directions—the car suggests a stale mate—action that can never be realized. Because FITO is fabricated from two cars, there is an expectation of functionality. This expectation is thwarted by the realization that like much of art, the car has no literal, only artistic, function. leonardogillesfleur’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico City, Miami, Buenos Aires, Paris, Prague, New York, and San Francisco. Their work is in the collections of di Rosa and ArtNow International. The artists live and work in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and New York, NY. They have exhibited with Catharine Clark Gallery since 2003.