LOS ANGELES, CA.- Edward Cella Art + Architecture is presenting streetseasky, featuring new work by artist R. Nelson Parrish. Parrish visually distills the iconic elements of surf, sun, and highway through glass-like resin wall mounted objects. Ultimately seeking the inter-connectedness of body and landscape, the artist looks to the speed and dynamism of athletics to inform euphoric surges of color and pattern. Suspended beneath multiple layers of cured resin, the works evocatively blur the boundary between sculpture and painting.
Parrish's highly refined material process invokes the dexterity, agility, and dedication of the athlete. By painstakingly building refined accretions of poured, cast, and polished environmentally friendly bio-resin in his studio, Parrish enacts the process of his work with an athlete's perfectionism and deliberateness. Seizing the "moment," Parrish's panels suspend time and seek to isolate this heightened experience of the athletic apex. When viewing Parrish's work, the viewer bears unlikely witness to a crystalline rush of adrenaline, literally apprehended within the material surface.
As an avid traveler, Parrish has explored moving through various topographies, and has summoned the specificity of their environments to inform the energetic abstraction of his work. In streetseasky, Parrish directs his attention to his adopted home of Southern California with its distinctive interface of sea, sky, and land, and explores the geography through movement. Parrish looks to surfing and driving for his kinetic inspiration. A wall sized installation entitled, Light Over the Pacific, underscores the specific set of references central to the exhibition. The vitality and optimism of the Southern Californian landscape is at the fore of streetseasky: its coasts, its endless horizons, and its warmth emanate from these energetic and active works.
R. Nelson Parrish completed an MFA at the University of California in Santa Barbara. In 2012, Parrish was the subject of a solo exhibition entitled COLOR/FAST at the Kimbell Art Center in Park City, UT, and was included in True North: Contemporary Art of the Circumpolar North, organized by the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. This is the artist's second exhibition with the gallery.
William Berry
Concurrently on view in the ECAA project room, is new work by Los Angeles based artist William Berry. Formerly a director, cinematographer, and editor in the entertainment business, Berry approaches the photographic medium much like he is making a feature narrative film. Citing the visual language of cinematography as his primary methodological and aesthetic influence the photograph is transformed through multiple exposures and digital manipulation resulting in an idealized image. Crafted from multiple points of views in a single photograph, the works blur the lines between what is artificial and real.
Berry's extensive research on locations and situations reflect the impact of human occupation on earth and the detritus left behind. The process behind the work mimics the recreation of a scene in a diorama by altering the viewing experience within a constructed reality that captures a moment within a larger, inaccessible event. Multiple photographic capturing of the site is digitally combined to create a seamless experience. The artist acknowledges that one of the specificities of digital technology is to create a more idealized perfection of the image-an artificial or hyper-real reality. Unplanned Obsolescence, shot on location in the desert communities of California, reveals that the American dream is surrealistic in its reality.
