Kaleidoscopic Gaze
A Painting and Sculptural Installation
July 15 – September 29, 2006
ArtNight Reception event: Saturday, January 15, 6:00 – 8:30pm
1629 18th Street, Santa Monica
18th Street Arts Center presents “Kaleidoscopic Gaze,” a painting and sculptural installation by L.A.-based artists Christine Morla and Eric J. Smail, showing July 15–September 29, 2006. The show runs concurrently with “Depicting Action,” an international exhibition and festival of time-based live art organized by Jamie McMurry.
Acting at once as painters, sculptors and excavators, L.A. artists Christine Morla and Eric J. Smail will attempt to blend geometric sculptures, mathematically planned paintings and intuitively drawn, colorful wall installations, fusing personal narrative with structural and formal concerns. In their collaborative work, “Kaleidoscopic Gaze,” the artists combine two radically different approaches to make a coherent site-specific installation, reinterpreting their experiences as postmodern surveyors of contemporary culture.
Christine Morla creates highly layered decorative paintings that alternate between transparency and concealment to evoke ghostly, atmospheric spaces. She has exhibited her work in Art FrankFurt (Germany), Rimjaus Gallery (Mexico City), The Armory, Patricia Correia Gallery and Raid Projects. Christine is Professor of Art at Oxnard College and an artist-in-residence at 18th Street Arts Center. She received her MFA at Claremont Graduate University.
The work of Eric J. Smail currently explores the interaction of colors as well as groups of regular and irregular polyhedrons ultimately constructed out of paper resulting in a strange grouping of geometric shapes and wall paintings that look both organic and geometric. Eric received his MFA degree at Claremont Graduate University. He has shown in ANDLAB, Huntington Beach Art Center, I-5 Gallery, and the McNish Gallery.
