RADICAL GARDENING
> sundown salon #013 / june 2004
+ inaugural planting of katie grinnan's sculpture 'adventures in delusional realism' - vegetables! fruit!
+ fresh from the 2003 show at the whitney museum, now permanently installed in the sundown gardens
+ fresh from topanga, the debut performance of 'cacophonous sarcophagus' (tim rogeberg, zak cook, joel searles, jules hartzell with special guest evan holloway)
+ marc & robby herbst perform special readings
"Evoking contained, self-sustaining ecosystems and utopian communities, Katie Grinnan uses moldable plastic and computer-altered images of corporate spaces to create large-scale photo sculptures and installations.
Grinnan’s installation work spatializes the intersection of photography, sculpture, and architectural environments. By incorporating her recent research of rain forests in Costa Rica, the Great Barrier Reef, the Biosphere, and Arcosanti (a utopian community in Arizona), Grinnan draws on the site-specific aspects of the Sculpture Court to create elements of her own hybrid, self-sustaining utopian community. This includes a small crop of corn planted in the existing flower beds and inverted trees suspended from above. Seamlessly combining high and low-tech processes, the installation features organically contoured sculptures growing over existing architectural structures and photographic forms that mimic objects in the space. These photographic sculptures and murals are derived from images taken by Grinnan of Altria public and office spaces. The combined elements of the installation reflect a compression of distance between structure and surface and the blurring of spatial function."
Katie Grinnan received a M.F.A. from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999 and a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. Grinnan currently lives in Los Angeles and has recently had a solo exhibition at ACME., Los Angeles, CA. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at such venues as Pond, San Francisco, CA; Galeria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy; Exit Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Her work was included in the recent 2004 Whitney Biennial.
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MEMORIES:
Gallery openings are never about the work, ever. This afternoon was as cool a celebration of the ideas and energy that can come out of a sculpture I've ever been a part of. It was so literally like what I imagine a "consciousness raising" meeting must have been like the hippieness of it embarrasses me. The Herbst boys read from the punk rock zines of the gardening underworld. It was a lil' like listening to the Violent Fems for the first time -with a hard- on. Katie and I began talking about working on a cookbook together around this time. A cookbook of sculptures that could grow from the kitchen or a half eaten lunch or straight out of you head. Katie really has figured out the grand potential complexity of spatial relations as they relate to all the things pleasurable that sustain and destroy us. Katie rocks so hardy! - Tom Texas Holmes