Installation: “Framing Uncertainty”

June 14-15, 2014 during Paterson Art Walk 

The Art Factory, 70 Spruce St., Great Falls, Paterson, NJ

An area rug is illuminated in the center of a huge, darkened cavern. On the rug, two sofas are set back to back. Together with an empty television frame and a drywall corner plastered with a child’s drawings, they reference a living room – the modern-day “magic carpet” that takes its owners on nightly trips to alternate worlds through the portal of their TV. During the Paterson Art Walk, Alex Losett’s installation portal will transport viewers into a space of artistic collision between different modes of framing reality. 

One sofa positions the viewer towards a huge rock outcrop that forms the vault’s wall, studded with flickering candles. The striking view is interrupted by an empty frame at the edge of the carpet, referencing a TV. The other sofa directs the viewer to contemplate a large panneaux of Urban Panels: painted 3D objects that meditate on mundane urban experiences. Beyond the rectangle of the carpet, exhibition stands dissect the space, displaying Minimal Landscapes: emotionally painted windows into nature that depict former sites of human activity being absorbed back into wildness. Their plane is broken by the encroachment of Urban Panels that creep on the floor and establish themselves on the gallery’s walls.

Each piece in the Urban Panels and the Minimal Landscapes series is artwork in its own right. The Urban Panels are conceptual art objects positioned at the intersection of painting, collage, and sculpture. These “visual haikus” invite the audience to reconsider slate and concrete slabs, manhole covers, and metal grates as unique chronicles of humanity. In stark contrast, the Minimal Landscapes appropriate conventional painting language to convey direct and unmediated emotional experiences of nature. The Landscapes are an invitation to connect to the primordial, “meaningless” view of the natural world unique to childhood. 

The installation juxtaposes the two to examine the tensions between intellectual meaning-making and emotional response against a backdrop of the immense scale of nature and history. Subverting the living room reference, Alex Losett invites her viewers to reconsider their connections to the larger world. 

About the Artist:

Alex Losett works at the intersections of painting, collage, sculptural relief, and installation. She has straddled two continents and three cultures. Her work embraces postmodern vocabulary and discourse, and builds on her deep cultural roots. Details about the Urban Panels and Minimal Landscapes series and information about the artist can be found at www.losett.com.