Sasha Bergstrom-Katz and Stephen Quick at Central Park

Artists: Sasha Bergstrom-Katz and Stephen Quick

Exhibition title: Hi Temps

Venue: Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles, US

Date: June 24 – July 28, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles

Central Park Gallery is pleas ed to announce Hi Temps, featuring work in sculpture and print by Sasha BergstromKatz and Stephen Quick.

In the manner that the gallery itself represents a lack, an exjeweler’s office without office furniture, without jewelry, the work in the exhibition is informed by an unseen force. It is a thing of geologic time, too slow to observe in action, one that compacts stone into smiling lines of strata, that holds particles in orbit so that they form a fragile nexus.

BergstromKatz’s warm and lightlyglazed ceramics stand as vestiges of this invisible hand or some curious volcanic upheaval. Like fossils exposed after the surrounding stone has eroded away, they resemble the frozen state of extinct proteancreatures, as if the flesh was mixed together deep in the earth’s mantle and spat back out. BergstromKatz engages their impotence by isolating them on the floor. Some yawn into the center of the space reaching out. Others appear turned away anxiously looking out the gallery windows.

Quick’s aggregate works seem to derive from a convolution of the same natural processes, but formed in wetter conditions. There is a strange frisson between the way the crystals simultaneously shimmer and absorb the light around them, as though they are continuing to slowly eek across the surface of the panels. These organic structures stand in contrast to smooth polished spheres clustered on the floor. At first glance they resemble subatomic structures, offering a sudden shift in scale and suggesting the formula for the inert organic material locked in the rest of the gallery. Again, it’s what one can’t see that maintains the form. The strength of the electric field surrounding the clusters of rare earth magnets is almost tangible when you get up close to them. Certainly enough to tamper with a cellphone or pacemaker.

Hi Temps is an exhibition of work that has been arrested along a continuum of expansion and contraction.