Artist: Anna Sew Hoy
Exhibition title: Face No Face
Venue: Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, US
Date: January 10, 2015 – Ongoing
Photography: Images courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles
VSF is pleased to present FACE NO FACE, Anna Sew Hoy’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
FACE NO FACE explores the beauty and horror of veils lifted. Each sculpture contains its own empty space manifesting a shocking void, an open closet in the dark, or a wide-open mouth. The works take as their starting point Sew Hoy’s public sculpture Look-See recently installed in Kings Road Park, West Hollywood. Like Look-See, these works are coil-built stoneware installed outdoors in VSF’s outdoor gallery. However, Look-See has a mirror-face, which reflects the surrounding park; these new works are often not finished with a mirror, enabling us to enter their strange rooms. A few works in the exhibition omit the room, and are only windows to look through or arms holding empty space.
In VSF’s Project Gallery, Sew Hoy creates a bedroom containing objects in states of undress. Here is a language of lines where the extruded coil of clay forms a symbol. On the wall are a series of loose knots, pictograms of different anatomies. Denim sleeves wrap various sections to create a wordless sentence or different dress options. A coil-built hat rests on the floor beside a flayed and filleted pair of jeans.
“In FACE NO FACE a single form is made again and again until a specific body comes into focus. Creation is not originality but seriality. One thing comes from another; traits are passed. With each repetition something new is attempted, pushing the process along. Time loops as you walk between versions of the same shape. My sculptures ask: what is this space created over and over? There is a viewfinder that frames a passing elbow and then just the ground below. The bottomless space in an empty hat is a lost trail. It is a black hole where air is compressed and dense. There are cathedral spaces that could be the inside of your head. Each clay body is a planet, and their gravity pulls the viewer through the universe.” -ASH
Anna Sew Hoy (b. 1976) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2008. Sew Hoy has held solo exhibitions at such establishments as the San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., NY; Leslie Fritz Gallery, NY; LAXART, Los Angeles; and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco. Her work has also been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Torrance Art Museum, CA; The Apartment, Athens, Greece; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, Aspen Art Museum, CO; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Asia Society, NY. Sew Hoy was awarded a California Community Foundation Grant for Emerging Artists (2013) and the United States Artists Broad Fellowship (2006) and has held residencies at Heart of Los Angeles, the Space Program at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, and Ceramica Suro, Guadalajara, Mexico. Her work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA and Altoids Collection, NY.
