Lara Grant

Lara Grant 
Opening August 2nd, 7-10pm. On view until August 30th

Walking through a textile exhibit gives me a certain kind of frustration, this goes for almost any show. The pieces I see in front of me made of materials that look smooth, fluffy, delicate or heavy can only be determined as such through sight. Each time my interest is triggered by the thickness of a paint stroke or the drape of a fabric I get up so close that my eye ball almost touches the piece. I scan every millimeter for more hints of technique and material, so as I can virtually feel it without laying a finger down. While I am grateful for the spawning of this kind of hyper-awareness from deprivation, I still have a very hard time with the fact that I can not reach out and touch these pieces.

Push Reset is an collection where the work is meant to be touched, explored and worn by the person who comes upon it. Some having more to give back than their physical properties through sound generation and manipulation. There are many fibers and materials to explore, the items in Push Reset are the beginning, continuation and for some the conclusion of a lifelong need and want to be able to enjoy textiles the way they are meant to be.

Also Sarah Grant will be showing her interactive piece, Hot Probs, a chat application designed for the Subnodes project, an opensource initiative that enables people to easily set up a Raspberry Pi to create portable local area networks for anonymous, local communication. link subnodes below to http://www.subnod.es

Lara Grant is a textile artist, fashion technologist, designer, fabricator, and educator living in San Francisco. She acquired her BFA in Fashion Design in San Francisco, moving to NYC to focus on wearable technology and electronic textiles at NYU's ITP. Her experience over the years includes working in the fashion and costume world as a seamstress, pattern drafter and production manager and has worked on contracts for NASA, Victoria's Secret, TechShop and various innovative fashion and tech start-ups. She enjoys teaching and has developed several workshops and classes for a variety of events and institutions. After living in NYC post graduate school, Grant returned to San Francisco to start Chartreuse Circle, a company focused on costume and tech solutions. She has recently taken up a Senior Lecturer position in the Interaction Design Department at California College of the Arts and is developing the course, Wearable and Soft Interactions. She is currently working as a Fashion Technologist for the wearable tech company Agent of Presence. Her work has been shown at Mass MoCA, PS1, NIME (Oslo / Ann Arbor), GAFFTA, 319 Scholes, Maker Faire, CCA, amongst others.

Bethany Shorb, Supplemental Restraint System

Opening Friday, July 1st 7 - 10pm 
On view until July 24th, 2011 

Exhibition preview - 
Detroit-based visual artist Bethany Shorb's "Supplemental Restraint System" is born from classic American and vintage European sports car parts harvested from wrecked vehicles. Her work is tightly wrapped in an outer skin made exclusively from previously deployed airbags, beaded and sutured back together forming another protective barrier in an imagined automotive crash narrative, then further fetishized in glass scientific vitrines. Also included in the show are neon and automotive emblem text assemblages as obsessive tropes on car-culture. 

Schooled in both sculpture and photography, Bethany Shorb creates elaborate prop, costume and set constructions that blur the line between both editorial fashion photography and performance art documentation. Her most recent LANGUAGE PRIMER series investigates the ideas of gender ambiguity and cultural assimilation/disallowance of such—in the context of self and self-portraiture—showing it’s onion-skinned layers as sides of self through the exploration of gender identification and accepted societal gender roles. She examines how these established roles may change in the future through parallel comparison to rigid English language grammatical rules.

Referencing the literary work of futurist Donna Haraway to the classic androgynous fashion photography of Helmut Newton, she plays on the current tropes of hyper-overdriven image retouching/manipulating seen in fashion magazines and illustrates that a level of body plasticization can not only transcend skin, but gender, moving beyond the limitations of body, beyond gender and beyond the roles we’re bound to within them.

Her recent CRASH series refers to JG Ballard’s novel of the same name with scenes titled by the lyrics of The Normal’s song of similar influence. Technology, celebrity, sex, and death are perversely glamorized and fetishized in unison in a single explosion of red Swarovski crystals and inflated black latex rubber. Models, wardrobe and set decoration all retain the same visual and emotional weight, , a hyper-saturated amalgamation exploring the interstitial space between the alluring and repulsive; hedonism and restraint; the seductive speed of expressways and the still finality of Last Rights.

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Devotion Gallery presents: ShearGlory, A group exhibition for Carrie Mae Rose & Elena Rose Ailes

Opening March 11th, 2011 7-9pm. Until April 3rd, 2011.

ShearGlory is as sharp as it is soft. Carrie Mae’s sculptures and couture costumes are made of confiscated scissors from airport security and other potentially dangerous recycled objects. She shares this space with artist Elena Ailes, creator of felted storm clouds, quiet photograms and pencil drawings. The two artists share an aesthetic language, full of totemic mystery, circular logic and beauty. 

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