Someone Told Me You’d Be Here juxtaposes photographs and an installation by Kyle Riedel with mixed media and video works by Erin Dunn. These artists invite viewers to discover and identify the distinct character of a visual environment. With an indulgence of skillful do-it-yourself knowhow, the art making practices of Riedel and Dunn blend traditional disciplines, which invigorate ordinary spatial perceptions with a sense of hyper reality and decorative tactility.
When encountering the broad range of media utilized by Erin Dunn, one gazes into a new world constructed for playful exploration. In her stop-motion animations, drawings and paintings comprise the scenery where paper and wire puppets are harmoniously synced with digital audio recordings. In the video work, the progression of events unfolds in a dreamlike space where time and gravity behave according to the artist’s choreography. Artificial flowers blooming on a windowsill, swans swimming in a fantasy lake and an energetic red monkey dancing around dollhouse gazebo are spectacles set in motion with incredible attention to detail and delightful whimsy.
Dunn’s mixed media objects and pictures share the same energetic frenzy that fuels the video work. On densely layered painting surfaces, colors ooze and materials morph, and carefully knitted tapestries adorned with wildly decorative patterns stretch out in warped planes. These lively instabilities celebrate visual invention with unbridled enthusiasm.
In a recent series of large format photographs Kyle Riedel has documented site-specific outdoor installations he created in the Mojave Desert. Some of these temporary structures introduce vivid artificial color into the dessert space by using gift-wrapping paper to cover surfaces of objects and planes. With a careful balance between the artist’s hand and the natural environment, isolated close ups of individual plants become fragments of unknown territories and expansive vista views, altered by Riedel’s placement of eye-popping patterned color, feel less like an artist’s studio and more like a UFO landing.
While there are traces of traditional landscape photography and earthworks in Riedel’s work, a uniquely fresh and lighthearted energy fills the atmosphere of these photographs. With the charm of a tree house or child’s blanket fortress, his striking and wonderfully out of place installations read like magical desert mirages.
