Los Angeles is a city of fantasy and illusion - a place where nostalgia is currency and product. Kelly Wall’s cheeky sculptural practice engages both earnestly and ironically with this manufactured emotion. Wall has created a series of works for VSF’s courtyard that draw on that ultimate backyard icon: The folding, basketweave vinyl lawn chair. Replacing the delicate vinyl with woven stained glass and augmenting the aluminum structure of the chair to create morphing, multiplying shapes - no longer suitable for sitting - Wall’s work suggests a campsite or party that happened last night, the mix and scramble of social interactions leaving their residue as objects.
Alongside these colorful chairs, a collection of cast aluminum objects amplifies the impression that something happened here. Crushed cans, kitschy ash-trays, little rodents, and impossibly intertwined mugs form sundial-like circles around the chairs, and a cosmology of enchanting detritus across the ground. Every object conveys a sense of time that has passed, both recently and long in the rearview. A heart-shaped ash-tray, emblazoned in corny script with the word love on one side, and strife the other, is aptly titled Empodocles’ cycles, nodding to the pre-Socratic philosopher’s theory that the forces of love and strife are the push and pull forces of the world.
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Kelly Wall (b. 1990 Los Angeles, CA) works across a myriad of subjects and media elicitng nostalgia, using memory-loaded objects to invite viewers to project themselves into the work. Wall tends to explore traditional art mediums with a contemporary approach, with a recent focus on stained glass as the medium to explore optics, emotional perception, and perspective. California, as place and idea, is paramount in Wall’s work. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Otis College of Art and Design (2013) and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2019). Her work has been exhibited at New Low, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2022); Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Scranch Hideout, Twentynine Palms, CA (2020); Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Nick Kochornswasdi Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019); JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Francois Gehbaly, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Infinity Room, West Adams, CA (2016). Wall is a Taurus and currently lives and works in Mar Vista, CA.