Alexandra Barth: Scenography
4650 W Washington Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90016
Saturday, June 19 at 12:00 PM 5:00 PM
Ends Jul 31, 2021
Alexandra Barth is essentially a still life painter. Working in air brush, Barth portrays stark and moody interiors of a relatively nondescript, middle European character. Her cold, quasi-photographic imagery is freighted with a nebulous, if noirish narrative charge; far from cozy and welcoming, it contains a certain menace, as if these were forensic details of a crime scene. The uniform, Ikea-style furniture found in her interiors, which recalls the utopian production ideals of Bauhaus, Russian constructivism, and even post-war American design, assumes a somewhat dystopian character here, by virtue of having all but fully realized the homogenizing tendency of these movements. The unexpected angles of Barth’s compositions wield a rushed, snapshot quality while recalling the dramatic angularity of constructivism– a drama that is heightened by the work’s penchant for chiaroscuro lighting. As such, these ostensibly simple still lives are full of a rich and dynamic strangeness which subtly upends their apparent banality while depicting certain legacies of modernism within everyday life.
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