Un-Structure

Ochi Projects is pleased to present Un-Structure, a three-person exhibition featuring works by Claudia Parducci, Connie Walsh and Brian Wills.

Following her recent series, The Space Between Us, which presented images of disaster sites and bombed off building facades, Claudia Parducci has furthered her investigation into the fragility of structure. Parducci takes the concept of the column—typically a sturdy, weight bearing support—and re-creates it out of yarn, knitting floor to ceiling shafts that not only hang rather than brace, but are also loosely woven and translucent. Parducci draws attention to the vulnerability of construction, upending our conventional understanding of architectural foundations and their purposes.

Connie Walsh juxtaposes a series of photographic pairings of interior architectural details with her amorphous sculptures made of rug-hooked canvas, beeswax and yarn. The hollow spherical sculptures contort under the weight of the wax and yarn, obfuscating their interior spaces. The tension between the biomorphic sculptures and the architectural details encourages the viewer to initiate a perceptual sense that exterior is defined by the interior and vice versa.

With rayon thread and wood as his primary mediums, Brian Wills meticulously creates minimal works that toy with perception. Though the Light and Space artists are often cited as influences for Wills—his surfaces are dynamic and dependent on perceptual phenomena—within the context of Parducci and Walsh’s work, Wills’ interest in spatial order becomes more prominent. Like Parducci and Walsh, Wills is interested in the collapse of a viewer’s intuitive ability to identify structure, plane and material.

Parducci, Walsh and Wills all explore formal and conceptual elements of structures, dissolving expectations and perceptions about surface and dimension. Like Parducci, Wills produces works that defy logic in the way they refer to both their material and their construction. And where Walsh conceives ambiguous surfaces in 2D, Wills creates them in 3D, each generating planes where foreground and background become difficult to distinguish. These works engage a viewer on multiple levels, at first wanting to be understood and identified, but ultimately compelling acceptance with and within undefined space.