Liminal Territory

TRANSFER is pleased to announce 'Liminal Territory' an exhibition from Rick Silva and Sabrina Ratté, the first salon-style exhibition in our new Los Angeles location.

'Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears' is an experimental video from Rick Silva that reflects the political and ecological threats that face four U.S. National Monuments. The work combines aerial drone footage and photogrammetry with 3D animation to create a nature documentary that collapses into itself. The wilderness is scanned by large shapes that momentarily reduce the landscape into grayscale polygons —in these redactions we glimpse a near-future dystopia of computer-vision aided resource extraction.

Image credit: Still from ‘Undream’ (2018) by Sabrina Ratté, with soundtrack by Roger Tellier Craig

In 'Undream', Sabrina Ratté depicts an imagined future where utopia and dystopia collapse, inspired by the photomontages of Superstudio – a major force in the Radical architecture and design movement of the late 1960s. Undream leads the viewer through an isolated landscape, overhung by a monumental structure. The architecture morphs between impossible surfaces and underlying order, interfering with the landscape as it undulates in and out of existence. Swept up in this movement, we are suspended in an impossible abandoned territory between the built environment and the natural world.

Taken together these works simulate the impending threats of extraction and construction on the natural environment, making visible the precarious liminal space that we inhabit.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS ///
Rick Silva was born in 1977 in Brazil and lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he is an Associate Professor of Art & Technology at the University of Oregon. He received an MFA from The University of Colorado in 2007, and has since shown extensively nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Transfer Gallery in New York, Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver, New Shelter Plan in Copenhagen, and Interstitial Gallery in Seattle. Silva’s projects and collaborations have been featured in festivals such as Sonar in Barcelona, Transmediale in Berlin, and Resonate in Belgrade. His works and installations have been acquired by multiple permanent collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Borusan Contemporary Collection, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. WIRED magazine called Silva’s videos “glitchy, curious things; some mesmerizing, some arresting.” ricksilva.net

Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist whose practice includes video, animation, installations, sculptures, audio-visual performances, prints and Virtual Reality. Mixing analog technologies, photography and 3D animation techniques, her work focuses on the creation of architectures, abstract compositions and surreal landscapes, straddling the fine line between the virtual and the physical realm. Her works have been included in exhibitions at Ellephant (Montreal), Laforet Museum (Japan), Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec, Young Project Gallery (Los Angeles), Whitney Museum of Art (New York), Galerie Charlot (Paris), Chronus Art Center, (Shanghai), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), HEK (Basel), and Museum of the Moving Image (New York). http://sabrinaratte.com

An inventory of work from the artist is available from the gallery. Please inquire with the [email protected] to request information.

VISIT ///
June 8 – August 10th, 2019
Open to visitors Thursday – Saturday from 2 PM – 7 PM
And by appointment, anytime.

1000 S Hope Street #420
Los Angeles, CA 90015