Tactility Of The Line

Tanya Brodsky

Michael Kennedy Costa

Conor Fields

Ariel Herwitz

Jonathan Ryan

"For me, part of the challenge is to recover our sense of time through tactility—through materials, through texture, through the senses."

— Sarah Sze, The New Yorker, "How I Solved It: The Problem of Suspense," 11 May 2017

Elevator Mondays is proud to announce Tactility of the Line. The exhibition features sculpture, drawing, painting and balloons. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our hominid ancestors made the world's first images, likely scribed into sand or scratched onto rocks, these early images represent the very beginning of our extended image culture. Today our lives are subsumed into an infinite culture of images. While many of our contemporary images are made by machines and comprised of mostly discrete points, human images originated with the line. A finger dragged across earth gave us the foundation of human images; our images started as matter, they could be felt.

Tanya Brodsky’s Oh, Yeaahh! (2017) is made from a recycled metal gate and impregnated by a balloon, the rigid steel form yields to supple, inflated latex. Michael Kennedy Costa’s drawings are bodily in image and in touch, a meticulous sensitivity to the medium gives way to gentle apparitions of past memories. Conor Fields’ stone sculptures make use of the natural world’s own sublime lines, foliated bands serving as spatial guides for plastic interventions. Ariel Herwitz’ twisted, woven, knotted wool sculptures offer a soft repose for the viewer, their hand-dyed fibers alluding to warmth. Jonathan Ryan’s flattened paintings suggest digital images, but assert their physicality with thick textural planes composed of paint mixed with rock and sand. Tactility of the Line features five Los Angeles-based artists that remind us that there can be more to objects and images than the empty, high-gloss glow of our favorite screen.