Laura Riboli
Circumvolver
October 24th–November 29th, 2009
Redling Fine Art
Kunsthalle L.A,
932 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Redling Fine Art presents the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Laura Riboli. Entitled Circumvolver, this exhibition will take place in a temporary off-site location on Chinatown's Chung King Road.
Riboli's videos investigate objects within phantasmagorical settings, often using a combination of puppetry and animation to explore the uncanny physicality of objects that, within the cinematic space of the video, seem to move freely under their own power, as though they were sentient beings.
For her new works, Riboli has enlisted actors in her interplay of bodies and objects, adding the human form to her bizarre repertoire of materials. In Rolls, Tosses, Rotations (ball), 2009 and Rolls, Passages, Rotations, Walkovers (hoop), 2009, Riboli puts her once animated objects into a real time relationship with the bodies that manipulate them. Using a ball and hoop respectively, a lone figure negotiates with their object in a movement that dialectically demarcates the figure's form, and the contours of the object itself. In this uncanny interplay, the object and figure act as equal collaborators in the sequence of movements that unfold.
Together these films delineate the body's ability to define an object as well as that object's ability to define the body. Each time the figure and the object cross the frame, another iteration of this duality is explored, as the object becomes an extension of the body and the figure strives to mimic and exploit the object's form.
Two series of photographs will complete the show. The first set creates a visual synecdoche of body and appendage, using a painted hand as a stand in for the human form. Using tropes from product photography these photographs merge the image of the body as a unitary form, with the incompleteness of the partial object. The second addresses the interaction of the actor and object together in a motionless space, allowing the viewer to consider how the body both imitates and contrasts with the geometric forms.
Laura Riboli, Rolls, Passages, Rotations, Walkovers (Hoop), 2009, Color HD Video, 5 min looped, courtesy of Redling Fine Art.