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ARTCAT



Stranger Than Fiction

the:artist:network
424 Broadway, 6th Floor, 212-431-1625
Soho
September 8 - October 7, 2006
Reception: Friday, September 8, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site


Stranger Than Fiction features installations and works by Gabriela Galvan and Yuko Oda in a two-person exhibition curated by Mariko Tanaka.

Gabriela Galvan’s site-specific installation, The Invisible Paradises uses appropriated materials such as shopping bags, brand name consumer products, and advertising of her surrounding environment in downtown Chinatown and SoHo. Employing their designs, saturation of colors, vis-à-vis branding, and graphic advertising within her cutout assemblages, Galvan transforms the space into a high-octane visual playground. Galvan’s constructions swell from the floor to the ceiling. Illuminated by pink flashing lights, the work allows the audience’s imagination to explore the creative associations between oft-ignored objects in today’s world and her luminescent fantasy. The collected objects take on new meaning through her re-ordering. Immersed in over-saturated visual signage, Galvan’s work imposes questions about the contemporary habit of consumption.

Concurrent to her concerns for the current climate crisis and a sustainable ecosystem, Yuko Oda transforms disposable byproducts of this system into new life forms. Using ordinary everyday objects such as plastic bottles and sponges, she creates perfectly sculpted fields of clear plastic flowers and neon-colored, wire-mesh insects into cultivated environments that explore concepts of fertilization, birth, and the cycle of existence. Through her study of plants and insect behavior, and by subtly manipulating disposable materials, Oda constructs flowers to grow out of the gallery room floors, beckoning the viewer to observe her strangely eerie and mysterious forms of nature. Often times playful and whimsical, her work holds a phenomenon of nature vs. the artificial, simulated world through her use of constructed materials.

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