D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present three rooms, a sequel exhibition featuring three conceptually-based, emerging artists — Shana Lutker, David Kennedy Cutler, and Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Shana Lutker

Los Angeles-based artist Shana Lutker questions the way history is recorded, calling attention to the blurred line between the subjective and the objective. Reflecting her interest in Sigmund Freud’s writings on dream analysis and civilization, Lutker will present sculptures and photographs that explore the problems inherent in the documentation of civilization. Lutker plays with notions of scale, representation, and display as she investigates psychological and subjective associations between objects. Appearing industrial and alienated, Lutker’s sculpture of a large grey clock points to the dreary reality that the measurement of time is the foundation of modern industrial civilization. In Lutker’s photographs, by eliminating contextual information, subjects appear detached, surreal, and dream-like. Placed in front of a bleached, white background, a National Geographic magazine appears as an isolated object analogous to the figure on its cover—a boy hunting in the water with a dead white bird fastened to his head as a decoy. Lutker’s works read as incomplete, unfulfilling archetypes.

David Kennedy Cutler

In David Kennedy Cutler’s large-scale sculpture, “The Greatest,” five plaid-flannel shirts frozen in semi-figurative positions exist amongst a surging pile of ash-covered boards. The dramatic tableau revolves around a central figure: a suspended spectral shirt dangles from above, its plaid grid rendered in multi-toned band-aids, its inner lining a chewed skin of red and purple bubblegum. Below, four plaid shirts— dusted in ashes— lurch toward the figure above. The scene stutters through various representations of historical drama: an echo of the Baroque’s counter-reformation, the break-up of the raft of Romanticism, and the propagandized poses of Nationalism. The plaid shirts are a proxy grafted onto the fray: a symbol of the short-lived grunge movement of the early 1990’s, perhaps the last localized and unadulterated alternative scene of the 20th century. The bodiless, ethereal plaid shirts are trapped in a history that is not fragmentary, but is a ritual of cultural oppositions. Are the colorless, leached shirts below tethered to an earthly realm, struggling towards attainment? Are they in phantasmic rapture? Are they perpetrators of a sacrificial act?

Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Rooted in Vaudeville, slapstick, and 1960’s stand-up routine, Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s work uses comedy as an accessible language through which one can investigate political, social, historical, and interpersonal concerns. Rafferty integrates gouache, photography and found objects into her sculpture. An upended table, redeployed as an inverted and disrupted stage, serves in an odd duality as both barrier and site of refuge for the female comic performer Carol Burnett. Through her transformation of a domestic object into a theatrical prop and her imagery of a female comedic icon, Rafferty calls attention to the role of gender within comedic enterprise. Rafferty’s use of the comic as a solo performer emphasizes the role of individual agency—creating a tension between staged performance and everyday life. Altering temporal linearity and logic, Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s table exists in a rewound moment in time, leaving evidence of an action that has taken place while suggesting action to come.