Press release, "Estate of Mind"

Future Studio Gallery presents:

ESTATE OF MIND

art created by Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel and Deborah Thomas
using things belonging to their parents’ estates
curated by Deborah Thomas

October 14 – November 4, 2006
Reception Saturday, October 14, 6 – 10 pm

Calendar Listing: ART – “Estate of Mind” – art created by Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel and Deborah Thomas using things belonging to their parents’ estates, curated by Deborah Thomas. Future Studio Gallery, 5558 N. Figueroa Street, Highland Park, October 14 – November 4. Opening Saturday, October 14, 6 – 10 pm. By appointment: (323) 254-4565 or amy@futurestudio.com
Who: Artists Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel, Deborah Thomas; curated by Deborah Thomas
What: “Estate of Mind” – art created by Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel and Deborah Thomas using things belonging to their parents’ estates
Where: Future Studio Gallery, 5558 N. Figueroa Street, Highland Park, 90042
When: October 14 – November 4, opening reception Saturday, October 14, 6 – 10 pm (by appointment after opening – 323 254-4565)
For information: 323 254-4565 or amy@futurestudio.com


What do you do when your parents get old and turn the tables on you, needing time and care? In addition to taking on their parents’ immediate needs, the three artists whose work is represented in “Estate of Mind,” curated by Deborah Thomas at Future Studio Gallery, make art. Artists Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel, and Deborah Thomas have fabricated sculpture, assemblages and installations which are both directly reminiscent of their personal family experiences and, as Elliott puts it, universal “messages from the past moving into the future.”

Suzanne Siegel’s assemblages, created from her mother’s 50s-era lingerie as well as natural objects and domestic artifacts ranging from rose petals to razor blades, carry implicit social commentary and bittersweet emotion. Ordinary items are delicately modified in ways that embody a material vision both whimsical and surreal. Siegel approaches these remains of her mother’s wardrobe as a language to be interpreted; her pieces communicate longing, secrecy and loss reflective of her mother’s personal history. As an artist, Siegel finds it crucial to interpret and contextualize what she reads and engages with in these items of apparel as common to the ordinary experience of many other women and part of a larger socio-cultural picture.

Deborah Thomas finds herself compelled to “time travel” into her family’s past, as she puts it, by working conceptually with family photographs and slides found while cleaning out her parents’ house. Her work is motivated by a desire to re-visit family relationships she remembers from childhood. After selecting images that resonate intimately for her, she maps out formal groupings according to patterns and repetitions only marginally related to any information the photos might convey. What results is a shift in emphasis away from any particular personal content or affect attached to the images to a more suggestive and universal zone of perception neither purely representational nor non-representational.

Beth Elliott, who describes her work as “destruction and creation,” relies on visceral process to cope with the shredded personal papers and junk mail addressed to her parents that continues to arrive in her mailbox. In order to make a universal statement, she shreds and braids the paper into irregular sculptural forms that are dynamic in their materiality yet restrained by means of her hands-on engagement with the paper discards. She produces organic shapes that reveal pre-logical formal qualities as well as an unexpected randomness or lightness of being.

Through their work, each of these artists moves between evocative past and ordered present, transforming highly personal reactions into universally resonant visions of life.

“Estate of Mind” at Future Studio Gallery, 5558 N. Figueroa Street, Highland Park 90042. Reception: Saturday, October 14, 6 – 10 p.m. (part of NELA Second Saturday art walk). Open by appointment (323 254-4565 or amy@futurestudio.com).