Rental Gallery (Hamptons) Presents Mindy Shapero: HYPNAGOGIA

Rental Gallery is pleased to present Hypnagogia, an exhibition of drawings, wall reliefs, and sculptures from Mindy Shapero, opening in the main gallery on August 25, 2018. A public reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, August 25 from 6-8pm.

Hypnagogia alludes to the hallucinations experienced in the liminal space right before we fall asleep. The wavering lines in Shapero's works in this exhibition capture different states of consciousness as they wax and wane.

Riotously colored wall portals-hanging on the wall like sculptures-are constructed from uneven layers of oval shaped wood covered in rainbow stripes of felt strips. These handmade reliefs boast a formal purity, emphasizing Shapero's commitment to concentrated color play. Shapero's large-scale drawings work to sew up the narrative started by the portals to the other side. Literal and conceptual byproducts of the wall reliefs, the drawings are "Scars" from a permanently closed portal, stenciled from the wooden ovals. Her large-scale sculptures act as totemic forms, or characters freed from this netherworld. Built up from hand-cut pieces of paper and felt tongues heavily saturated with paint drips, the sculptures take on an amoeba-like quality.

Rooted in a craft and DIY aesthetic, Shapero's practice evolves out of a kind of storytelling and narrative space that evolved from making zines as a way to index her work in the late 1990s. Spray paint, paper bits, foam, layers of wood, a chakra color neon palette-all are craft staples you might use in the suburbs. Stepping into the tradition of Los Angeles-based work made by Mike Kelly and Jim Shaw, with their yard sale aesthetic and commitment to play, her idiosyncratic deep dive into the unconscious makes for an earnest fantasy brought to life. "Totemic and anthropomorphic, Mindy Shapero's sculptures appear to have emerged fully formed from their maker's imagination. And yet they are also unabashedly handmade things that require labor-intensive processes and the presence of the artist's hand to come into being. Shapero brings a love of line and an almost magical belief in the power of repetition to engage both the eye and the emotions; her ability to create rippling textures through the use of thousands of bits of colored paper, for instance, replicates the look and feel of the natural world, including the movements of air and water that animate it. In other works Shapero uses paint to inscribe concentric rings of color that accentuate the curved surfaces of ring-like forms, generating swirling, whimsical patterns of great optical complexity.

If on the one hand Shapero's work is an organic, even psychedelic take on the formalist ethos of her minimalist and modernist forbears, on the other it is full of unabashedly archetypal content, suggesting that art can come alive in archaic, non-rational ways. Faces, bodily constructions, and landscape-like contours are recurring motifs. Tellingly, the titles of works on view in this exhibition all make reference to night. Shapero conjures the fluid, protean quality of dreams, though she counteracts their fleetingness with her passion for the palpable facts of materials and craft." -Stuart Krimko.

Mindy Shapero is an artist based in Los Angeles, California. She has exhibited internationally, including shows at David Kordansky Gallery and a solo exhibition at The Pit and Marianne Boesky Gallery.

Rental Gallery began in 2004 in Los Angeles as a way to bridge the New York and West Coast art communities, as well as to provide a venue for flexible and experimental programming, both by local curators and gallerists, and those from out of town. For more information, visit rentalgallery.us.