November 16, 2002 – January 18, 2003
LACE presented a solo exhibition by Alice Könitz that ran 16 November, 2002 through 18 January, 2003. An opening reception took place on Saturday 16 November 2002 from 6 – 8 pm. The artist spoke about her work during a joint artists’ presentation with Ruby Neri on 17 January, 2003 at 7 pm. This exhibition was organized by Irene Tsatsos.
Alice Könitz’s exhibition, entitled Beautiful Ornaments as Shadows, Crashed Down and a Video of Flickering Light in a 70’s Office Tower, could be seen even before entering the building. On the windows of the building’s front façade, Könitz installed a vinyl pattern across the viewable area of the glass, which provided privacy and protection from the general street traffic, and enticed and permitted curious passers-by to peek through the slivers of space between pattern elements.
The window installation provided a foreground for the rest of Könitz’s work in the exhibition, which consisted of a series of maquettes and a new sculpture. The sculpture was an amalgamation of her distinct memory of a wooden structure that she visited as a child in Germany, and a set of contemporary corporate office towers located in downtown Los Angeles. This show will also include a series of maquettes – small cardboard and mixed media models – which served as proposals for structures that could function as sculpture, as architecture, or both.
Könitz’s constructions suggested an opening of the modernist aesthetic. Rather than tight, impenetrable forms, there were gaps that revealed sites of potential. There was a purposeful absence in Könitz’s forms that alluded to material breakdown. However, breakdown does not equal disintegration. The spaces were slippages, sites for reconstructing alternate realities and structures. Könitz imagined the viewer relating to her sculptures as pseudo-functional objects, alluding to possibilities in the everyday. Stoking the tension between title, material, structure, and imagined functionality, Könitz played with the viewer’s sense of hope and expectation.
