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Maura Bendett
Jeff Cain
Joyce Campbell
Christine Nguyen
Orlan
Lothar Schmitz

Curated by Pam Posey

July 14 - Septmeber 14, 2007
ArtNight Reception event: Saturday, April 7, 6:00 - 8:30pm
1639 18th Street, Santa Monica

18th Street Art Center presents “Nature (Interrupted),“ an exhibition of works by Maura Bendett, Jeff Cain, Joyce Campbell, Christine Nguyen, Orlan, and Lothar Schmitz. The works of these six artists blur the distinctions between the natural and the manmade, the real and the imagined. Maura Bendett’s wall sculptures of botanical growth gone awry hover anxiously between fantasy and the anxiety of endless mutations. Jeff Cain’s visceral sound environment, “Dead Air,” records the collision of wind and fragments of radio chatter surrounding Mount Wilson. Taken during a recent trip to Antarctica, Joyce Campbell’s haunting photographs of macabre ice formations surprise us with their mix of uncanny beauty and dread. Christine Nguyen blurs the boundary between the real and the fantastical in her manipulated photographs of an alternate natural world. Orlan’s reliquaries containing body tissue from performative plastic surgeries question the separation of the artist’s physical being from the art she creates. In his installation, Lothar Schmitz uses nature, science and technology to suggest that our ability to distinguish between the real and the manmade has resulted in a dysfunctional and unbalanced relationship to the natural world. The uncanny prevails in “Nature (Interrupted).”.

Pam Posey (Curator) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose paintings draw from and reinterpret traditional ideas of landscape. Posey received her B.A. in Painting from Bennington College and her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Posey's paintings have been exhibited nationally and are held in a variety of public and private collections. Posey serves as the chair of the Visual Art Department and director of the Sam Francis Gallery at Crossroads School in Santa Monica. For more information visit www.pamposey.com.

CLICK TO READ CURATOR STATEMENT.

18th Street programs are supported by the James Irvine Foundation, California Community Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, National Endowmwnt for the Arts, Santa Monica City Cultural Affairs Division, L.A. County Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Foundation, J. Paul Getty Grant Program, and others.

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