by Elizabeth Manson

Lawrence Asher Gallery held an artists reception last Wednesday to celebrate the close of its latest exhibition featuring the works of Paul Davies, Christina Shurts, and Andre Yi called Structural Through-Line (Coherence). With a title like that, I didn’t go in expecting to be impressed much—I figured that I would be surrounded by a hodge-podge of lines and circles and be forced to nod and smile as someone waxed poetic about their importance and originality. But I actually like this work. Touché, Lawrence Asher.

Though the title served as a nice unifying theme, each artist had a markedly different viewpoint with regards to structure. Andre Yi’s work played with structural contrast through mixed media and form. In a piece like Giant Stump, he rendered a giant tree stump (obviously) through paint so light and delicate that it looks like colored pencil, and he contrasted this image with dark, opaque floating blocks (someone made sure to point out to me that the blocks look the same at every angle—trippy). Every piece played with this contrast of the fragile beauty of nature and the severity of simple geometry.

The work of Paul Davies and Christina Shurts focused more on architectural structure. Davies favored ultra-modern, linear homes contrasted with a natural backdrop of forests or mountains. Davies’s lines are so smooth and clean that they make the trees and houses look like elaborate cutouts. I actually stared at his Modern Home + Mountains to try and find evidence of glue. No dice—I think he’s legit.

Unlike Davies, Christina Shurts shied away from the realistic and the ulta-modern, and instead she created fantastical rustic-looking houses that could not stand in the real world without the help of prayer or magic. In her piece Picadilly, she created a colorful fantasy-land of warped tree houses that would make every adventurous child’s mouth water.

No more lines and circles. This is structure I can get behind.

QUICK LOOK:
WHAT: Artists reception for Structural Through-Line (Coherence)
WHERE: Lawrence Asher Gallery
ADDRESS: 5820 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 100
WHEN: April 7, 6-9 PM
EXHIBITION DATES: February 27-April 10, 2010
WEBSITE: www.lawrenceasher.com