Sublime Desert Synthesis: Works by Winter Rusiloski & Angel Fernandez

This work explores color interplays through abstract paintings and sculptures created from repurposed synthetic materials. Compositions speak to formal qualities like abstraction, surrealism and site-specificity involving the desert as studio. The work is synthesized around the smallness of everyday life and the terrifying vastness of the land. This recurring tension around object, performance and landscape exists within and between their work. As parents, they tried to keep the kids out of the work, but they always made their way back in. The mess of life: kids' chairs, playpens, and discarded toys make interesting shapes and colors on the land. They view the desert as a raw canvas that they draw, paint, sculpt and perform on. Rusiloski’s paintings pull from the canon of abstract, but moments of color and play subsume the work. In contrast, Ferandez’s work is drawn to the synthetic, like tires and childrens toys on an intimate scale. The cyclical formal shape of the tires are important, in terms of materiality and form, but also work conceptually as traces of humanity. Border patrol use old tires to erase footprints of migrant pathways, flowers grow around the tires, or provide shelter to insects and small animals to take cover from the heat of the sun. These mediums are inextricably linked by practice, lineage and synthesis of the work. As artists, they try to escape the mundane of life, but it will always imbue the work contrasted through the lens of the sublime. 

Opening Reception

Artspace111

Thursday, November 7, 2024

5:30 - 7:30pm

Artist Talk

Artspace111

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

5:30 - 7:00pm