Sinter

Description

Lynne-Rachel Altman: Sinter
August 2nd – September 26th, 2013


Opening Reception: Friday, August 2nd, 6 – 8 pm
Artist Talk moderated by Anthony Pinata from Oakland Museum of California
Saturday, August 10th, 2 – 3 pm
Second First Friday Reception: Friday September 6, 6 - 8 pm
Artist Led Tasting and Discussion about Sugar
Saturday, September 21st, 2 - 3 pm

Chandra Cerrito Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Lynne-Rachel Altman. Since the early 1990’s, Lynne-Rachel Altman has used sculpture, installation, photography and other media to explore existential questions such as, what does it mean to be present—to exist in a physical body? How can we become conscious of being? And what presence remains after life is gone? In her current exhibition Sinter, Altman continues to ponder presence and absence of self in relation to the physical body through abstract and figurative glass sculptures as well as an installation made of cast sugar. The results are both ethereal and haunting. Hollow forms of shimmering sintered glass depict empty human heads or eggshell-like objects in various stages of fracture. As Altman describes, the “Empty Head forms are my attempt to crystallize a fleeting moment between embodiment and vacancy” and the Egg Forms focus on “deflation, cracking, emptiness, and remainders.”

Altman’s newest work, Phantom/Sugar Feet, is an installation of dozens of hollow feet made of cast sugar. Arranged in large assembly on the floor, they share the standing space of the viewer, heightening awareness of his or her own body. Like the glass sculptures, these cast sugar feet are at once ghostly and life-like, but sugar’s finer grain enables a greater degree of anatomical correctness and detail reminiscent of classical marble statues. At the same time, sugar’s inherent fragility enhances the overriding sense of vulnerability expressed by the gathering of detached appendages.

While, like most of Altman’s work, Phantom/Sugar Feet conjures timeless issues of human existence, it was inspired by a more specific concern regarding our society’s current epidemic of diabetes. Caused by the body’s inability to metabolize sugar properly and exacerbated by our excessive sugar consumption, diabetes causes the amputation of lower limbs for tens of thousands of people every year. This tragic and potentially fatal disease has scourged the artist’s family, as it has so many others. In this poignant installation in which the subject is also the medium, Altman asks the viewer to consider the devastating impacts of this disease and the societal conditions that have helped create its magnitude.

About the Artist: Lynne-Rachel Altman earned a BFA from San Francisco State University (1982) and an MFA with distinction in sculpture and glass from California College of Arts (1994). Altman has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, the Museum of American Glass, Millville, NJ, San Francisco International Airport, the Tacoma Art Museum, WA, the de Young Art Center, San Francisco, and the Arad Museum in Isreal. This is Altman’s second exhibition at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary.

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http://www.chandracerritocontemporary.com

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