FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kristi Engle Gallery
5002 York Ave.
Highland Park, CA 90042
323.472.6237
kristi@kristienglegallery.com

March 8 - April 12, 2008
Opening Reception: March 8, 2008, 7-10pm
Artist Talk: April 6, 2008, 2pm
Gallery hours: Thursday - Saturday 12 - 6pm & by appointment

John O'Brien, an American artist who spent his formative years in Italy, uses elements of collage, drawing and industrial fabrication to create a new series of work, Pagine Pompeianne on view as part of his new exhibition at the Kristi Engle Gallery from March 8 to April 12. Similar to the series Pagine Veneziane (Venice Diaries) his debut exhibit at the gallery in November 2005, O'Brien begins with duotone photographs taken by the Alinari Brotheres, famed Italian photographers from the turn of the last century. These photographs are still used extensively in tour books and are considered the best photographic documentation of Italian historical monuments before the First World War. In this new series he uses images of the Pompeiian ruins, particularly those that have a domestic context. O'Brien imbeds the photographs in cast resin alongside laser-cut metal shapes and graphite drawings whose source material are snapshots of the artist's childhood homes.

Like the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the drawings in this series are present but changed. We can see the outlines of a house, a coffee table and other domestic trappings but they come to us through a kind of fog that makes us doubt what we see.

O'Brien cites the works of abstract expressionists Arshile Gorky and David Smith in considering the composition of this work, including the form and placement of metal shapes. O'Brien draws particularly from these artists' earlier works and their brief forays into surrealism. Here he combines the surrealist concern with memory and the abstract expressionist interest in the formal aspects of creating.

O'Brien pursues his continued interest in the spaces between gestural & representational mark-making and employs it as a method to explore fragmented memory. O'Brien attempts to make time stand still, but his effort is consciously half-hearted. Using memory "keys" like Italian tour pictures and snapshots of houses that he lived in as a child, he examines his own ambivalence toward memory and time's ever-running course.

Kristi Engle Gallery devotes itself primarily to solo exhibitions of new works by contemporary artists. It is located in Highland Park, near the corner of Ave. 50 and York Blvd.