Andrew Gavenda, "Houser"

Andrew Gavenda

“Houser”
at Texan Equities
January 10-Feb 14


Andrew Gavenda’s stunning sculpture solo show at Texan Equities in Highland Park opened January 10th to a large and loyal crowd. The artist works as an arthandler and has built museum crates for some of Los Angeles’ most famous artists. Appropriately Gavenda’s work exhibits the broad range of skills and levels. Twelve sculptures of different sizes and proportions from the massive Gate Tower (98 x 121 X 73 inches) to the delicate Houser (27.5 x 7.25 x 34.5 inches) dominate the large main gallery space. The theatrical like presence of the pieces is due to the stagecraft techniques the artist employs riffing on stage risers, and polystyrene foam props.

Gate Tower the most massive piece in the show appears like a pos-modern mash up of the video game Q-bert and a Navajo rug. The negative space in the inerior of the sculpture plays off the exterior striped painting creating a moiré-like after image. The resulting optical effect is heightened by the modesty of the craft as these are simple materials built in a small shop and slapped together. The casualness of the construction seems to fit the cartoony transcendentalism of the content alluded to by the artist.

By contrast the piece Houser has the delicacy of a sculptural maquette with its finely tuned carving. A chiseled foot rises from the corner where the wall meets the floor and a spiny form rises to meet a delicate museum board construction. The museum board forms the contours of a fragile quartz rock or diamond crystal form.

Scattered around the room are, Lamed (109 x 8 x 33 inches), Untitled (30 x 21 x 4 .5 inches), and Untitled, Corner Handle (14.5 X 18.75 x 14.5 inches). These iridescent textured foam tubes dodge in and out of the space like abstract earthworms irrigating the gallery space. Formally Gavenda moves space in astonishing ways. Conceptually the pieces seem in keeping with current trends aimed at heightening our cultural relationship with desublimated junk e.g. Justin Beal, Maya Lujan and Davis Rhodes. The question artists seem to be asking all over town this season is how do you make really good bad sculpture. Gavenda’s answer seems to be you make it as good and as fast as you can creating a theatrical like production of the whole enterprise.