Sculptures from the Pedestrian Memory Bureau: New Work by Yelena Zhelezov
November 3 – December 8, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 3rd, 7-10pm
The exhibition features a collection of Zhelezov’s recent sculptures and performative objects. The works displayed act as playful ciphers, translating topographic markers into lyric constructions that intimately investigate the biological and social body in space and time.
Yelena Zhelezov’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses performance, installation, film, drawing, and sculpture. Though her approach stems from research and critical engagement, she intuitively constructs and stages her work. Zhelezov often builds structures and modular parts that can be transformed by the individuals that interact with them. This process endows each object with its own layered history and expressive potential.
The Worlds Most Charming Instrument is a participatory installation piece that generates a looping soundscape of soft harp tones. This children’s zither was produced in Belarus, the area Yelena Zhelezov was born. One can play specific songs on the instrument by following a visual score that is slid beneath the strings. The song sheets indicate which string needs to be plucked and the order in which each note should be played. The scores of this instrument are black and white photographs of the Los Angeles landscape. In order to perform the songs the viewer must read the fronds of palm trees as musical notation. A projection visually amplifies this tactile exploration and the cycle of recorded sound creates a wistful and eerie baseline for Zhelezov’s constructed environment.
Pedestals in the gallery elevate diminutive porcelain sculptures of buildings, palm trees, cars, and abstract structures, dramatizing these handmade ceramics with a tongue in cheek gravitas. The figures were originally employed as interpretive tools for a body of work entitled, PEDXING. For this ongoing project, Zhelezov produces participatory installations that explore traditional Jewish leitmotifs of oral history and migration. Yelena Zhelezov investigates personal and societal relationships to space by staging mobile memory collecting stations in public areas. She uses the sculptures as interpretive markers to record stories from the individuals that she encounters. Removed from their performative context, the porcelain works become independent entities. The figures form a structural typology of Los Angeles. They exist as moveable monuments in absurd, poetic landscapes that could serve as utopian models or memorials for a remembered place.
Sometime in November:
Zhelezov and special guests will use puppetry to interpret East Coast, West Coast, a video that documents a conversation between Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in which they parse the bi-coastal approaches to art making in 1969.
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Actual Size Gallery Hours: Saturdays 12:00- 5:00pm; Sunday-Friday by appointment.
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Actual Size Los Angeles
741 New High St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 290-5458
Early this November, Judith Berkson’s Six Points project The Vienna Rite will premier at Roulette in Brooklyn! The Vienna Rite is a chamber opera about Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer, whose life spanned most of the 19th century to include a friendship with Franz Schubert, an arrest during the revolution of 1848, being knighted by the emperor, and spreading a liturgical style influenced by the music of his city. The opera will explore these events drawing on influences from Viennese opera, contemporary music and devotional singing of cantors, and will feature a vocal ensemble, percussion, harmoniums and organ. Click here for more info, and here to purchase tickets!
