CLOUD 9
Math Bass, Brian Bress, Jenny Drumgoole, Erik Frydenborg, Michael Henry Hayden, Julian Hoeber, Shana Lutker, Jackie Rines, Amanda Ross - Ho, Alake Shilling
In a realm where urinals transform into waterfalls and motel rooms calcify into rocky grottoes, Left Field gallery invites you to Cloud 9, a rousing evening of artifice and sculpture curated by Anthony Lepore in the Round Room at San Luis Obispo’s historic Madonna Inn. Featuring sculpture, installation, and video works by Math Bass, Brian Bress, Jenny Drumgoole, Eryk Frydenborg, Michael Henry Hayden, Julian Hoeber, Shana Lutker, Jackie Rines, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Alake Shilling.
Becoming the honored guests at a grand banquet in the famously over-the-top Inn’s Round Room, the sculptures and centerpieces in Cloud 9 sit on and around pink tables, engaging with the room’s patterned turquoise carpet, rock walls, and grand crystal chandeliers. Perhaps as far removed from the traditional white-box exhibition space as humanly possible, Cloud 9 takes on the celebratory (and slightly perfumed) air of a lavish wedding reception, a traveling circus, or a rowdy overnight school field trip: energies strange, familial, and raucous mingle for a single evening – per the rental agreement – before checking out the next morning and driving home in a dazed glow.
Among the primary aesthetic sources of midcentury California camp, the Madonna Inn serves as both gracious host and eager participant. Beloved for its themed rooms and maximalist décor, the inn proves an encompassing sculpture itself, with the carefully appointed interiors providing an ideal ground for entering distant worlds, picturing past lives, and embodying a bygone era’s carefree kitsch-glamor. Deeply authentic in its lived-in artifice, the Madonna Inn informs the works in the exhibition, as each comes to occupy a different psychic and formal space among the many floating through the inn’s storied suites and hallways. Immersive, unexpected, and partly crazy, Cloud 9 and the Madonna Inn come to reflect one another, while artwork and audience find themselves clinking glasses at the same party.
Curated by Anthony Lepore
Now on view at LEFT FIELD gallery from March 12 - April 16th, 2023
