June 04 to July 18, 2021
Opening reception June 4, 5pm – 8pm

MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture is pleased to present Enduring Time | Material Emergence, our inaugural exhibition with works by Lauren Alyssa Bierly, Ilknur Demirkoparan, and Luis Zavala Tapia.

Amidst the contours of our newly fractured reality, we count time in incessant ways as our work bleeds into our homes, family members becoming coworkers, the touch of our labor separated from one another, and our patience ever exhausted. Time, that unceasing fugitive in our long wait for normalcy, is at once all we are after and all we lose track of. 

This artist-curated exhibition stems from a series of conversations surrounding the parameters of our existence in a slowly collapsed temporal grid worsened by the global Covid-19 pandemic. The various lockdowns of the past year, besides containing bodies in time and space, also expose the human need to make sense of our vulnerable collective presence.

Hailing from New York, Los Angeles, and Portland, the works of three artists shed light on the experience of time as they celebrate the touch of the hand by way of material and process. Grappling with themes of endurance in various iterations including painting, drawing, installation, and video, the works of these artists evoke history, mythology, labor, and memory while carving new spaces in which to describe identity and being.

Lauren Alyssa Bierly’s 2020 Light Dialogues, as part of her Architecture of Memory series, is a two-part project employing drawing and digital translation to document the passage of time in a given place, and its subsequent incarnations by the environments in which they are installed. Working quickly to trace the fleeting time, Bierly describes her multi-layered drawings as a living record of invisible conversations captured through abstract studies in color, sound, light, and geometry. Bierly’s drawings are accompanied by a video documentation of the artist’s process in timelapse.

Inspired by the abstract language of Turkish kilims, Ilknur Demirkoparan’s 2019 painting series, I want to Live Forever, at first appears as contemporary renditions of ancient symbols. In traditional kilim arts as practiced solely by women, the “toka” (hair clip) motif symbolizes the joy of life. When the weaver weaves strands of her own hair into the motif, she expresses the desire for eternal life. Demirkoparan recreates these motifs from a chaos of scattered dots as if to mold them into contemporary talismans that breathe serenity to eternal madness.

Luis Zavala Tapia’s 2021 Mi Cielo oil on paper paintings derive their title from a Spanish term of endearment, translating in English to my heaven. Taking a meditative turn inward for self-recognition in time and space, Zavala’s interplay between mythology, fantasy, and the self speaks to the expansiveness of our being. Zavala’s series of paintings invite recognition for the multitude of histories that collide into the present to constitute one’s ever expansive self.

The intimacy of manual labor in these various iterations generates a new durational relationship to materiality. By capturing human presence through material expression, this exhibition works against the volatile relationship with time premised on the frailty of lived experience. Resilience is the primary radical act that intervenes in time through tenacious endurance. Thus, emerges an arresting display of material that is at once intimately perceptive and rigorously expository.

Artists 

Lauren Alyssa Bierly is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose artwork is rooted in phenomenology and inspired by ecology, language and architecture. Bierly approaches her work as an observer, identifying conversations between her environmental collaborators then drawing on these connections to create vibrant installations. Through processes of mapping, her work takes the form of site documentation, color journals, mixed-media prototypes and installations, and text-to-color reflections. Bierly has exhibited in New York, Oregon, Kolkata, and Moscow. She was artist-in-residence at Playa: Art + Science; ChaNorth Residency; Starry Night; Panoply Performance Lab and Trestle Art Space.  Bierly earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Pennsylvania State University (2009), and MA in Modern Art, Connoisseurship, and History of the Art Market from Christie’s Education (2010).

Ilknur Demirkoparan aka ironBreaker, aka the barbarian, is a Turkish-born American artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and digital media. Her practice explores the intersections between political power and the narration of history by tracing her own identity in time and space. While her early work evokes the bizarre and often baffling narratives of identity and otherness, her current work explores the tension between erasure and endurance through the abstract language of kilims which she translates into paintings. She has performed and exhibited her work at the Berlin Biennial Art Wiki Project, Highways Performance Space and Gallery in Los Angeles, and FAR Bazaar. She holds an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts and a BA in Art from University of California, Riverside. Her recent residencies include ChaNorth and GlogauAIR. She is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Max H. Gluck Foundation fellowship awards.

Luis Zavala Tapia is a Mexican-born artist based in Long Beach. He holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2007) and a BFA in painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004).