Abstract
A group show with a real purpose, Vantage Points brings together artists who recombine in original ways elements of painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Individually, the artworks by Letha Wilson, Sonia Almeida, Heidi Norton, and Claudia Peña Salinas offer much to appreciate. Collectively, they enjoy lively correlations of color, texture, materials, techniques, and imagery.
Sonia Almeida’s hanging cloth installations Reverse Timeline and Reverse Timeline Stretched (both 2019) add a new wrinkle to the layering metaphor that extends through Wilson’s and Norton’s pieces by attaching to the bottom edge of both her works clothing patterns designed to layer the human body. At the pieces’ upper edges, she includes patterns based on computer graphics, addressing sequences based on the metronomic rhythms of information processing. Almeida brings in the human figure, but in the form of a stylized letter Z, a cipher representing just another data point in the rigid timeline she represents as a series of vertical bands. The only relief, or perhaps site of resistance, in this relentless march are the occasional gaps, or glitches, in the striped patterns, but otherwise, in Almeida’s art, technology has superseded even the human body.