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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bari Ziperstein's inventive sculptural tableau, through collage aesthetics and the lens of Feminist domesticity, explore America’s perverse love of excess and desire to collect. A selection of recent solo shows includes Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles (2010); Project Space, Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art at Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamonga (2010); Perk, See Line Gallery, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles (2009); and (This Isn’t Happening) Popular Hallucinations For Your Home, Bank, Los Angeles (2007). In 2009, Ziperstein's work was included in Bitch is the New Black, curated by Emma Gray at Honor Fraser in Culver City, CA. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in numerous publications including: The Los Angeles Times, Flash Art, X-TRA, Los Angeles Weekly, Artnet, and Art Papers.
Since 2007, she has been on the Board of Directors at Side Street Projects and hosts a biweekly podcast series called Shoptalk of frank conversations with contemporary LA artists, sponsored by SSP. She has taught at Cal Arts, CSSSA: California State Summer School for the Arts, and is currently a Professor of Art at University of CA at San Diego and University of CA at Riverside. Ziperstein holds an MFA from CalArts and double majored at Ohio University to receive a BFA in painting and a Women’s Studies Degree. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
ZIPERSTEIN'S ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic practice draws attention to the way built environments are designed – both as architectural and as aspirational consumerist constructs. My site-specific sculptures, ceramics and photographs challenge viewers to discern the familiar from the strange, and to question the attachments – be psychological, economical or emotional – that consumers tends to place on spaces and objects that adorn them.
The projects 'For Display Purposes Only' (2008-09’) and 'Thrift Store Piñatas' (2008-09’), continues my investigation of the architectural/design history of Los Angeles and the effect of consumerism on urban landscapes. My process of re-assembling functional domestic objects - from found thrift store end table, hand made ceramic object, to collected lamps reimagined as piñatas - aims to re-interpret the domestic setting by challenging the physical and psychological perceptions of model domiciles and disorientating how its inhabitants are meant to interact within such spaces. However, by employing the language and rhetoric of modernist architecture (industrial, monochromatic, economic use of materials, utilitarian) – the lavish and coveted, if truly unattainable, interiors of home design magazines – I am able to create sculptures that at once waver between the fantastically absurdist and the comfortably commonplace.