Location: Sage Culture, Los Angeles, USA
Dates: 8 September – 14 October 2022
Sage Culture is pleased to present TRACES, a group exhibition featuring works by Lemos + Lehmann, Saad Qureshi, Carlos Vera, and Clément Mancini.
This show aims to promote a reflection on the Traces of humankind on Earth. By featuring a diverse group of artists with various backgrounds and nationalities, the reflection evolved to explore individual perceptions and how traces of our presence can be composed of personal experiences to be translated into artistic expressions.
Different levels of Traces are present, as they not only mark our presence on Earth, causing disturbance and destruction but also ourselves and our existence. Registering those traces is part of an attempt to make sense of the human condition and the world around us.
The idea is to portray the artists' personal views concerning their surroundings and environment. Not only connected to environmental impacts on the planet but especially traces of the environment in the personal life of each of them.
Traces of perceptions of an untouched Nature clash with traces of an altered landscape caused by us. Human Nature suppressing Nature.
Traces as marks on the land, memory fragments as observers of their internal landscapes. Each featured artist explores in-depth urban, natural, memory, and ancestral landscapes.
Beauty is the first impact and aesthetic perception, as the selected body of work is abstract and poetic. But it corresponds to the first layer of a complex interconnection between artists, their environment, and history.
Photographs as records of a remote and intact nature but not undamaged by the rising temperatures. Drawings of charcoal on brick dust background, traces of memory landscapes, deserts, and trees in one of the most populated regions of Earth that will face severe effects of climate change. Also, sculptural works of an extracted ancestral land shaped in totems forms of a contemporary excavating apparatus. And finally, paintings that reflect gestures of modern society, traces of an urban culture detached from Nature.
In the age of the Anthropocene, our marks on the planet are the subject of constant debate, and Sage Culture intends to make this debate permanently present in its program concerning Art & Environment.
The gallery embodies the human intent to understand Nature constructively and to reconnect with the environment through artistic contemplation.
For Traces, Sage Culture is showing the never-before-exhibited series "Portrait of Trees," which depicts the memories from the artist's childhood in his home country, Pakistan, and the sublime relationship with trees throughout his life.
