works sited
"Reading Seating"
Shana Lutker
January 14th - February 28th, 2010
For the fifth installment of the Art, Music & Recreation department's ongoing Works Sited series, Shana Lutker presents "Reading Seating," an informal account of the library's sites of seating. Using photographs and paint, Lutker has constructed a set of miniature chairs and benches modeled after those found in the public reading spaces. Accompanying these crafted objects is another case filled with library books bearing images of similar chairs and benches. Using these two distinct collections Lutker creates an index of real and imaginary spaces by bridging the library's chairs (and the "lived experience" of sitting) with the virtual spaces of the chair's representation.
Lutker's presentation of model chairs also frames the formal qualities and tactile presence of normally neutral pieces of furniture. In this act of miniaturization and photographic representation she encloses an object that is otherwise held in the open and public spaces of the library. The flattened seating seems fragile and ephemeral in contrast to the static utility of the institution's furniture or the historical posterity achieved in the pages of a book. Here Lutker's display of chairs frames the tension between the permanence and impermanence of various forms of representation. By calling attention to the library's seating as the site of both rest and intellectual activity Lutker poses the chair as a kind of transitional field that exists simultaneously within the space of the subject (the private experience of reading) and the space of the social (the public experience of the library or exhibition space).
LA-based artist Shana Lutker's work focuses on the psychological affects of history and modes of representation. She has had solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the Suburban in Chicago, Room Gallery at UC Irivine, Artists Space in New York, and Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm. Her work was included in the 2008 and 2006 California Biennials and recent group exhibitions at Mass MOCA, the Tang Museum, the Wattis Institute at CCA San Francisco. Her work will be on view in February at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State Los Angeles and in "Torrent of Words" at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin. She is Managing Editor of X-TRA magazine and received her MFA from UCLA.
