Krysten Cunningham, Balls to the Wall at Ladies’ Room

Krysten Cunningham, Three Minutes (Purple Balls), Cotton, nails, sheetrock, plywood, house-paint, wood frame) 2019. Photo D.K. Sole

By D.K. Sole

“They are relief sculptures folded back in on themselves, seeming to reside between two and three dimensions,” Krysten Cunningham wrote in 2018 when she was trying to describe her attraction to the work of the Brazilian neo-Concretists, specifically Lygia Clark’s folded metal “Casulos”. Seeing Balls to the Wall you know she still hasn’t worked that niggle of the dimensional shift out of her brain. A rectangle in “Twisted Octagon, Yellow Rectangle” is, at the same time, a flat drawing, a 3D object (the lines in the drawing are strings held slightly off the wall by nails), and the side of an implied prism (the nails are arranged in tilted octagons that suggest the stubby ends of a stretched, fatter, invisible shape). “3 Minutes (Purple Balls)” shows you that all you have to do is hold up a ball of yarn with a dangling end to see a sphere translate itself into a line. The line resists gravity by recording its history in little kinks. Cunningham has complicated things by winding each of her thirty-six purple balls for three minutes each and so you are reminded that each three-minute set of time is different to every other one, a notion that sounds obvious when you say it but you did not expect to see it rendered like this, proposing (like all time-constrained works) the input of a mysterious context. We will never know what made one ball smaller than its neighbor, or flatter on top. The artist herself probably doesn’t know. These are memories that no one has ever had. 

You can’t see the exhibition now because it ended on September 14th but Cunningham doesn’t need publicity from me anyway – “Brainwave Visualizer (Pink Ball)” is made from the pink cloth strap she used last year when the Getty Center asked her to cover one of its lawns with her tricky geometry. The gallery is currently running a group show critiquing sun mysticism.

Krysten Cunningham, Balls to the Wall
June 1 – September 14, 2019
Ladies’ Room
Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Ave Suite #502B, Los Angeles, CA, 90015

Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.

Posted by Wendy Kveck.