A Time And A Place

Home is a place of safety, comfort and status, but for some a site of darker associations. During childhood, idealized drawings and paintings of home constitute some of our first forays into visual art, revealing conceptions of life’s most basic elements – family, security, and connection. In A Time and A Place, Alexander Cheves, Lisa Dahl and Kyle Bravo each present their views of home with a captivating surface beauty. The colors, shapes and textures draw us in, then slowly, more foreboding overtones emerge. The houses are broken, fractured or inaccessible, yet the paintings, prints and sculptures have a dreamy, childlike optimism.

Alexander Cheves’ brightly colored poetic paintings and sculptures are derived from the landscape, hills and architecture of central valley California. Working from materials that are used to build and paint houses such as wood, plaster, concrete, and steel, Cheves takes us on a dream journey to a place and a time that is familiar but distant. Houses are turned on their side, merged together and floating in a brilliant sky.

Lisa Dahl uses the Suburban Home as a metaphor for the American Dream and its discontents. In her series of paintings There Goes My Neighborhood, Dahl paints layers of bright colors atop images of houses in real estate magazines and photographs she has taken.  The houses stand out from their natural settings and turn this one-time symbol of comfort, warmth and stability into a closed off, cold place with no entrance or exit.

Kyle Bravo’s eight silkscreens were created from collaged photographs of houses in the ninth ward that he photographed after Hurricane Katrina. Bravo’s studio was in this section and he lost most of his artwork and equipment during the floods. He describes the process of making these pieces as “his own reconstruction effort. Salvaging the broken pieces of people’s homes and lives and reclaiming a place and a purpose for them.”