Ariel DeAndrea
‘Dreams Of Flight’

Thinkspace Gallery (Los Angeles) – is pleased to present new works by Ariel DeAndrea in Dreams Of Flight. An accomplished painter and installation artist, DeAndrea’s works are expressive dreamscapes developed through a personal iconography. Her paintings combine technical elements of hyperrealism with a surrealistic stylization that is distinctly her own. Looking to the crane as a symbol of hope and salvation, the artist creates hyperreal paintings of these delicate origami birds. The imagery is at once intensely poetic and strategically understated. Often staged in atmospherically shifting water, the paper talismans are refracted through light and subtle reflection. A shimmering blur of organic patterns and prismatic shifts, the serene paintings are quietly exquisite in their detail and execution. The sense of meditative calm conveyed by the work, contributes to its measured and deliberate impression of the surreal. The images are hauntingly poignant as a result; like silent suspended excerpts from a revelatory dream.

As a recurring symbol for the artist, the crane is frequently shown with figurative subjects or self-portraits, and is staged alongside the crocodile as its repeated symbolic counterpart for fear and atrophy. Drawing from the proverbial divisions of good and bad, and light and dark – binaries essential to the symbolic function of fable – the artist uses her work to polarize experiences of hope and fearfulness, salvation and damnation, bringing deeply emotive subject matter to life. Intensely personal, the works are like psychological portraits of human conflict. Looking to the uncomfortable proximity of hope and phobia, and our constant negotiation of their coexistence, DeAndrea’s works are powerfully simple and stirring. Like the indelible visuals left by dreams, the imagery in her work is intimate, surreal, and beautifully vulnerable.

Check out a great profile on Ariel’s work here:
http://vimeo.com/78095574