ALICE

Designer: Florencia Pita

Project Team: Ai Amano, Guillermina Chiu, Zarmine Nigohossian, Clair Souki, Tanja Werner

Curator: Lauri Firstenberg

Los Angeles, CA. 2007

LAXArt Gallery Installation

Alice is an installation that takes its form from a tale, its name comes from a narrative that creates multiple fictional landscapes. There is no literal relationship between the installation and the original story by Lewis Carroll, it is indeed an aim to capture the sensibility and atmosphere that is present in the story and therefore intends to embed the space with it. Much of the aesthetic of the piece is related to the images created by John Tenniel (1865) where the black and white engravings outline an incredible focus on the detail of overlapping patterns, which accentuate a very frontal two-dimensional graphic space with a shallow depth. Later iterations such as the illustrations by Arthur Rackham (1907) introduce color, which converts the patterns into moods.

Alice installation focuses on ideas of figuration and color. Figuration is developed as a way to exaggerate form, to capture very specific geometrical notations of given objects and manipulate them, a kind of exacerbated embellishment of curvaceous form. Color allows for the double manipulation of materiality and space, certain materials have a coded color condition that defines their character; this project intends to exacerbate materiality’s character by exalting its pigmentation. In Alice the material is plastic and the color is orange, the idea was that the right sensibility for the object should be similar to that of a plastic toy, were you see how the parts lock, and you definitely have the urge to touch it. The work resides within an aesthetic of densely ornamented form that returns to a realm of embellishment and fantasy.