Light Echoes

Radiating energy fields of psychedelic embroidery in Light Echoes, a solo exhibition by Aili Schmeltz 

Johansson Projects presents Light Echoes, a solo exhibition by Southern California based painter and sculptor Aili Schmeltz. Light Echoes is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and highlights a combination of mixed media textile paintings and ceramic modular sculptures.

The unique mixed media wall works begin as portraits of particular landscapes of significance for Schmeltz—her garden and neighborhood in Los Angeles, the California redwoods, and the Mojave Desert. Moments of connection within these spaces are depicted with rich saturated color and hand patterned details layered with radiating energy fields of psychedelic embroidery. Schmeltz likens these radiating works to light echoes—pulses of light from an event such as an outburst of a star that ripples through cosmic clouds, often to be seen at a much future point in time. The silhouettes of pulsating gardens and forests are illuminated here with concentric pulses similar to sound waves echoing down a canyon to reveal its wall contour.Similarly, the Cairn sculpture series is directly informed by the landscape around her clay studio in the Mojave Desert, a homesteader cabin surrounded by igneous rock mesas, cactus and Joshua Trees. Schmeltz speaks of the act of creating and stacking stones within this context as an empathic gesture, a poetic marking of time with sculptural monuments.  Architectural structural elements are employed within these sculptures, integrating Brutalist, Utopic, and Modern traditions to create hybrid futuristic relics. These simplified and abstracted motifs speak again to the examination of energy exchange within natural systems —light echoes of objects and substances.

Aili Schmeltz is a sculptor and painter who splits her time in between Los Angeles and the High Desert of California. Her work is informed by environmental, philosophical, and architectural histories of the American West. Current series of works include CA Women, mixed media textile paintings that honor women of California who have furthered equality and justice in a wide range of communities, and a series of Cairn ceramic sculptures which use modular building and historic architectural languages to create futuristic monumental relics.

Light Echoes opens with a reception at Johansson Projects on April 5, 5-8pm and will run through May 18, 2024. 

I think a lot about edges in the natural world, a place where nutrients gather, energy exchanges, sunlight is absorbed and archived. The edges in between from and space or a body and an environment are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate each from the world that accommodates it, an interdependent compound is created. Making art to me is a similar natural process, an alchemical breathing in between objects and substances. 

I like to think of creativity or intelligence as a force or field of energy, like radio waves or magnetism, and art creation as a process to try to describe the poetics of this human experience. I feel this field as a pulse and silent language that is in constant vibration, in an endless cycle of formation and re-formation. Often I don’t know in a conscious sense why or how a specific work emerged or exactly what it is or what it means, but I trust the process and know that it is important, I welcome the unknown and continue to be surprised.

My paintings begin as portraits of particular landscapes that I am drawn to and have a deep connection with; my garden and neighborhood in Los Angeles, the California redwoods, the Mojave Desert. Moments in these spaces are drawn and painted on canvas or linen, then the canvas is cut apart and sewn together with other marbled, hand dyed, batik, and/or found fabrics to create a conglomerate surface. The top layer of these pieced paintings is then embellished with radiating, machine embroidered line work, and stretched over a deep profile panel. By using thread that has a slight sheen to it, these lines create a moiré pattern effect with shift in visual vibration, prompting the viewer to move around the objects as they slip from paintings into low relief sculpture. 

I name work in this series of textile paintings in honor of women who have furthered equality, activism, and justice in a variety of fields and communities. This began as a way to connect the history of women who have left their mark in the specific region of the Mojave Desert where I was isolating during pandemic times, a way to make monuments and devotionals while I grappled with ideas of how to mark a life, wanting to anchor a continuum that I consider myself to be a part of. With time, the women that I research and hold space for with the titles has expanded to include people connected to the larger region of the state of California, and will undoubtedly continue to expand beyond borders of states or countries.

Aili Schmeltz (b. 1975 in Davenport, IA) is a sculptor and painter that splits her time in between Los Angeles and the High Desert of California. Her work is informed by environmental, philosophical, and architectural histories of the American West. Current series of works include CA Women, mixed media textile paintings that honor women of California who have furthered equality and justice in a wide range of communities, and a series of Cairn ceramic sculptures which use modular building and historic architectural languages to create futuristic monument/ relics.

Schmeltz studied at UCLA, earned her MFA from the University of Arizona, and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. She has exhibited nationally at galleries such as The Landing Gallery, Johansson Projects, Edward Cella Art and Architecture, and Commonwealth and Council in California, Ortega y Gasset Projects and Friedman Benda in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson; and internationally in cities such as Berlin, Tokyo, Barcelona, London, and Zurich. Schmeltz has been awarded grants such as the Pollock Krasner Grant, California Community Foundation Grant, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. Residencies attended include The Archie Bray Foundation, Bemis Center, Sculpture Center, Vermont Studio Center, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica (Venice, Italy), Espronceda Center for Art and Culture (Barcelona), Takt Kunstprojektraum (Berlin), and Babayan Cultural House (Cappadocia, Turkey).

CV

“Aili Schmeltz @ Johansson Projects” April 23, 2024 by David M. Roth “…Aili Schmeltz, an artist who divides her time between studios in Los Angeles and California’s high desert, reminds us that painting is, at root, a textile-based medium.  She does so by embroidering canvases into which she cuts holes to form “windows” through which painted backgrounds – readable as lakes, ponds, cloud formations, islands or abstract patterns  – can be glimpsed. The embroidered parts, some of which she renders in dayglo-colored thread, form shimmering ridges that, at different junctures, resemble high-altitude views of terraced farms, ancient glyphs, oceans and forests. The effect is roughly akin to what we see in James Turrell’s Skyscapes, except that instead of immersing us in telescoped visions of sky seen through architectural apertures, Schmeltz’s paintings jostle us back and forth between elevated surfaces and views of whatever contents populate the sub-surface portals.  The result is a mildly disorienting visual two-step – something you can only experience in-person since reproductions fail to capture the low-relief character of the artist’s “topography.”  Spatial confusion, achieved by this melding of multiple perspectives, is the show’s most engaging aspect…” LINK

The Architects Newspaper, “Artist Explores Ideology of California’s Built Environment” May 22, 2019 Drew Zeiba “The 2019 edition is titled Paradise::Parallax, and the curators’ point of view reflects an evolving conceptual focus that regards the history of the local environment, and the adaptations of flora and fauna — as well as human beings and community — in response to its hardscrabble beauty. ” LINK

Artillery Magazine, “Coming: Joshua Treenial 2019” April 11, 2019 Scarlet Cheng “In the installation ‘Object/Window/Both/Neither’ Aili Schmeltz mounts an 8-foot diameter black disc in the rocks as a disruption in the landscape.” LINK

Artillery Magazine, “Skulpturengarten; Infinitely Malleable Sculptural Practices” October 25, 2018 David DiMichele “…Schmeltz, whose large construction of wood, cardboard and tape (Crosscut, 2011) has much more significant mass than all of the previous artists combined, and alludes to the boxiness of late David Smith sculpture, as well as suggesting architectural references.” LINK

Art and Cake, “Aili Schemltz and Jason Manley at Jaus” July 22, 2018 Lawrence Gipe “Her concrete “Cast Print” series travels in the trajectory started by Bruce Nauman’s 1965 castings of the “air” beneath a chair, through Rachel Whiteread’s interior “ghosts” and Trafalgar Square plinths of the early-2000’s (one critic refers to latter “as a sculpture that both wants to both declare itself, and to disappear,” which feels right in the case of Schmeltz as well.)” LINK

Architectural Digest, “9 Art Galleries That Double as Airbnbs” September 4, 2018 Kelsey Ogletree “Owner Aili Schmeltz has a triple threat at her property set on five acres in the high desert: an exhibition gallery, an Airbnb, and her own home.” LINK

Lonely Planet, “You Can Rent This Art Gallery in Mojave Desert on Airbnb” September 29, 2018 Sasha Brady “The completely renovated mid-century building is home to artist Aili Schmeltz. Set on five acres of desert, with Joshua trees and protruding cholla all around, the space is also an art gallery and an invitation for the larger community to interact with art, as well as for artists to come together, share ideas and find inspiration.” LINK

Palm Springs Life, “Vive La Résistance; A High Desert Exhibition is an Artistic Response to the Border Wall” April 30, 2018 Steven Biller “Schmeltz, who divides her time between L.A. and Yucca Valley, offers her Object/Window/Both/Neitherseries of matte black sculpture that appears to recede as a cutout of the landscape, the negative space obscuring the figure-ground relationship.” LINK

Artillery Magazine, “Pasadena Museum of California Art: Interstitial” July 26, 2017 Anise Stevens “While summoning the supernatural wasn’t Schmeltz’s intention, per se, both of her pieces spur curiosity as viewers examine her mingling of woven yarn with an array of materials that include enamel, wood beads, oak and mirrored Formica.” LINK

Range Podcast: Stories of the New American West, “Desert Love, The Original Tiny Homes, and Joan Didion’s West” July 11, 2017 Megan Burks  (Interview)  LINK

Art and Cake, “Interstitial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art; The Meaning In-Between” April 28, 2017 Lorraine Heitzman “Looking like ambitious macramé projects gone astray, these were inspired by psionic generators, apparatus believed to harness energy from the eyes to encourage psychic phenomena.  Schmeltz explores these forms and melds the quasi-scientific with handicrafts to create objects that place the possibilities of ESP within our reach while elevating macramé from its usual domestic context into machines of our imaginations.” LINK

Juxtapoz Magazine, “The Conceptual Works of Aili Schmeltz” December 29, 2012 “Her works are a constant process of research and response to natural events and phenomena that captivate and serve as an impetus to weave these seemingly isolated events into a larger contextual tale.” LINK

Green Prophet: Environmental News of the Middle East, “Save the Cave Dwellers of Cappadocia” May 22, 2012 Tafline Laylin “Gripped by a longstanding love affair with the region, visual artist Aili Schmeltz spent last summer in the Ibrahimpasa village documenting the homes of more than a dozen cave dwellers. She collected hours of audio footage and thousands of images, four of which she has shared with us. Within the next year, she hopes to arrange her work in a book that will help save this priceless heritage.” LINK

Tucson Weekly, “The ‘Good Life’” May 5, 2011 Margaret Regan
“Schmeltz calls her large, carefully crafted sculptures ‘fallen monuments’ to that doomed ‘utopic philosophy’” LINK