Receiver
Featuring: Aili Schmeltz + Katy Stone
March 4 – April 23, 2022
Artist Reception: Friday, March 4, 5-8pm
The works of Aili Schmeltz and Katy Stone move between individual and collective experience, tying personal stories to shared landscape.
Johansson Projects presents Receiver, a two-person exhibition featuring works by Aili Schmeltz and Katy Stone. The exhibition presents hybrid pieces combining sculptural, painting, and textile processes that find their inspiration from the natural world.
The works of Aili Schmeltz and Katy Stone move between individual and collective experience, tying personal stories to shared landscape. The formal proximity of these two artists is loosely apparent, as each focuses on the tools of color and material to reexamine spatial relationships. Aili employs the narrative mediums of painted canvas, fabric dye, and thread, while Katy uses laser cut aluminum or acrylic, in concert with sculptural relief and shadow. Each artist in her investigation intimately communicates an awareness of connection to nature and our place in it.
Aili Schmeltz extends the stitched, undulating layer of pattern around the edges of her paintings, calling attention to their dimensionality while illustrating her belief that these works are both paintings and wall based sculptures or ‘objects and windows’. The examination of the liminal and the in-between spaces is a conceptual thread throughout Schmeltz’s oeuvre; she often uses saturated color, linework, and framing devices to describe edges and connections, where volume meets space, or where earth meets sky, for example. Driven by a fascination with landscape and history, her work tells living stories of those deeply rooted to the land though a widened scope. The CA Women series draws from her research of trailblazing women to commemorate place and cyclical time in a grouping of smaller scale, intimate works that the artist likens to devotional paintings, a parallel of marking a place and period of time by connecting a plant or flower with a woman from history. The stitching resembles meandering lines of mycelium and rivers, radiating and stretching in harmony with the substrate while redefining the detailed, meditative process of traditional ‘women’s work’. The larger paintings bring form into focus on a more monumental scale as an environment, allowing the composition to be wild and organic, a requiem to nature as much as letting go of control.
The hallmarks of Katy Stone’s stylistic idiom are material, line, and shape merged to create a hybrid of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Her space-activating installations create a sense of structure and fragility that investigate relationships between the microscopic and monumental. She describes her forms for this exhibition as “traces of topographies”, built with accumulated layers that flow, reach, and converge. Here, materiality finds itself in an exchange with the immaterial, in a realm of aesthetic speculation and imagination. While the forms in Stone’s work evoke landscape elements such as water, clouds, wind, and geological tracings, universal associations may emerge. Conceptually, her works capture glimpses of unidentifiable processes unfolding – the quiet formation of a cloud, the tresses of forest growth, the ripples from undulating water. In this sense, these pieces are also fabricated documents of cyclical time.
Offering up the opportunity to examine how we receive and process visual and aesthetic data, Schmeltz and Stone act as expressive translators, each leaving her personal imprint on these unique mediums as metaphorical bridges to the viewer.
Receiver runs from March 4 – April 23, 2022, with an artist reception on First Friday, March 4, 5-8pm. Johansson Projects is open Thu-Sat 1-5pm and by appointment.
For more information, please contact info@johanssonprojects.com / 510-999-9140
Aili Schmeltz is a sculptor and painter that splits her time in between Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, CA. She 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 Johansson Projects, Edward Cella Art and Architecture, ACME, Commonwealth and Council, and Pasadena Museum of California Art in California, Friedman Benda and Jen Bekman in New York, and 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 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). Aili is the Founder of Outpost Projects and teaches at Otis College of Art and Design.
Katy Stone paints on a variety of materials and layers the elements into constructions that explore materiality and transformation, blurring the boundaries between drawing, painting and sculpture. She has exhibited nationally at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle and the Bay Area, including at Johansson Projects, Ryan/Lee, Patricia Faure, Greg Kucera, Carl Solway, and Robischon Gallery, at alternative spaces such as Suyama Space in Seattle and Gridspace in Brooklyn and internationally in Vienna, Austria and Cheongju, South Korea. Her work has been featured in numerous group shows including at the Harnett Museum of Art in Richmond, VA, Sun Valley Art Museum in Ketchum, ID, the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, FL, and Mass Art in Boston. She has been reviewed in many publications including Sculpture Magazine and Art in America. Her works are in museum and public collections including Boise Art Museum, The McNay, Columbia University, The University of Michigan, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, and the City of Seattle, among others, and at international projects in Taichung, Taiwan and Shenzhen, China. She is represented by Ryan/Lee in New York, Robischon Gallery in Denver, Johansson Projects in the Bay Area and J. Rinehart in Seattle. Stone received her BFA in Drawing, Painting and Printmaking from Iowa State University, and her MFA in Painting from the University of Washington. She lives and works in Seattle.
