proxy gallery

PROXY GALLERY is pleased to announce Dialogues, a project by Shiva Aliabadi, who will be turning the newly-opened Proxy Gallery space (a 12 by 12 inch white box) into an itinerant gallery. Proxy will first appear in her studio at Otis Culver Studios; by placing Proxy in her studio, Aliabadi will investigate the issue of scale and how that affects the reception of a gallery space.

This installation will invert the placement and hierarchy of the gallery versus studio. Dialogues references Meret Opphenheim’s Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure). Aliabadi has lined Proxy with fur to not only transfer feminist readings of Oppehnheim’s piece into the white cube but to also comment on female artists’ presence in the gallery space. Are women represented equally, now, as men in the gallery or museum system or is there still a discrepancy?

During the month of the show, Aliabadi will take Proxy to several openings in Los Angeles galleries to continue its itinerant status for the month. Carrying Proxy into commercial galleries comments on and questions the function of galleries (galleries within galleries, portable gallery as luggage, and what the cube means as a shape for the art field). What does a gallery on the move mean versus the stationary ones that require the community to come to them? Her art piece, Dialogues, will continue to be in Proxy as she takes it to art openings so that her work has dialogue with the art works inside the larger galleries.