HOMATORIUM III Lost Horizon
Rebecca Chamberlain
HOMATORIUM III Lost Horizon
September 2 - October 14, 2017
SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
Charlie James Gallery is delighted to present HOMATORIUM III Lost Horizon, the debut Los Angeles solo show of New York-based artist Rebecca Chamberlain.
Following a recent string of site visits to various public housing projects, garden apartments and private homes in and around LA, Chamberlain took her resulting photographs back to New York and began developing the underlying theme for Homatorium III, Lost Horizon. Homatorium (Home/Sanatorium – artist’s coinage) is Chamberlain’s ongoing investigation into architecture’s promise to meet psychological needs for safety, possibility and belonging.
Chamberlain toured an array of LA Modernist residential housing, from Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health and VDL Research House(s), Gregory Ain’s Dunsmuir Flats, John Lautner’s Rainbow House, Rudolph Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House, and the William Mead Public Housing project in Chinatown. Inspired by a meeting with Barbara Lamprecht (architectural historian and Richard Neutra specialist), Chamberlain observed design details in each of the sites that Neutra described as “biorealism.” Neutra ensured that his homes, when possible, had clear views of the horizon on the surrounding landscape to satisfy an innate evolutionary need for people to orient themselves, to feel secure and calm, to have perspective.
Chamberlain’s work, produced in the spring and summer of 2017, reflects the tumultuous time of its making. At a time when even the most fortunate are looking for a sense of hope, calm and safety, the works in Homatorium III – Lost Horizon reflect an appeal to the humanism and idealism resident in the original houses. The exhibition consists of multi-panel, window-height interior and landscape paintings alongside door-height works on paper. Hanging from aluminum hospital track are custom, translucent lace curtains patterned after “safety paper”—the obscuring designs printed on the insides of security envelopes. Miniature plinth paintings, encased in plexi boxes punctuate the installation as archeological findings.
Rebecca Chamberlain (b. 1970) was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1991. She has performed at the Hirschhorn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been exhibited at Dodge Gallery, 303 Gallery, and Knoedler Project Space in New York; VOLTA NY, New York; judi rotenberg gallery, Boston, MA; Leyendecker Gallery, SP among other venues. She was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Grant and a NYFA Fellowship for Painting. Chamberlain’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, Artinfo.com, The Boston Globe, Flash Art and Tema Celeste, among others. Her work is included in the collections of The Currier Museum, Société Bic, Fidelity Investments and Torys LLP. Following a residency at Het Vijfde Seizoen (an artist residence program at a psychiatric hospital in the Netherlands) in 2013, Chamberlain became an Artist Ambassador for the Beautiful Distress Foundation Artist Residency at Kings County Hospital. Chamberlain lives and works between Brooklyn and Delancey, New York.
Installation
