Artist Kim Abeles has an innate sense of social awareness that she incorporates in several art disciplines. She creates installations and public art that are fun, provocative and, above all, enlightening.
Her latest work, "Sweet Dreams," will be featured in The Project Room of The Center, Ketchum, from Oct. 27 through Jan. 5, 2007. It is part of a group exhibition titled "Whose Nature? What's Nature?"
Commissioned for this show, Abeles spent a week getting to know the region last summer when she came to be The Center's artist-in-residence.
"There are tiny details and views contradicting each other in an area where there is so much," said Abeles. "The oxygen or the air here make things look more vibrate and intense. The general perception is unusual."
"Sweet Dreams" includes hand-designed wallpaper where Abeles has placed photographs of landscapes within a repeated oval design. Building a wall in The Project Room, Abeles cut out some of the photographs and replaced them with looping video images of landscapes she filmed during her stay here last summer. Adding to the nursery, Abeles created toys and baby items reflecting many of the ways a child may learn about nature.
A shelf for toys includes jewelry boxes and artificial mounds, which Abeles saw in front of the larger more expensive homes in Sun Valley. They are unusual objects.
"Children (are) growing up, and what are we trying to teach them? (Are) these fake mounds in front of the home used for privacy and sound?" asked Abeles. She created a mold of a house and made it an artificial "bling" medallion in a jewelry box. A silk berm sits in front of the medallion to hide it in the jewelry box. To finish off the berm, Abeles placed handmade trees from paper with hand painted bronze wire.
"A small mountain made like an Erector Set shows how children learn about nature as if it perfectly fits together," said Abeles. "When children are growing up we are trying to teach them, and it's hard to say one person is right on everything."
Rod iron baby furniture is suspended from the ceiling. Ables welded it and covered it in yellow chiffon. The furniture is mean to appear surreal, implying a dreamlike state associated with a nursery.
"The furniture was constructed to appear nomadic, it's portable like camping equipment," said Abeles. "There are ties in the yellow chiffon, which have bows to keep it sweet for a baby's room, and the yellow chiffon represents the Aspens in fall and the color they change."
In addition, Abeles has added a pillow to the crib where she has embedded another video loop of sheep. "The idea is, we want things to be pristine and under control. Nature is not really like that," she said.
While in residence last summer, Abeles saw sheep being herded into the mountains for the summer, and she wanted to get across the idea of counting sheep. The sheep, however, are dirty and roaming, quite unlike the cottony creatures of baby dreams.
"I wanted to bring out conflict of land use as well as the long history of sheep herding in the area," she said. "It's historical."
Combining sculpture, video, digital imagery, painting and welding, Abeles will use any material and tool to create her ideas. This allows her to learn the fundamentals about many things, from video installations to welding.
And welding just so happens to be an aspect of the process she truly enjoys. It's reflective throughout the entire nursery.
"I imply a room because furniture becomes a signifier of how we think of a room," she said. "We accept the vocabulary for the visuals. It is a baby's first experience, and we try to keep from spoiling it for them."
She adores detail and claims it slows her down, but at the core her art reflects a great deal of what she absorbs from her surroundings and what she's learned from her research and fieldwork.
"In the end, the result of any work should look simple. It is complicated to create, but it should appear seamless. That is my ultimate aesthetic."
Kim Abeles creates the ?Sweet Dreams? nursery in The Project Room at The Center, Ketchum. Photo by Chris Pilaro
