Elyse Graham
September 15 - October 21, 2012
Reception: Saturday, September 15, 6-9pm

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Press Release

Fifth Floor is pleased to present, Inside Out, an exhibition of sculptures and prints by L.A. artist, Elyse Graham. The artist builds sculptures of layered resin employing an array of fluorescent colors to create “techno-organic” geodes, the likes of which nature has never seen. A series of her drawings and prints also explore and illuminate the unopened insides of these sculptures.

Geodes, with their hidden inner-beauty have long been an object of attraction to the artist who is fascinated with the notion that seemingly ordinary objects have the possibility of harboring something unexpected and beautiful inside. Her sculptures start from an inner void created around balloons of the artist’s exhaled breath, building to an outer mass ending only when the artist deems it complete. As each layer is created, covering up the layer that preceded it, there is no hint as to what will reveal itself once the geode is duly bisected. Graham is also interested in the geode as a time capsule; in a natural geode, a cavity is very slowly encroached upon over time by the elements that form it from the outside of the rock’s void inward. Her sculptures represent a reversal, and at the same time acceleration, of the natural process resulting in her geodes as a snapshot of this faux-geological event. Beyond the purely formal representation, Graham is concerned with the outcome as a record of her time. As part of this recording the geodes are x-rayed or CT scanned and made into cyanotype prints. These are displayed as a somewhat muted hint of what may lie within. On some prints Graham also hand draws the addition of colors as further documentation of the process as it is filtered and altered through her memory of the geode’s creation.

Elyse Graham lives and works in her studio at the Brewery Arts Complex in Los Angeles, CA. She has shown her work at various galleries in California and New York. She received her BA in Art: Semiotics from Brown University in Providence, RI.