Maximalist Playground
Two-person exhibition by Olivia Bonilla and Liz Rundorff Smith
Event Types: Visual Arts
Sep 3, 2024 10:00 AM — Sep 28, 2024 4:00 PM
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Contact Information
Liz Rundorff Smith
862-252-5858
[email protected]https://artandlightgallery.com/https://www.instagram.com/artandlightgallery/https://www.facebook.com/artandlightgallery/Details
Art & Light Gallery is pleased to present Maximalist Playground, a two-person exhibition of work by Olivia Bonilla (Charleston, S.C.) and Liz Rundorff Smith (Travelers Rest, S.C.) launching on the website and in the gallery at 10am (EST) on Tuesday, September 3 with an opening reception on Friday, September 6 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM.
Olivia Bonilla is a sculptor who works with cement and resin to create work that gives confectionary pop art a contemporary twist. Using unconventional materials and an inventive approach to color theory, Bonilla combines the notions of nostalgia and indulgence with forms that reference candy, toy culture, and 80’s and 90’s pop trends. She is interested in the idea of excess in today’s consumer driven society. Bonilla fabricates objects like sprinkled pills, oversized diamonds, and vintage toys repeatedly to reflect a world of over stimulation and appropriation. The forms are brightly colored, splashed with glitter and finished in a wet gloss resin finish.
Liz Rundorff Smith is a painter who works in the oil and encaustic mediums. Her work elevates the mundane, mimicking the way we bring significance to loss with keepsakes and memorials. Rundorff Smith wants to create work that evokes a sense of nostalgia and exposes the sentimentality in memory. Her color choice is tied to the decor and design trends of decades past that have become kitschy artifacts. Shapes intimate objects that are no longer identifiable but retain familiarity and reference urns, shrines, and places of veneration. Embellishments like fringe and shiny gold finishes play into kitsch, recalling party decorations, parade floats and prize ribbons and elevating the ordinary to something to be celebrated.
For Bonilla and Rundorff Smith repetition is important both formally, in the reiteration of forms and sequencing of color and conceptually, in the connection to mass-production, consumerism and the reference to the structure of the grid in art historical context. The work leans into the more is more aesthetic of maximalist design with a focus on bold colors, patterns and objects. Together, their work acts as a playful 1980s form of maximalism that acknowledges a minimalist love of the grid and repetition while celebrating decadence and indulgence.
