Tomorrowland: Aili Schmeltz Exhibition

Tomorrowland by Aili Schmeltz

January 11 - February 16, 2013

Opening Reception:  Friday, January 11, 6 - 8 PM

Aili Schmeltz is a Los Angeles based artist that earned her MFA from the University of Arizona, holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and has exhibited internationally in cities such as New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. She recently had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tucson, Arizona, and received the prestigious Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. Other recent awards include The Creative Capacity Fund Grant, The Durfee Foundation Grant and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. Schmeltz has been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Sculpture Space, Babayan Culture House (Cappadocia, Turkey) and Takt Kunstprojektraum (Berlin, Germany). She is cofounder of the Los Angeles Art Resource, a website that serves as a forum for the exchange and sharing of comprehensive arts resources.

Aili’s artist statement illuminates her creative process; ”My current body of work explores the idea that utopia can be considered not only a place or a goal, but also as the very act of striving for such a target. These hybridized structures are materializations, remnants of an ideal that never was and may never be. As fallen monuments to a utopic philosophy, they function as relics of both a “good place” and “no place.” They nod towards a bright future and a fallen past, recontextualizing and recombining materials that are both nostalgic and futuristic. An embedded sense of naiveté is inherent to the objects, formed from a chemical bond of sunshine and noir that was repeatedly cooled and heated by urban temperament and artifice. Part architectural, part fossil, part potential: these works utilize discarded building materials that appear to have crystallized within a ‘natural’ process—strata that have undergone philosophical transformation yet to be fulfilled.”

For more information visit Aili Schmeltz’s web sites at ailischmeltz.com and

losangelesartresource.com