Where some people see photographs, artist Lala Abaddon sees spools of thread she can weave into magnificent and chaotic visual tapestries. Her solo show, Fractal Realities, goes on display at Castor Gallery this Thursday, showcasing works that rely on patience and attention-to-detail to communicate messages of what the press release describes as, “a web that connects all beings and energies and transcends all conceived boundaries of time and space.”
Abaddon captures and develops her photos on 35mm film, but while that’s the end of the process for any old school photographer, it’s just the beginning for Abaddon. Shredding her images into geometrically interesting patterns, adding paint, and then hand-weaving them together, Abaddon creates patchworks of overlapping scenes that dazzle the eye at first glance, and draw viewers in for careful inspection on the second. Her zig-zagging photos seem to exist in two realities simultaneously, portraits in one moment, swirling, abstract masses of color in the next.
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The Fractal Realities exhibition expands on Abaddon’s web of ideas through a new site-specific installation called Death is to Life as ____ is to ____. To create it, the artist cut up several of her large weaves, then reconnected them throughout the gallery using a free-form webbing, and overlaid it with projections that lend to the feeling of being, “literally inside one of Abaddon’s woven liminal landscapes; from observing to participating, from the second to third dimension.”
For more of Lala Abaddon’s work, visit her website. Fractal Realities opens on Thursday, February 26 from 6-9 p.m., and will run through March 27, 2015 at Castor Gallery in New York City.
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