The framing nature of photographs can often flatten the complex layers in the world around us. A new exhibition of photographs by Yanai Toister opening today at Sandroni Rey gallery in Los Angeles explores cracks in the very idea of environmental seamlessness - focusing on the landscape illusions found in contemporary housing developments in Israel.
Yanai Toister.
Toister is a young Tel Aviv and Los Angeles who received his MFA from CalArts last year and makes work combining multiple interests and possessing an inherent critique of photography's disciplinary subdivisions. Seeing his works as they were being prepared and installed for this show, his US solo debut, lined up on the floor against the gallery walls, added a certain resonance to the subject of his photographs - these previously existing housing complexes standing on raw, dry rock settings looked as if they were standing on the ground, whilst projecting an added aura of genre ambiguity - we could have been standing at another LA realtor's office, or an architectural studio,
Toister employs colour to demarcate eerie layers of meaning and separation remarkably in these studies. In the exhibition notes Chris Balaschak emphasises the importance of difference and clashing in the new series:
"The logic these photographs suggest goes beyond color alone. Toister's careful selection of these pre-configured housing tracts reveals less an incongruous relationship between home and landscape, than a predetermined coordination... Toister's images communicate a sense of unease that lies dormant in the incongruous, continual spread of modern rationality across untenable geographies."
Sandroni Rey will have a booth at Scope Basel with new work by Yanai Toister in Basel Switzerland, Monday June 11th through Sunday, June 17th. For more information please visit http://www.scope-art.com/.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
YANAI TOISTER
26 May - 23 June 2007
Opening Sat 26 May, 6-8pm
Sandroni Rey
2762 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 310 280 0111
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