February 10th 2005, 2006, 2007.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the 10th at TRUDI. These three dates hook the loops of two years pulled taut behind the present: a timeline of production, exhibition, and transformation. The starting date, February 10th 2005, is when Chris Lipomi began developing a year-long body of work. The pieces he made explore primitivism through 1970s domestic materials and altered found objects, atavistically reworking art historical and cultural representations of ‘the primitive’. There is an opening up that occurs in his act of revisitation, his reactivation of history and its remains. Lipomi’s project has a vital repetition driving it, a repeated repetition in the present of moments in the past that becomes insistent: “…when you first realize the history of various civilizations, that have been on this earth, that too makes one realize repetition and at the same time the difference of insistence” (Gertrude Stein, Portraits and Repetition).
Everything Lipomi produced since that first February 10th went into a solo show at Daniel Hug’s gallery, opening February 10th 2006. It was lush. The year’s work included configurations of masks, shells, feathers, and twigs as well as mirrors, designer scarves, plants real and not, painted hand prints, a gold plaster lion’s head, Thomas Kinkaide corporate diagrams, and black and white stripes. The show presented a community of like-minded objects sprung from the same impulse, cohabiting a space and together lifting our eyes upward to where so many wicker, wood, and plant things hung.

A year later, February 10th 2007, what remains of that previous show will reappear as a new show in a new form and a new space – TRUDI. Lipomi’s TRUDI show will reuse the refuse that has accumulated between the Februaries. It is an ecological gesture of recycling, both material and relationships. The artist’s community of neo-primitive objects we saw one year ago will make an unholy pilgrimage, partially reconvening in reunion around the corner at 510 Bernard St. We can trace its path between friendships and collaborators, galleries and dealers. This time the remaining objects will be cramped and will pile on top of each other as so much unprecious stuff filling storage space. A second loop circles us back a third time to the 10th.

Chris Lipomi is an artist living in Los Angeles. He has studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute, Valand Kunstskolan in Sweden, and UCLA. He has exhibited in various group shows internationally, especially throughout Germany, and in solo shows in Los Angeles, Zurich, and Frankfurt.
- slg