Flora and Fauna is Marina Kappos’ second solo exhibition at I-20. It is her first large-scale installation in the gallery since 1999. With a series of nineteen new paintings, Kappos advances her exploration into the dimensional possibilities of flat form, presenting a tableau of portraiture
and landscape. Her subjects include solitary individuals – sometimes with surprising props; lush landscapes; and small animals captured in daily symbolic foraging. As with her earlier series Fade to Grey, which portrayed peaceful landscapes that degenerated into a city‘s destruction,
the paintings in Flora and Fauna collectively hint at an oblique narrative, with figures precisely engaged, and with empty landscapes serving as settings for potential events. Joining portraiture and landscape in this way, the artist has created a new field for investigating how their combined imagery are inextricably related.
In the East Room, Kappos will present a companion video work entitled Beast. It is a loop of the artist’s handsome and normally placid cat, Superkitty, transformed into a menacing creature. Superkitty’s segments are a live portrait: tightly framed against a black background, he hisses
and gestures and bares his fangs – all the action rendered in slow motion and accompanied by the gutteral rumbling of an animal highly alert to his surroundings.
Marina Kappos is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, and received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art. She was born in 1972 in Pasadena, and lives and works in Los Angeles.
An illustrated catalogue (No.17), with an essay by Giovanni Intra, director of China Art Objects in Los Angeles, will be forthcoming.