The work of Isabelle Cornaro concerns the experience of perception in a formal language that bridges photography, drawing, film and sculpture. Cornaro’s installations distill the monumental in the miniature and the painterly in the found.

For LA><ART Cornaro will present three 16mm shorts. Each film presents accumulated domestic objects. These vivid images, while luminescent and animated by color, are always minimal nonetheless. The perpetual self-genesis of organic material contained in nature is a key metaphor for how Cornaro invents montage in a reflexive studio practice that occasionally imbricates sculptures and readymades as the subject matter for her films. As a counterpoint to the films, Cornaro will exhibit a plaster cast sculpture from her ongoing Homonymes series of slip cast sculptures. This new composition, made in LA for LA><ART, plays on how the Baroque sought organic principles in decorative motifs. Like the other Homonymes, the entombed fragments in the project room also call to mind how Surrealism made existential hay out of trifling démodé goods, each of which served as an analogy for life and death in a mad capitalistic society obsessed with moribund objects.

Matthew Schum