A selection of photography, mixed media, and objects on display in a live/work art studio. Each artwork explores a narrative that engages a sense of memory or longing. Participating artists, Yuri Boyko, Erica Shires, Greg Smith, and L. Mikelle Standbridge

This exhibition takes place in an artist live/work studio located in Hollywood, a place I once lived. I believe displaying the exhibition in this space is suitable, as it is like peeling back an onion, seeing the work in a room engages the viewer on another level steeped in the process of living and creating. The works in this exhibition include photography, mixed media, and objects. Each artist shares a narrative, while these maybe familiar to the creator they are new to us. The artwork on display was selected from each artist’s portfolio. I felt these works related to the documentation of time and all its dimensional elements.

L. Mikelle Standbridge’s, Doing Time; a love story follows the story of Signorina F, sharing some twists of fate and how images preceded/predicted her future. Four out the 30 images related to Signorina F and her partner’s incarceration are on exhibit in this show and are part of Standbridge’s larger, on-going series, Photo-Bodies. Standbridge is an American artist who has lived and worked for the past 20 years in Milan and is a photography-based mixed media artist, exhibiting one-of-a-kind “photo-sculptures”. Her work addresses the relationship between bodies, their stories, and photographs.

Yuri Boyko is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His artistic practice focuses on the deconstruction of identity. He transforms individual experiences, observations, and emotions into visual representations. A little while back, the artist revisited his grandmother’s home in Ukraine. The visit has prompted an examination of the relationship between memories and identity. Through the combination of an allegory and visual material in Departure and Arrival, he questions how barely changed customary way of life, well imprinted in childhood memories, relate to the current self.

Greg Smith shares objects collected by his great-grandmother, Leanora Prouse, who was born in 1887 in Cornwall, England. The artist is currently working on a book about Prouse’s life where she spent time in a small fishing village called Mousehole. At the age of nine due to financial hardship, she left England for America with her mother’s siblings. Later in life, Prouse wrote a diary sharing many personal items. This recording of events and objects collected would help describe the essence of her being. Because some of the objects were broken years before, in areas of fracture, the artist carefully adds gold and silver to enhance the imperfection, borrowing from the Japanese technique of Kintsugi or “golden joinery” which highlights the cracks addressing the parallels in life that nothing is perfect. Smith's current studio is in Los Angeles, but the artist has previously lived and worked in New York and London.

Erica Shires, whose studio is in Brooklyn, New York, has been working on Collodion Wet Plate process for 15 years. The nature of technique warrants much praise as it requires advanced chemical prep and skillful working of her compositions. Shires’ writes, “I am never interested in portraying anything in a literal sense. I am looking for some deeper resonance, that liminal space that touches on our vulnerability and mortality. This wet-plate series examines our fleeting time in this world and the way sorrow changes us.”