The most important purpose of my artwork is to bring a moment of calm and respite to the public. During these times of global mourning, my intention is to show the joyful side of our world while celebrating the exquisite natural environment.
About Luciana
Luciana Abait was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and is currently based in Los Angeles where she is a resident artist of 18TH Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. Her photo-based two- and three-dimensional works deal with climate change and environmental fragility, and their impacts on immigration in particular.
Abait’s work has been shown internationally as well as extensively in Los Angeles. Selected exhibitions include A Letter to The Future at Los Angeles International Airport and Sur Biennial in California; Flow, Blue at Rockford College Art Museum and Luciana Abait at Jean Albano Gallery in Illinois; Nest at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania; and ARCO in Spain. She has also completed numerous corporate and public art commissions including Vistas, a 24-foot mural that was commissioned by Miami-Dade Art in Public Places for Crandon Park Golf Course in Key Biscayne, Florida in 2004.
Abait’s works are held in private, public and corporate collections from the United States, Europe, Latin America and East Asia. Among these collections are: The Related Group, Florida State University, Permanent Art Collection of Neiman Marcus, Miami-Dade Public Library System, Four Seasons, and University of Miami in Florida; King and Spalding in Texas; Lehigh University Museum and West Collection in Pennsylvania; Sprint Corporation in Missouri; Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan; the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington D.C., and Freshfields and Swire Properties in Hong Kong. From 1997 to 2005 Abait was a resident artist of Oolite Arts (formerly ArtCenter South Florida) in Miami, Florida. In 2005 she relocated to Los Angeles and in 2016 was the recipient of the Santa Monica Individual Artist Fellowship Award.
“My work invites viewers to reimagine nature through manipulated photographic landscapes, installations and photo-sculptures. Natural landscapes and human-made utilitarian objects or structures are twisted, scaled out of proportion, or impossibly adapted to new roles where they coexist in a magical reality. These eerie, hyper-real psychological landscapes range from sci-fi to storybook, encompassing parables that critically reflect upon human beings and their fraught relationship with the natural environment. These intricate interrelations portray the aggressive intrusion of humans into nature, but also imagine alternate (or perhaps future) realities marked by adaptation and assimilation, isolation and displacement.
Images are sourced from personal photographs, textbooks, encyclopedias and stock imagery, connecting personal experience to a collective geographic history. I work over the surface with pencils and pastels erasing the photographic quality beneath, and lending urgency to these emotionally charged images.
For Projecting Possibilities, I have created a fantasy narrative through surreal landscapes based on photographs that I took on a recent road trip through the American West in order to clear my eyes, mind and soul after months of isolation due to the California lockdowns. In Road Trip, my altered landscapes eerily portray distortions that begin to feel like a trippy science fiction film, and take the viewer on an out-of-this-world, supernatural voyage that enables them to get lost, find a sense of possibility and of freedom.”
– Luciana Abait
lucianaabait.com
instagram.com/lucianaabait
On display for one week beginning 3.12.21
Helms Design Center at 8745 Washington Boulevard
All artwork is copyrighted work of the artist. All rights reserved. Images not to be used without permission.
