ANAT EBGI

Ali Prosch

Travelers' Suite

March 6 – April 17, 2010

Nothing seemed true; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could quickly be removed, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, 1959.

What happens behind the door of a hotel room? Time gets muddy -- day and night conflate on the whim of thick curtains. Jumping on beds, taking long baths, moving furniture to simulate home. You greet friends visiting the room, lounging on couches with a cocktail and a cigarette. All the while the fireplace roars. The room belongs to no-one and everyone for this moment, and will forget you as soon as you leave.

For her first solo exhibition at The Company, Prosch will be re-imagining Travelers' Suite, an ambitious nine-channel video installation depicting the metaphysical essence of a hotel room and the activities of its transient inhabitants. Presented in a gaudy pastiche of periods, Travelers' Suite is a veritable visual mash-up: caveman meets rococo meets your spinster great-aunt, where oversized velvet couches, gilded chairs, rock wall fireplace, and a mirroring set of Victorian beds more than decorate the room -- they become characters.

Abstractions of time and space, coupled with disparate imagery of the suite fading in and out, convey a simultaneous sense of wonder, uncertainty, and terror. Lithe, costumed characters drifting in and out of the frame in temporal vignettes activate the space as props or extensions of the room, their gestures facilitating a delicate tension between stasis and hyperbole. The dreamlike state evoked by this piece is reminiscent of a trippy, non sequitur-laden meeting of the minds between David Lynch and Fluxus artists, or a stylized, surreal, time-based version of a Belle Époque novel.

Ali Prosch was born 1979 in Fairfax, California. She lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2009, Prosch received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. Prosch has had solo projects at the New Jersey City University, Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami), Sandroni Rey (LA), and in group exhibits at Georgia State University, REDCAT, MoCA at the Goldman Warehouse (Miami), Locust Projects (Miami), Museum of Contemporary Art (Miami), Tomio Koyama Gallery (Tokyo), White Box (NYC), and The Moore Space (Miami).