Artists: David Adey - David Daigle - Sherin Guirguis - Fran Siegel - Edra Soto - Samira Yamin

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents the group exhibition CUT—Six Artists on the Edge, featuring works by David Adey, David Daigle, Sherin Guirguis, Fran Siegel, Edra Soto, and Samira Yamin.

CUT— explores various methods of cutting in which the physical object and the method of creation are integral to the works conceptual implications. The processes used to transform these objects—including tearing, slicing, carving, drilling, and laser cutting—employ subtractive operations to move beyond the surface. The artists in this exhibition intersect through these diverse strategies of intervention and examine structural and material properties to reveal a core of scientific, historical, and anthropological connections, bringing a metaphorically and physically nuanced perspective to the expressions of form.

David Adey’s work examines the fraught intersection between our physical bodies and the increasingly digitized, two-dimensional world that we inhabit. “Ghost” employs a three-dimensional scan of his body created with the assistance of open-source software. The resulting triangulated 3D model was unfolded and flattened onto a single plane, then laser-etched into 75,000 pieces and reassembled in a layered composition with pins. David Daigle endeavors to see past, through, and around photographic images. Through a subversive manual process of hole-making using an adapted drill, Daigle obfuscates, destroys, and sifts through commercial advertising images as a strategy to discover the meanings trapped behind them. Sherin Guirguis research-based practice is a means to heighten awareness of marginalized and contested histories, particularly those of women. She aims to make the invisible work of historically underrecognized women visible once more by translating their forgotten stories into paintings with multi-dimensional surfaces revealed through meticulously hand-cut geometric patterns in paper.

Fran Siegel’s painted embroidered patchworked tapestries are suspended from elaborate porcelain mounts and the interwoven lines that pass between them. Siegel disassembles and reorganizes pattern histories, cultural hierarchies, and painting itself by turning expectations inside out. These cuts continue with the collaged drawings made throughout her reassembling process. Expanding on her ongoing architectural intervention series GRAFT, the works in Edra Soto’s laser-cut series por la señal / by a signal, delve further into the artist’s personal history and cultural heritage, examining the connections between her memories of Puerto Rico, African and Caribbean influences, and the colonial imposition of the United States upon the island. Samira Yamin’s Refractions series employs optical glass carved in dynamic symmetrical patterns as the lens through which the phenomenon of light is able to bend, obstruct, and illuminate photojournalistic images of conflicts and in so doing prompt viewing experiences that challenge what the images purport to represent.