In Lieu / Ethan Tate Gallery is pleased to present Nave, an exhibition of new wall sculptures by Greg Carideo. This is the artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles.

Referencing the architectural language of building facades, awnings, and doorway thresholds, Carideo crafts armatures of silver-brazed steel. Adorning his sculptural enclosures with items lost and left behind, Carideo elevates found objects and materials to items of uncommon beauty. 

Within his care, as with the workmanship of a special tailor or cobbler, Carideo’s sensibility is a deft hand that mends the broken and remakes the otherwise forgotten. He preserves rips and tears of weathered t-shirts so as to highlight the fabric, now sheer and threadbare. He centers the broken heel, lost and found, to present its special form. Each discoloration alludes to an unseen story of use or misuse; together, as a palette of weathered shades, the work is an homage to the castoffs and fragments of life’s experiences.

Some of Carideo’s newest welded designs resemble wall facades from European towns, or perhaps, the bottom tread of a new boot. The heel shape that reappears, and that the artist celebrates, is also the shape of a true Roman arch or portico. A fascination regarding the possibility of image and form allows each artwork to reimagine the criteria of function, use, adornment, and ornament. With visual serendipity, these offerings elaborate on form as function, and propose the idea we can make everything out of anything and anything out of everything

A canopy, shade, or awning is actually an impossibly simple and universal gesture that offers protection from the physical elements. Yet, as with so many things, bare-bones pragmatics can only sustain for so long, and practicality must give way to the tender and mysterious. 

Look down, look up, and bear witness to the ravages and splendor of life– take refuge in the possibility of beauty as shelter, an elegy for a disappearing world.

- Candice Chu