Los Angeles based artist Kirsten Stoltmann recognizes the suburbs as a ground for major pathological unrest, and her new exhibition at Allston Skirt Gallery, Kirsten Stoltmann: “Rough Bush: Artifacts and Heirlooms,” takes as its icon the tumbling tumbleweed – seen through Stoltmann’s eyes as a roving plant making its way through the isolated desert into the decorum of the suburban household.

In “Rough Bush,” Stoltmann’s preoccupation with the suburbs manifests itself through knick-knacks, statuettes, tapestries and objects found in the common Laura Ashley or faux antique décor, as she merges real gender and racial conflicts with autobiographical association, referencing where she grew up and what she identifies as problematic. Using found and made objects including a swank Southwestern rug, chrome and gold tumbleweeds, and a coffee table whose base is decoupaged with naked ladies and roses, Stoltmann identifies representations of women and American Indians as stand-ins for nature and spirituality, generating similarities through the use of cliché-laden images and objects. She presents these objects in conjunction with memoir photography, creating a nuanced installation relating to the above topics.
As in all of Stoltmann’s work, vulnerability and baggage are key. “Rough Bush” works to undo what every common suburban household values most - safety through stuff – and reveals the artist’s vision of the suburb’s safety as a web of prejudices, group sex, chemical dependencies and general misinterpretations, co-opting spirituality, teeming with underlying sexual tension or unknown goings on of teens, gangbangs, punk, Goth, and rap… all to return home to the safety of your Laura Ashley decorated room. The exhibition puts its own value system into play with its totems, knick knacks, fetishes, and fine art, which try to be a little more up front about the hidden nuances of the suburbs as a holy ground for rebellious youth, spurning new kinds of creativity daily.

Stoltmann received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002, and studied at the Film Department, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA in 1993-1994. Her work was shown in one-person exhibitions at Wallspace Gallery in New York City in 2006, at The Suburban in Chicago and Sister Gallery (in collaboration with Sterling Ruby) in Los Angeles in 2005. Foxy Productions, New York presented her work at Volta in Basel, Switzerland, 2005, and Stoltmann also shines as a damn fine DJ.
AND IN THE MINI SKIRT, Matthew Higgs, Director of New York’s White Columns, reprises a two-person show originally organized for Herald Street gallery in London, October 2006. The Boston incarnation of Higgs’ project, “Christopher Knowles & B. Wurtz,” – a project organized by Matthew Higgs, White Columns, New York features a new selection of works by two highly accomplished artists who look to the world as it exists – its fonts and its forms, its scrawls and its logos, its sounds and the things it balls up and throws away - and fool around with it.