Linda Ganjian ‘Overview’ — Apr 2013

Auxiliary Projects is pleased to present “Overview”, a solo show of intricate large-scale sculpture and printed handmade paper tiles by Linda Ganjian. Overview opens on April 5, 2013 and will be on view through May 5th. There will be an opening reception on Friday, April 5th, from 7-9pm.

Like many urban commuters, Linda Ganjian begins and ends her days with views from an elevated subway line, views most often ignored or endured by fellow passengers. Ganjian takes the lemons of dismal journeys over dreary rooftops never intended to be aesthetically considered and makes a fantastical lemonade of hybrid visual designs reimagining water towers, satellite dishes, bubbly graffitti, and ductwork as if they were made by a meth-addled cake designer. Her visual style mashes up elements drawn from Middle Eastern carpet designs and Ottoman tiles with traditional American quilting craft and contemporary NYC street art. 

In Ganjian’s 61 paper tiles, collectively titled “Glimpses from a Queens Commute,” these myriad influences and experiences are combined in inventive urban kaleidoscopes of miniature scale, each measuring only 2 ½ inches square. Grouped together on the wall they form an illuminated alphabet, each unique yet understood in relation to its neighbors. Occasional flat black squares provide punctuation, interrupting and giving pause to the visual rhythm. Each tile is first hand-drawn using ink and marker, then printed as a unique [archival] giclee print and sealed onto hand-made wall-mounted shallow boxes.

“7 Train Panoramas” is a large-scale table-mounted sculpture composed of twenty-four one-foot square tiles covered in a miniature architectural array of clay and painted paperboard forms. Like the designs of her tiles, “7 Train Panoramas” showcases Ganjian’s obsessive drive to transform banal disorderly elements of life into inventively engineered patterns. Although hand-made in execution, the aggregate manifestation of small, neat objects and details in Ganjians work has a digital, rationalized, almost futuristic aesthetic that contradicts the cluttered mess of our real-life functional urban landscape.