Rachel Khedoori

Rachel Khedoori (born in Sydney in 1964) has been working in Los Angeles since 1990. Her work is an examination of her environment and the spaces she inhabits both physically and mentally. Rachel Khedoori gained international recognition with her first comprehensive solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2001, which also established her with a wider audience. In her second one-person exhibition at Hauser and Wirth she is showing a group of new sculpture. The key strategy of Rachel Khedoori's art is her practice of interlacing and interlinking. She often weaves together architecture, sculpture and film to create highly complex interpretations of time and space. Khedoori's works present real, actual spaces that are combined with remembered or imagined ones, producing situations of disturbing, claustrophobic beauty. By interlinking reconstructed, mirrored, filmed and re-filmed spaces, she creates works that continually challenge the viewer's perceptions. For the present show, Rachel Khedoori has returned to the medium of sculpture, creating works made of foam, plaster, wood and wax. In contrast to earlier works, which were often developed from actual spaces outside the gallery the starting point for these sculptures is a model of a very simple room. The model is then reproduced and reincarnated in different forms to varying degrees of abstraction. The rooms are model-sized miniatures that the viewer projects oneself into rather than a physical object that the viewer enters as with her earlier work. Some of the sculptures are objects from the room scaled up but still perceptibly smaller than they would be in real life while all the objects inhabit roughly the same volume. Further abstractions of the room are seen in a set of yellow blocks carved out as caves yet mirroring the original rooms, doorways and windows. The room is an abstraction and in this case the cave becomes the secondary abstraction of the room. The interior walls of the blocks have the rough texture of rocks, forming sharp contrast with the smooth exterior surfaces. The title, Butter Cave, extends this interplay between the organic and the inorganic to the linguistic level. The cave, the archetypal form of living space inhabited by humans, is an ambiguous location - at the same time a protective shelter and the birthplace of the uncanny thus interlinking physical and mental space.