Make Room Los Angeles is pleased to present Come Down to Earth, a collection of new works by Weston Uram.
The show will be live on Make Room's online viewing room from May 24 though June 17, 2022.
With a firm basis in modern woodcarving, Uram’s multifaceted practice has long experimented with the boundaries of form, medium, and function within a single work. Their earlier wooden case works–two of which were presented as part of make room’s winter group show urban whispers–were a combination of sculpture, drawing, embroidery, and installation, mixing the handcrafted with the readymade or the mechanic.
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Continuing with Uram’s interest in the interfusing of formal elements, Come Down to Earth is a presentation of work which the artist made in collaboration with a CNC router. Hijacking the formal apparatus of the carving machine, Uram replaced the blade with colored markers, allowing the technology to execute an additive–rather than the traditional subtractive–process. The exhibited works are the final step of an artistic process that incorporates elements of net art, sculpture, and painting into the final physical drawing.The resulting images lay plain the mark of both the artist and the machine, the colored fields of Uram’s digital Illustrator files tessellated into forms that resemble spider webs and the meditative rake patterns of Japanese dry gardens. These mechanical “failures”–showcasing the transitional nature of Uram’s art and the co-opting of the machine’s function–reflect the honesty of the robotics and its limitations. This honesty lies at the heart of Come Down to Earth.
The raw images of Come Down to Earth find their origin in photographs of flowers taken by the artist in both natural and constructed settings. The floral forms, as rendered by the CNC router, are at once familiar and geometric, an intermediate state further emphasized by Uram’s play with bright and inverse colors, which often pushes the compositions into abstract, tessellated landscapes. Pink Flower Bucket revels in the textures of wood and petal, the lacing marks of the CNC router mirroring natural veins. Uram’s delicate choice of colors–resulting from a painstaking, hand executed process– allows for a deep gradient that causes an almost three-dimensional effect. In Purple Cascade, the colors of the source photo are almost completely disregarded, resulting in a pulsating field of tone and shade.
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Weston Uram: Come Down to Earth
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The work shows a world more precise than can be crafted by hand, but upon scrutiny the seams are splitting. I like art that brings the promise of technology down a peg, back down to our reality” – Weston Uram
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