Flora Kao                                   
WITNESS                                   
Nov 7 – Nov 18, 2022

Flora Kao’s Window Dressing installation, Witness, is an investigation of memory and longing thru physical rubbings of site. Exploring touch and bodily knowledge, Witness records the natural topography of places where the artist sought solace during times of intense emotional turmoil and grief. In the expansive rhythm of garden stones and the tenacious beauty of mussel-covered boulders, she found safe harbor. Large gestural rubbings of the sites anchor these moments of psychological intensity, bearing witness to perseverance and rebirth in the face of catastrophic loss and change. Like the rocks they record, these meditative drawings capture the memory of a place. A large-scale 6’x18’ colored rubbing from Descanso Gardens stretches across the gallery display’s long wall, while a smaller 6’x6’ rubbing of mussel-covered boulders in Malibu cover the short wall. Assorted rocks accumulated over a lifetime are arranged on the floor in front of the wall drawings on a third rubbing taken from Las Piedras Beach. By working across these multiple ecosystems, Witness compresses the artist’s experience of space and time into an evocative installation reflecting on the very meaning of place. What is knowledge? How does the body come to know a place? What does it mean to feel and press against every bump on a boulder and to take its imprint away with you? To touch each crevice, to translate texture through one’s body, to make an imprint of a surface as it registers at a moment in time. What happens when you combine the residue of remembrance from disparate sites?

Working in installation and painting, artist Flora Kao explores the poetics of human relations with the environment, examining various forms of architecture and technology by transforming everyday structures into systems of beauty. Kao holds a MFA from UC Irvine in Studio Art, a BFA in Painting from Otis College of Art and Design, and a BA in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College. In Los Angeles, Kao has exhibited solo at Pasadena Museum of California Art, Commonwealth and Council, Gallery 825, Art-merge LAB, HAUS Gallery, the LA Art Show, and the UC Irvine University Art Gallery. Kao’s work has also been featured at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, Infernoesque in Berlin, and at various Southern California venues including Torrance Art Museum, Irvine Fine Arts Center, City of Brea Gallery, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Culver Center for the Arts, LAXART, See Line Gallery, Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Beacon Arts Building, Phantom Galleries, West LA College, California State University Long Beach, and La Sierra University.