Chadwick Rantanen

Reception In Clear

July 13 – August 25, 2018

CAPITAL is pleased to announce Reception in Clear, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Chadwick Rantanen.

Chadwick Rantanen works with non-traditional, yet highly specific materials, to define, analyze or create niche categories of objects and commercial productions. His work often takes hold of a product from our everyday lives that conceals its true nature behind banal or apparently inconsequential facades, to explore its complex manipulative, horrifying, sombre and tender nature without employing excitement or transgression, finding the subtle terrors and buried humanity of commercial production.

For the exhibition Reception in Clear, Rantanen presents a series of new works made by dissecting, industrial, medical-grade upholstery vinyl produced for hospitals and healthcare facilities. Past the threshold of a hospital entrance, medical upholstery is the first interaction between patient and institution; appearing bland, saccharine and numbing while advertising its resistance to ballpoint-pen ink and blood. The work dwells in materiality and experimentation— testing the limits of durability, discovering and creating workflows by pushing stress-tests to the maximum extent possible, and in exploring the kinds of images that appear within corporate healthcare environments. The exhibition looks directly at the healthcare industry as a unique model for how humanity tries to care for itself fusing the conflicting principles of corporations, health, science, diversity, community, well-being, and mortality—exploring how this industry relates to people through materials and aesthetics in a complex built environment.

The title Reception in Clear, refers to the process in which ink is printed directly onto the vinyl material, and is then accidentally transferred into the antimicrobial, clear outer coating. This process is subtle, and undetectable. The clear outer coating, or film, becomes the locus of activity in this work. Confined to the very thin architecture of the material, the works dwell on and expand the seepage between substrate, ink, and top coat. The artist soaks the vinyl in a chemical solution in large metal trays, and slowly peels the topcoat back by hand leaving a physical record of its arduous removal. Stretching both the vinyl and clear film like an animal hide, the film often tears requiring reinforcement. These areas of repair fracture the patterns repetition, creating moments of visual disruption, diverting attention and creating emotional breaks in the sculptural pattern. The torn, perforated surface of the transparent film serves as a window into the layered system, while providing slack so the now isolated, shrunken film can stretch to match the size of its previous substrate. The original stasis of the upholstery layers, fraughtly reproduced in the sculptures, display the character of the delaminated layers and how they cohere, mimic and support each other, like a machine pulled apart and organized, but unable to be put back together again.