Elevations

Uprise Art is pleased to present Elevations, an exhibition of work by Arielle Zamora and Sinziana Velicescu.

Photographed on medium-format film throughout the United States, Velicescu’s Purgatory, Paradise series depicts the American landscape as defined by seemingly abandoned architectural sprawl. Focusing on civic and commercial buildings, she is interested in public and private structures that provide a framework for everyday experiences: sites of work, commerce, gathering, and transit. Velicescu captures the clean facades, flat planes, and sun-bleached surfaces of these buildings devoid of people, reducing them to abstraction. Cloudless cerulean skies provide angular demarcations around interminable expanses of beige and grey, punctuated occasionally by vertical and horizontal slices of windows. Shadows stack and layer, adding their own architectural agenda superimposed onto the forms beneath them. In these photographs, ambitious structures and institutions once built to signal progress and permanence now appear suspended between promise and uncertainty. Velicescu captures these liminal spaces in our landscape and culture, the tension between what was promised and what was received.

In 'Elevations', Zamora and Velicescu examine architecture as both structure and symbol, a physical rubric and psychological landscape.

Inspired by horizon lines, overlapping planes of architecture, and the natural and constructed environment, Zamora’s paintings translate these structures into gridded compositions that confound the boundary between landscape and facade. Zamora begins these paintings by applying gypsum-based joint compound and oil paint over wooden panels. The surface is then sanded and carved with an etching tool, creating recessed channels that reveal the layers below. Finally, the work is buffed with cold wax medium, sealing the surface with a matte luster. This new body of work brings architecture and nature into conversation, probing their inseparability despite their apparent opposition. The paintings reference the rhythmic patterns of repeated building windows, as well as the movement of the ocean's surface. Architecture’s literal ability to reflect nature becomes another point of inspiration, particularly the way skyscraper facades mirror the sky. In turn, organic forms take on a new solidity through comparison, their repeating structures becoming cityscapes in their own right.

In Elevations, Zamora and Velicescu examine architecture as both structure and symbol, a physical rubric and psychological landscape. Where Velicescu isolates architecture, removing it from its original context and displacing it into symbolic abstraction, Zamora iterates on its gridded structures, dissolving its rigidity through paint and allowing it to merge with the rhythms of the natural world. In dialogue, their works suggest that the boundaries we draw between nature and the built environment are more malleable than they appear. Both artists reconsider the spaces we inhabit, inviting viewers to reflect on the shifting terrain between what we build and what ultimately shapes us.

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