Katie Aliprando: Proxies Go Through Go Back


On View Saturdays from September 21 – October 19 and by appointment.

Installation view of Katie Aliprando: Proxies Go Through Go Back at W Projects. Photo: Marten Elder.

Katie Aliprando’s enigmatic practice evolves through compiling notes, archiving images, and ‘auditioning’ objects driven by her personal motivation to map out an implied space or imagined scenario. Through collages, prints and sculptural installations, faint impressions are left while not made explicit, leaving a large space between the artist’s implied action and the viewer’s interpretation(s). The titular proxies are stand-ins, relics from imagined scenes moving through the present and into the future as well as going back.

Aliprando’s work often takes as it subject quotidian items—wood, string, clothing, chairs--most of the objects forming the artist’s installations are found on the side of the road, and more specifically on an area of grass between the street and sidewalks of Los Angeles where she lives and works. The images that comprise her collages are found through a process similar to her scouting for a location in which Aliprando collects images online or takes photos of her tv or computer screen using her camera phone. These include thresholds, docks, waiting rooms, stairs in between spaces that can help give the persona she imagines movement as the artist attributes fragmented actions to the fictional characters experiencing these scenes. The larger prints are scans from either children’s phonics workbooks or cards from a series of memory card games; the images on the cards are partially erased or sublimated, adding a poetic gesture and sense of mystery to the images. Together, her work across a variety of media evidences the artist’s singular visual language that she develops through this process of marriage and juxtaposition of both objects and imagery.


Katie Aliprando
lives and works in Los Angeles and graduated with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2006 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2010. She has exhibited her work in solo presentations at Private Places, Portland (2017); Park View, Los Angeles (2015); 2 nd Cannons Publications, Los Angeles (2010, 2014); and Actual Size, Los Angeles (2013). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2010); and MoMA PS1, New York (2007).