In her latest piece for L.A. Weekly, Art Editor Shana Nys Dambrot introduces readers to artist Flora Kao. A spatial lyricist, Kao works with natural elements to create drawings, sculptures and environmental installations. Her works can currently be seen at Gallery 1820 in Duarte (Persistent Garden with Ginger Van Hook). She is showing a giant origami lotus sculpture at the Geffen Playhouse through mid December as well.
“In drawings, sculptures, environmental installations and increasingly working directly in nature, artist Flora Kao explores the lyricism of spatial constructs of experience,” writes Dambrot. “From full-scale contact drawings of homes with personal and cultural significance, to sculptural objects invested with emotional and societal meaning, as well as taking a narrative interest in our cultivation of the natural world, Kao examines the liminal entanglement of memory and history. With data, ritual, storytelling, resilience, and transcendence in the mix, her gentle deconstructions of our feeble attempts to control the forces of nature and the courses of destiny reveal deeper poetic and somatic forms of insight regarding the unseen patterns we sense at play behind it all. An exhibition featuring her work within the idiomatic framework of the garden opens this week in Duarte.”