FREE FALL succinctly presents Los Angeles artist Rochelle Botello’s new work in sculpture.  Botello has long deployed an exceptionally focused sculptural vocabulary using colored duct tape, cardboard, and wood to construct abstract forms both specific and ambiguously searching.  Fusing structure and spacial mass, Botello’s forms sprout spindly appendages from tape-swathed slab, tablet, or plank-like shapes.  The work is a powerful evocation of flesh and bone, with none of the literal connotations that phrase implies.  Yet Botello’s singular work reverberates with the fragility of the exposed and flayed body.  In a 2021 interview, she spoke of the bend of a dog’s bone as among the associative impulses in her work, pointing to the polymorphous bodies of her abstract figuration. 

Botello’s large gawky forms possess vectors thrown into multiple directions and court the feeling of an experiential encounter beyond passive viewing.  The vivid color and optical play of Botello’s sculpture emphasize their potential for exuberant motion. The sculpture appears to linger as if momentarily put on “pause” before stepping forward in leggy invitations to stalk, crawl, stagger, or stumble in syncopated dance.  They implicate activity of the entire body -- how it moves and how it occupies social space. Whether as metaphor or memory, or reimagined relationships between nature and the effects of geopolitical strain, this tension between conditional stasis and freedom is how Botello’s sculpture attains its presence, and how Botello calls into question the realities of life through acts of making.

A suite of small ink and acrylic drawings accompanies the sculpture.  They are a sample of “It’s All Wrong, But It’s Alright,” Botello’s on-going drawing practice.  The series is independent of the sculpture and appear to be graphic ruminations on movement, auditioning the flows and rhythms of new forms.  Endowed with the sense of a three-dimensional presence, the drawings elude narrative, but their networks of parallels, breaks, convolutions, stratification, lateral lines, and tangles are associative. They suggest veins, bows, branches, and wings.  As with Botello’s sculpture, the drawings evoke the intrinsically dynamic quality of reality and the transformational character of her experience.

-Statement by Julia Couzens

Exhibition Photos