LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting Christine Corday: Protoist Series, Selected Forms, the first solo presentation by the artist in a U.S. museum. The term “protoist,” coined by Corday, describes forms in and out of a solid state and is the title of a series of works in which she aims to suspend the moment between sensory perception and definition. The series’ large-scale torch-cut works focus on temperature, solid states of metals, and the sensory effect of touch with abstract form.
Each piece in the Protoist Series, including the two artworks featured in the exhibition, UNE and KNOUN, are meant to engender direct physical contact, not only to be touched but to be worn down over time by the tide of human interaction. As a result, the works exist as recording devices; every handprint that touches them will appear over time as rust, mapping an intimately individual yet shared public surface. The forms are on view for limited durations in commonplace locations—an abandoned interior, an urban alley, a piazza—that are selected to motivate the unexpected encounter.
UNE, Corday’s first large-scale steel work, is a three-ton form. This sculpture is hewn from raw weathering steel alloy and stands nearly nine feet tall with the arc spanning more than 16 feet. A two and a half foot notched void cuts through the center of the arc. This mark replaces the artist’s hand, or brush stroke, in an otherwise mechanical process, both acknowledging the sensory power of touch as well as reframing imperfection. UNE debuted in 2008, under the New York City High Line at West 25th Street.
KNOUN is Corday’s second work on view at LACMA from the artist’s Protoist Series. The exponentially curved figure is approximately 13 feet long and ascends 13 feet. The 4,500pound work is meant for interaction: visitors can touch and walk on the work, whether from the base of the rising monolith or from the ground.
Christine Corday has diverse interests in the fine arts as well as the sciences. In 1991, before receiving her B.A. in Communication Arts, she wrote an original research paper which led to an astrophysics internship at NASA Ames Research Center. She later continued her academic studies with graduate courses in Cultural Anthropology from Washington University. From 1992–1999, she worked as a graphic and structural designer for several international advertising agencies. During this time, she received an Edison Ingenuity Prize in Montreal, Canada as well as international design awards for her patented glass bottle for The Republic of Tea.
Corday devoted herself full-time to painting in 2000 and began her studio abroad in Tokyo, Japan for one year and then in Seville, Spain for three years, where she began the large-scale sound and tidal energy project, “Instrument for the Ocean to Play.” Her years in Spain directed her palette to black, creating works that later would be seen as blueprints for her future sculptures. She made her own paint mulling raw pigment and charcoal into a synthetic polymer base to create a tar-like substance and fabricated tools for its application to raw linen and canvas.
Upon her return to the States in 2005, she moved to Brooklyn, New York and started the large steel forms of her Protoist Series, replacing the painted brushstroke with heat of plasma torch.
In 2010–2011, Architect Michael Arad and the Memorial Committee selected Corday’s black iron oxide color for the National September 11 Memorial at One World Trade Center, New York City as overseen by KC Fabrications: Fabricator and Installer of the Memorial’s Bronze Name Parapets. For nine months, she and her assistant applied her blackening color and technique over the 15,000 square feet of the Memorial for its opening on September 11, 2011.
