Conversation between Olga Koumoundouros and Charles Gaines, 6:30 pm

Visual and sonic performance: Sunday, August 23, 3 pm
Featuring collaboration with Corey Fogel and Aurisha Smolarski joined by artists, musicians and others for an immersive performance environment.

Olga Koumoundouros’ provocative practice actively engages ideas of labor, class and human sustenance that shake the very core of the American Dream. The artist’s dexterity and commitment to materiality is her tour de force. Working with industrial materials—plywood, corrugated fiberglass, plaster and tar, among others—Koumoundouros’ sculptural objects and installations resonate with brute, elegant force, exploring the many social, economic and political ideologies that shape our relationship to both past and present. In A Roof Upended (2007), a recent project the artist undertook in Bellevue, Wash., she recovered sections of asphalt shingle from a derelict ranch-style house and reconstructed the roof tilted on end, supported by columns of stacked cans of beans filled with concrete. Here, the artist explored the tension between development and community, while contemplating the displacement of people and their histories.

In the site-specific installation commissioned by REDCAT, Koumoundouros expands upon her interest in architecture and monumental structures where the tension between power, movement and the individual must be negotiated. Informed by research on the uneven distribution of wealth in the United States, this new work develops a form that draws from the artist’s thinking on productivity, depth, Möbius strips, tunnels and the human body in architecture as physical and abstract models that may destabilize conventional constructs of culture, politics and power.