Far Out

Aaron Curry grew up as a skateboarder in San Antonio, Texas, watching plenty of TV. For years he’s lived and worked in Los Angeles and while his exuberantly-colored paintings, sculptures and collages reference Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi and many of the other artists he’s studied, they’re also just as likely to pull from Pixar, TV sitcoms and comic books.

More recently, he says, he’s spent a lot of time looking at photography from the Hubble Space Telescope and thinking about “the magic dust and ether and orgiastic energy from which the universe emerges, and then into which it collapses.”

His musings on black holes have resulted in STARFUKER, a new show of paintings and sculptures, opening Saturday at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. The name refers not only to the way Curry creates his own cosmos and to the show’s largest work – a curving black mass – but to ecological apocalypse and Hollywood’s blinding seductions.

Curry long ago blurred the boundaries between two and three dimensions and between painting and sculpture. This time around, he bends and twists his forms to convey the way images of outer space are “mediated by technology” and then filtered though pop culture—through the vivid colors and caricature of cartoons, sci-fi, and Disney—before it reaches our imaginations,” he says.

Think of his shaped canvases and steel sculptures not as spacescapes, but as windows into an alternate reality.