The WORK Magazine‘ url=’http://www.theworkmag.com/black_board/ariana-papademetropoulos/’ target=’_blank’ size=’small’ style=” color=’grey’] ‘It’s about creating a gateway where a seemingly traditional environment is liquified; revealing it’s organic and interpretive forms that bare similar effects to a Rorschach inkblot test,’ says Ariana Papademetropoulos, a portrait of beauty herself, perched amidst a sea of plants suspended above painted interiors embellishing the walls of her light-drenched downtown studio. Through inventive pictorial strategies, the LA artist evokes worlds where the figurative, decorative, theatrical, allegorical, biological, and popular collide to form physical and psychological blueprints. Transcending traditional interior representations and appropriated imagery, the artist conjures illusive spaces oscillating between the natural and paranormal. Her evocation of the in-between permeating polarizing elements: dark and light; destruction and beauty; line and color; content and form, draw the viewer into the magic of unfolding transitory myriads. As we gaze through Papademetropoulos’ view and trademark inkblot effect, there is no differentiation between the ornamental and the organic— bleeding into each other, they colorize one infinite mimesis. In her first solo show opening this Sunday at SADE, the artist presents a series of new paintings including the namesake piece Wallflower at the Orgy. Adapting the title of Nora Ephron’s book, Papademetropoulos’ paintings are, too, timeless pieces that tap into our endearing obsessions with pop culture, celebrity, entertainment, and sex. As Ephron’s Wallflower at the Orgy surveys the past through a collection of essays, Papademetropoulos’ works read as reflections on contemporary physicality— windows where it’s impossible to disentangle artifice from nature, fact from fiction, and fantasy from reality.

Wallflower at the Orgy opens 7-10pm Sunday, March 22.  On view through April 26, 2015 at SADE.

 Opening Invite | Press Release