Chad Attie: "The Girl With The Golden Eyes"

Opening reception for Chad Attie: "The Girl With The Golden Eyes." Attie’s practice is rooted in a quintessentially urban impulse to salvage a sense of beauty from the mundane trappings of the contemporary world. There is also a strong metaphorical significance in the way his works seem to have been made, by a hand often as much at the mercy of his materials as in control of them. ’The Girl With The Golden Eyes’ asks the question if it is ever possible to control what we see and attain what we desire, or whether by engaging with it we destroy what we touch. Throughout Attie’s career his work has been influenced by extensive travels to such places as Morocco, Russia, Burma, Vietnam, Japan, Turkey, and Cambodia. Many of the ideas in ’The Girl With The Golden Eyes’ have come from such contrasting cultural notions as well as environments, textures, and objects he has photographed or detritus collected in his travels. Original photographs, thrifted paintings, broken toys, discarded book jackets and torn children’s illustrations are transformed by Attie into resonantly colorful images that simultaneously signify the material transience of the urban environment and the multiple layers its experience can manifest upon its inhabitants.