Painted Over/Under

The final chapter of Kim Schoenstadt's year-long interactive project, Painted Over/Under. Once revealed, Schoenstadt's complete line-drawing snakes across five gallery walls, constructed out of fragments of the project's history.

Kim Schoenstadt’s Painted Over/Under Parts 1-4 is a year-long project based on the mismatched color patterning created by “graffiti maintenance” on freeway retaining walls and other open walls in the city. Parts 1-3 have incorporated guest curators Les Figues Press, Jens Hoffman and Erin Cullerton, who invited writers, artists and architects to create drawings in shifts on the walls in LACE’s rear gallery. With each part of the project, works have been written and/or drawn onto the walls, then painted over with Schoenstadt’s color palette, creating a layered, abstracted painting defined by the shapes of past projects, offering a new starting point for the next group, and so on. Prior to each "painting out," Schoenstadt has applied tape on the large wall-works to preserve portions of the work below.

The inspiration for Painted Over/Under stems from the unlikely combination of Rauschenberg’s drawing “Erased DeKooning,” and a frequently graffiti-ed and re-painted truck which regularly parked in the artist’s neighborhood. “Somehow these two concepts came together, these two moments of erasure - both creating something new by what is left behind but in utterly different contexts,” states Schoenstadt. “I was thinking about how easily street art is painted out and how for his erasure drawing Rauschenberg had to find a well known artists work that would be ‘indisputably considered art.’ I'm not sure where the ‘indisputably art’ line is anymore.”

The project has been documented each step of the way on :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paintedoverunder/
http://paintedoverunder.tumblr.com/

Press

KCRW coverage of Panel discussion at LACE, 2011

LA Times story on the LACE Show, 2011