Collecting Shadows Cara Lasell Bonewitz by Rachel Heidenry
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ainted interiors. Woven seaweed. Toasterinspired papier-mâché. Ojai-based artist Cara Lasell Bonewitz draws inspiration from organic materials and everyday shapes. Born in Pittsburgh, she and her family moved to Ojai when she was fourteen. After high school, she went back East for college, spending years in New York, before attending graduate school at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. In 2018, she decided she was finished with the gray weather and moved back to Ventura County, setting up a studio in Ojai. Since then, she’s been immersed in the regional arts community, organizing programs like Joyride: Ojai, a socially distanced outdoor exhibition featuring work by local artists in fall 2020. In her studio, Bonewitz is constantly moving between pieces, sampling different concepts and materials simultaneously. In mediums ranging from installation and fiber to drawing and photography, her works are often labor-intensive undertakings that explore ideas of transience and nostalgia. Regardless of the material, her artwork ponders the question: How do you capture the passing of time?
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encounter a stairwell, lined with windows casting presumed shadows across the space. In these paintings of corners, hallways, passageways and closets, Bonewitz captures the intimacy of space. As viewers, we encounter glimpses, our eyes zooming into rooms not fully revealed. Shown in the Architectural Foundation Gallery – a modest, lightfilled room in a historic home built in 1904 – the relationship between spaces and those who inhabit them becomes even more pronounced. But while people are felt throughout Bonewitz’s painted interiors, no bodies are actually depicted. Instead, we encounter remnants: coffee mugs, shoes lined up in a row, a glowing desk lamp, bottles of nail polish. Human activity is felt, not shown, rendering time ambiguous. Has something just happened? Is something about to? By focusing on the seemingly mundane, time feels both frozen and continuous.
In a recent exhibition at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, that question is addressed through a series of paintings, papier-mâché sculptures and watercolors. Titling the exhibition A•BOD•E, Bonewitz explores both the idea of home and the body, thoughtfully detailing the relationships between personal belongings, architecture and the shadows and shapes that inhabit them.
Perhaps the works that most strongly capture this duality are found amid Bonewitz’s watercolor series Collecting Shadows. Created during a year in which she was constantly moving between places, these abstract compositions of interiors in hues of blue, gray and black are as much about what is left out as what is shown. In Collecting Shadows – Fifth Morning (2015), more than half of the paper is left unpainted, the white space acting as both light source and ceiling. As the title suggests, the shadows captured are fleeting; they will never fall upon the fireplace or wooden dresser in exactly the same way.
In Mom and Dad’s Closet (mostly Mom’s) (2014), we peer into a personal wardrobe, where a fringed white vest stitched with colorful embroidery and a checkered green jacket hang amid brown coats. In XO (2022), we stare at a bedside table, where stacks of books with red, black and white covers lie beside a lamp missing its shade. And in Summertime in London (2015), we
In many ways, this balance between transience and permanence defines Bonewitz’s practice, both in the subject matter she chooses and the materials she works with. Her white papier-mâché and plaster sculptures – the abstract shapes themselves referencing specific architectural details, her own body or personal mementos – look like bones or fossils. They give the
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