Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is pleased to present Taking Up Space, a three-person exhibition featuring work by Dawn Ertl, Sarajo Frieden and Michelle Carla Handel, curated by TSA LA member Stacy Wendt. This show explores different approaches to engaging and activating space through abstraction. While these artists share connections in their work via their interest in mixed media, organic shapes and their careful consideration of color, they each offer a different method to experience dimensionality. These experiences can offer the viewer ways of understanding the world through our relationships with objects and how we perceive them.

Dawn Ertl’s woven pieces cut through space, asserting their materiality, while at once remaining ephemeral and light.  Disruptions in the weaving patterns, along with changing viewpoints allow for varying experiences; that of a fractured, unpredictable pattern when viewed up close or of a strengthened unit when viewed from a distance. Her work employs the use of metaphors pertaining to process, material, structure, and information to investigate relationships and how they influence our natural environment. Dawn is a native Los Angeles artist. She received her MFA from California State University Long Beach and her BFA from Otis School of Art and Design. She has exhibited her work throughout Southern California, at The Blue Cube, The Arcade, Manhattan Beach Creative Arts Center, El Camino College Art Gallery, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Boston Court, as well as the Cerritos College Art Gallery.

Sarajo Frieden’s works offer layers upon layers of pattern that deny a reality of space in their multifaceted and discordant surfaces.  Although primarily two-dimensional, at times her work engages space beyond traditional painting through her use of collage and various materials that break the steadiness of the rectangular edge and the two-dimensional plane.  Her pieces are populated with disparate vocabularies–the language of signifiers, symbols, and patterns; and her paintings are alive with movement, ambiguity and exploration. Sarajo was born in Oakland, California and raised there and in Los Angeles, where she received a degree in Painting and Printmaking from the University of California at Los Angeles. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, and has received fellowships to a number of artist residencies including Golden Foundation Residency and the Vermont Studio Center. For several decades, her work as a designer and illustrator has appeared in many different media and publications and won numerous awards.

Michele Carla Handel’s work is assertive, weighty and bold in its relationship to space.  Whether a free-standing sculpture or a three-dimensional wall piece, her pieces are commanding in their physicality.  In her work, she attempts to reconcile various distances. Distance between the ordinary and the sublime; perception and fact; the visceral and cognitive; and the constraints of the body with the vastness of the psyche. She received her MFA in Fine Art from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Baker’s Dozen 6’ at the Torrance Art Museum; ‘The Collectivists’ curated by Manual History Machines at the Brand Library; and a site-specific solo installation at Outside Gallery in Los Angeles. Michelle lives and works in Los Angeles.