Terminal 2/3, Departures Level, pre-security

Little Wing, a site-specific three-dimensional wall drawing by artist Krysten Cunningham, offers a visual meditation on movement, space, and light. Rendered in white rope against a sky-blue painted wall, the common domestic material recalls the simplicity of empty clotheslines while simultaneously inviting us to imagine a space beyond our reach.

Cunningham achieves a deceptively simple composition through the manipulation of a basic geometric form, the triangle. By folding and flattening triangles into rhomboids, Cunningham creates a spatial illusion suggesting motion. The resulting shapes evoke paper airplanes, birds, flight patterns, and movement. Each of the forms begins with a ball of rope that defies gravity as it unwinds around fixed points delineating a path across the surface of the wall. Our eye moves into illusionistic space until it lands on the hanging ball of yarn, which makes visible the gravity that airplane flight enables us to overcome.

Elise Barclay, Curator
O’Melveny & Myers Art Collection

 

Los Angeles-based visual artist Krysten Cunningham creates site-specific installations using hand- and machine-made string, yarn, and rope in her sculptural weavings and three-dimensional drawings. Her compositions, applied directly to architecture and landscape, hover between two and three dimensions, echoing the logic of virtual space and optical illusion. She is inspired by the poetic forms of geometric abstraction created by avant-garde painters and sculptors associated with early European modernism and the Neo-concrete art movement in Argentina and Brazil from the 1950s and ‘60s.

Cunningham’s work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Getty Center Central Gardens, Los Angeles, CA; the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK. She lives and works in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles.

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