Aili Schmeltz was born in 1975 and raised in the suburban Midwest. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She obtained an MFA from the University of Arizona and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute.
Schmeltz is an installation artist and sculptor. Her work exposes the manifest juxtaposition between her upbringing in the Midwest and her temperamental adopted city, Los Angeles. Schmeltz makes the claim that striving for utopia is just as utopian as the physical place or the paradisiacal goal realized. But the building remnants strip the hybridized structures of their naiveté, and consequently, they look less like futuristic possibility and more like fallen monuments of idealism.
Schmeltz’s solo exhibitions include: Project Room Gallery, Grand Central Art Center, California State University Fullerton, Santa Ana, CA (2013); Tomorrowland, Prescott College Art Gallery, Prescott, Arizona (2013); Tomorrowland, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona (2011); La Fuente de la Vida, Greenlead Gallery, Los Angeles (2010); The Magic City, Locust Projects, Miami (2008). God’s Eye, Bermis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2008).
Her selected group exhibitions include: Apocryphal Times, Friedman Benda Gallery, New York (2014); Up and Coming, Kids of Dada, The Hoxton Gallery, London (2014); Prep School – surviving an Apocalypse, or not. Torrence Art Museum, Torrence, California (2014); Portal, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles (2013); Una Casa como Yo: Asuntos Domésticos, Galeria La Miscelanea, Puebla, Mexico (2013); Projekt Papier, Zatoka Sztuki, Sopot, Poland (2012); Anonyme Zeichner Archiv, Asihlquaiss Offspace, Zurich, Switzerland (2011); and Flat File, Golden Parachutes Gallery, Berlin (2009).
She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards such as the Artist Pension Trust Fellowship Prize Residency at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia in 2015, the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts in 2013, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants, New York as well as the Creative Capacity Fund Grant of San Francisco in 2011, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2009. In 2011, she co-founded the Los Angeles Art Resource, an organization aiming to provide local artists with a forum to exchange resources to enable sustained success in their respective fields and careers.
For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art
