Aili Schmeltz (b.1975, USA)

Born and raised in the suburban Midwest, installation artist and sculptor Aili Schmeltz 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. 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. (src. APT Global) © All images courtesy of the artist