1001

Chris Sicat

November 6-23, 2025

Reception: November 6, 2025 | 12-6pm

LA Artcore | 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012

Chris Sicat’s installations, sculptural and performance-based artworks seek to deepen our understanding of time. In daily life, time serves as a construct to measure seconds, minutes, days, and years. Sicat uses time to assess the organization of the infinite. Using hundreds of graphite pencils per piece, Sicat etches small marks onto the surfaces of preserved wood. As he proceeds, individual lines become a blanket of graphite that envelops the surface of the wood in a silver sheen.

The 1001 installation at LA Artcore, refers to One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folktales in which a recursive pattern emerges by way of stories dwelling within the landscapes of other stories. In much the same manner, Sicat’s redwood sculptures that comprise this installation contain multitudes of time, nestled within one another. Sicat uses repetition as a ritual to engage conceptually with time and space; dimensions that govern our reality but are difficult to fathom in their entirety. Each mark drawn paves the way for the next to be written, like seconds blending into a vast infinity. For the photo realism drawings, his consummation of lines dissolves into a range of varying values and dissolves the lines itself. Sicat may spend months to complete a single sculpture, but the wood itself heralds from trees that are centuries old, and the graphite that coats it predates the first trees to have taken root on this earth.