LAXART is pleased to present, POW!, a new installation of sculptures by Los Angeles artist Anna Sew Hoy. Invoking technologies of healing, Sew Hoy has constructed two oversized casts, one shaped for an ankle and one for a wrist, but each large enough to encompass an entire human body. Employing the materials and techniques commonly used by clinicians who treat broken bones, Sew Hoy's monuments form a social allegory as they cleverly assert a sculptural presence. As is the common practice among kids in school, the casts will have been signed by invited participants that Sew Hoy will have led in an art workshop, as well as the artist's own friends and family. The monumentality of the project is personalized through a video that illustrates the artist's research: Sew Hoy's father, a medical doctor, casts his daughter's wrist in an intimate family exercise. Finally, Sew Hoy has elaborated an office water-cooler with excessive denim forms, emphasizing the simultaneously nourishing and clinical sensibility that infuses this scene of recovery. With this project, Sew Hoy playfully juggles many art-historical concerns regarding sculpture, from its role as a site of social connection to the psychological ways in which humans relate to objects that surround their bodies.

Anna Sew Hoy is quickly becoming recognized as a leader among a new generation of sculptors. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1998 and her MFA from Hunter College in 2001. The artist has had solo shows at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery (2007) and Peres Projects (2003) in Los Angeles, and at Massimo Audiello Gallery (2002) in New York as well as participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Eden's Edge: Fifteen LA Artists at the Hammer Museum, LA, One Way or Another: Asian Art Now at the Asia Society, New York, and Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, and Cosmic Wonder at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Sew Hoy is one of the youngest artists to be awarded the United States Artists Fellowship, which she received in 2006. Anna Sew Hoy was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and she currently lives and works in Los Angeles.