The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Christine Corday: Protoist Series, Selected Forms, December 13, 2014–April 5, 2015, the first solo presentation by the artist in a U.S. museum. The term “protoist,” coined by Corday, describes forms in and out of a solid state and is the title of a series of works in which she aims to suspend the moment between sensory perception and definition. The series’ large-scale torch-cut works focus on temperature, solid states of metals, and the sensory effect of touch with abstract form.

Each piece in the Protoist Series, including the two artworks featured in the exhibition, UNE
and KNOUN, are meant to engender direct physical contact, not only to be touched but to be
worn down over time by the tide of human interaction. As a result, the works exist as
recording devices; every handprint that touches them will appear over time as rust, mapping an intimately individual yet shared public surface. The forms are on view for limited durations in commonplace locations—an abandoned interior, an urban alley, a piazza—that are selectedto motivate the unexpected encounter.

UNE, Corday’s first large-scale steel work, is a three-ton form. This sculpture is hewn fromraw weathering steel alloy and stands nearly nine feet tall with the arc spanning more than 16feet. A two and a half foot notched void cuts through the center of the arc. This mark replacesthe artist’s hand, or brush stroke, in an otherwise mechanical process, both acknowledgingthe sensory power of touch as well as reframing imperfection. UNE debuted in 2008, underthe New York City High Line at West 25th Street.(Image captions on page 3) Page 2KNOUN is Corday’s second work on view at LACMA from the artist’s Protoist Series. Theexponentially curved figure is approximately 13 feet long and ascends 13 feet. The 4,500-pound work is meant for interaction: visitors can touch and walk on the work, whether fromthe base of the rising monolith or from the ground.

Christine Corday has diverse interests in the fine arts as well as the sciences. In 1991,
before receiving her B.A. in Communication Arts, she wrote an original research paper which
led to an astrophysics internship at NASA Ames Research Center. She later continued her
academic studies with graduate courses in Cultural Anthropology from Washington
University. From 1992–1999, she worked as a graphic and structural designer for several
international advertising agencies. During this time, she received an Edison Ingenuity Prize in
Montreal, Canada as well as international design awards for her patented glass bottle for The
Republic of Tea.

Corday devoted herself full-time to painting in 2000 and began her studio abroad in Tokyo,
Japan for one year and then in Seville, Spain for three years, where she began the large-scale
sound and tidal energy project, “Instrument for the Ocean to Play.” Her years in Spain
directed her palette to black, creating works that later would be seen as blueprints for her
future sculptures. She made her own paint mulling raw pigment and charcoal into a synthetic
polymer base to create a tar-like substance and fabricated tools for its application to raw
linen and canvas.

Upon her return to the States in 2005, she moved to Brooklyn, New York and started the
large steel forms of her Protoist Series, replacing the painted brushstroke with heat of plasma
torch.

In 2010–2011, Architect Michael Arad and the Memorial Committee selected Corday’s
black iron oxide color for the National September 11 Memorial at One World Trade Center,
New York City as overseen by KC Fabrications: Fabricator and Installer of the Memorial’s
Bronze Name Parapets. For nine months, she and her assistant applied her blackening color
and technique over the 15,000 square feet of the Memorial for its opening on September
11, 2011.