ART
AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY
APRIL/MAY 2010
Susan Wides Art & Entertainment
FEBRUARY 19, 2010 PIGMENTED INK PRINT 50 x 36 INCHES
Kim Foster Gallery 529 West 20 Street New York 10011 212.229.0044 May 1- June 5, 2010 Opening Reception Saturday May 1, 6 pm - 8 pm Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday 11am to 6 pm info@kimfostergallery.com
www.kimfostergallery.com
Nadine Rovner, One at a Time Archival Digital Pigment Print , 2009
hous projects
DARKmatter march 25 - august 17 2010 Featured Artists: Narelle Autio • Jen Davis • Scott Davis • Marian Drew • John Houshmand • Molly Landreth • Eric Ogden • Trent Parke • Charles Robb • Nadine Rovner • Haley Jane Samuelson • Phillip Toledano • Nicola Vinci
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CONTENTS April/MAy 2010
ART
AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY
UP FRONT 09 Events 12 Museums EXHIBITIONS 16 New York 17 Washington, DC 18 Philadelphia 18 Santa Fe 19 Albuquerque 19 Boston 20 Portland 20 Atlanta
16 Jackie Gendel
18 Lance Letscher
45 Mark Schoening
25 California Contemporary Art: Special Section
ARTISTS 45 Mark Schoening 46 Anthony Mastromatteo 49 Peter Sarkisian 50 Jean Kazandjian FEATURE 22 F. Lennox Campello on Washington, DC
30 Blythe Projects
32 Martha Otero
36 Los Angeles & San Francisco Shows Neha Choski Dorsey Dunn Frederick Fisher Charles Garabedian Jeffrey Gibson Lawrence Gipe Steve Hough
Cover Image: Charles Garabedian (pg. 41), Die Tote Stadt, 2009, (detail), acrylic on canvas, 96’’ x 66’’. Courtesy of L.A. Louver
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Robert Hudson John Jurayj Charles LaBelle David Levine Jeff Matsuno Robert Melee Pard Morrison
Publisher: Richard Kalisher Editor: Donovan Stanley Design: Rui Vilela DC Editor: F. Lennox Campello Editorial Consultant: Eric Kalisher
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Lisi Raskin Kelly Reemtsen Sarah Rossiter Stephen Sollins Rowan Wood Kohei Yoshiyuki Lawrence Yun
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ART EVENTS
addition, the fair will also feature onsite exhibitions including New Insight, an annual exhibition of rising MFA students from the country’s most influential art programs, curated by Susanne Ghez of The Renaissance Society; Partisan, a display of works that critically explore social and political ideas; and Survey America, a floor-wide exhibit that highlights extraordinary works by artists living and working in the United States. Art Chicago: Bill Viola, Small Saints, 2008, color high-definition video polyptych on six OLED flat panels (continuous running) mounted on shelf. 13’’ X 62’’ X 11’’.
SFFAF: Albert Contreras, Untitled, 2009-10, acrylic on panel, 20’’ x 24’’. Courtesy of Peter Mendenhall Gallery.
Art Chicago
April 30 - May 3
This renowned international fair of contemporary and modern art will once again bring together the world’s leading emerging and established galleries. Now in its 30th year, Art Chicago will offer curators, collectors, artists and art enthusiasts a comprehensive survey of current and historic work from cutting-edge to modern masters - in a wide variety of media including: painting, photography, drawings, prints, sculpture, video, and special installations. Located on the 12th floor
of The Mart, Art Chicago will feature events throughout the weekend, enticing both the novice and experienced collector. Throughout the four days, cutting-edge speaker programs, Art Chicago Speaks and Converge Chicago: Contemporary Curators Forum will feature an international roster of artists, writers, curators and critics, discussing current trends and provocative issues confronting the contemporary art market. Perspective Texas will focus special programming on the Lone Star State, featuring top Texas collectors and curators from Texas institutions. In
San Francisco Art Fair May 21 - 23
Marking the first significant international art fair in San Francisco in almost a decade, the SF Fine Art Fair includes over 50,000 square feet of art space. Seventy internationally renowned galleries headline this art fair at Fort Mason’s Festival Pavilion. From modern masters to important contemporary offers, the show features over $300 million of artwork by more than 500 artists. The setting will be designed to accentuate and highlight a spectacular selection of paintings, works on paper, drawings, printed editions, photography and sculpture (both indoors and outdoors) by the world’s leading artists. Adding to the excitement and quality of the Fair experience, SFFAF organizers are resisting the current art fair trend of ‘more is better,’ and are instead selecting a limited number of Fair exhibitors in order to create a greater sense of intimacy amongst fair attendees and exhibitors. With nearly 85% of the SFFAF participating galleries based in North America and 25% of these galleries located in the Bay Area, SFFAF organizers were inspired to earmark a portion of the Fair’s funds towards highlighting arts in the Bay Area. ART EVENTS
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F. LENNOX CAMPELLO
“Superman flying naked and low to the ground in order to avoid radar” Charcoal on paper. 20x24 inches. Circa 2009.
ALIDA ANDERSON ART PROJECTS WASHINGTON, DC s ALIDAANDERSON.COM
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MUSEUMS
Installation view of Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Curated by Jeff Koons. Photograph by Benoit Pailley.
Skin Fruit New Museum New York [through June 6]
“Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection” is the first exhibition in the United States of the Athens-based Dakis Joannou Collection, renowned as one of the leading collections of contemporary art in the world. This is also the first exhibition curated by artist Jeff Koons, who was invited to organize the show by the New Museum and whose work inspired Joannou to start his collection in 1985. Including over 100 works by fifty international artists spanning several generations, the exhibition explores the age-old preoccupation with the human body as a vessel and vehicle for experience, a distinctive focus of the collection. Koons’s title Skin Fruit alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. “Skin” and “fruit” evoke the tensions between
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interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume. In the exhibition role-playing games and dramas occur: a man will stage a religious ritual; a sculpture literally sings out; white-chocolate monuments tower above visitor’s heads; voracious creatures eat themselves and each other while bodies are buried or frozen. Joannou’s collection is comprised of more than 1,500 works by 400 contemporary artists, from the most eminent to those just emerging. For “Skin Fruit,” Koons has selected works in many mediums including sculptures, works on paper, paintings, installations, and videos.
Maira Kalman Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia [through June 6]
The first major survey of the work Maira Kalman, Various Illuminations
Maira Kalman, Crosstown Boogie Woogie, 1995, gouache on paper, 15.38’’ x 11.5’’. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York.
of a Crazy World), features a selection spanning thirty years of original works on paper and design production, along with less widely seen aspects of Kalman’s work in photography, embroidery, textiles, and performance. An illustrator, author and designer, Kalman illuminates contemporary life with a profound sense of joy and unique sense of humor. Like a gift, her work appears to lift the spirits, no matter how ordinary or overwhelming circumstances may be. As a context for this survey, Kalman is creating a special installation. The space will be furnished with chairs, ladders, and «many tables of many things»—such as fezzes, bobby pins, balls of string, things that have fallen out of books, lists, moss. Expressive of Kalman’s habits as a collector, traveler, reader, and avid walker, this installation offers a view of how she sees the world, both in and outside of the studio.
MUSEUMS
illustrating the story of the artists, collectors, cultural mavericks, and San Francisco leaders who founded, built, and have animated the museum. The exhibition mines the depth and breadth of SFMOMA’s collection— the soul and long-term memory of the museum—and constitutes the first complete reinstallation of the second floor galleries since the museum opened its doors on Third Street in 1995.
Stephen Shore, West Ninth Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974. Chromomeric print, 8 x 10 in. © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. Permanent Collection Cincinnati Art Museum, Acquired with The Edwin and Virginia H. Irwin Memorial Fund.
Starbust Cincinnati Art Museum [through May 9]
Garish, pedestrian and commercial that’s how critics characterized color photography in the 1970s. It was in fact an explosion of color and the beginning of a new form of art. Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980 is the first survey of a burgeoning period in photography. Through the work of artists such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Mitch Epstein, conventions of the snapshot are turned into high art. Starburst offers the first historical survey of what critics of the 1970s called “The New Color Photography,” a loose artistic movement that generated much controversy and excitement in a multitude of exhibitions and publications throughout the decade. Addressing various themes, such as
the technological factors contributing to color’s emergence, cultural biases against color photography’s use as an art form, and shifting attitudes between formalist and conceptual practices, the exhibition explores color’s role in the transition between modern and contemporary approaches to art photography during the 1970s.
The Anniversary Show SFMOMA [through January 2011]
Celebrating the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s impact on modern and contemporary art, the exhibition The Anniversary Show traces the art and individuals that have made SFMOMA the institution it is today. Throughout the anniversary year, SFMOMA will present a series of exhibitions under the heading 75 Years of Looking Forward
Jasper Johns, Land’s End, 1963, oil on canvas with stick, 67’’ x 48.25’’. Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson. © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York.
Paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, video works, architectural models, and design objects will be supplemented by archival material orienting visitors to the timeframe and context in which these works were first shown and acquired. From mounting Jackson Pollock’s first solo museum exhibition in 1945 to championing the emerging Mission School scene in the mid-1990s to exhibiting snapshot photography in 1998, SFMOMA has consistently broken new ground and challenging conventional wisdom. MUSEUMS
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EXHIBITIONS
Chuck Kelton & Shelton Walsmith Causey Contemporary Brooklyn [through May 17]
dream, they are the fractaling seconds between dawn and dusk, fact and fantasy, experiencing and remembering.
Michael Behle Hogar Collection Brooklyn [through May 24]
manner, the metamorphosis Behle transposes upon his subjects offer the viewer unexpected encounters into new perceptual experiences that question established thought patterns and the implications of our societal typifications. In his efforts, Behle poses a steadfast opposition to a world where absolutes can serve only to stifle and hinder pure thought and radical exploration.
Jackie Gendel Jeff Bailey Manhattan
[through May 8]
Chuck Kelton, I Can See Right Through It, 2010, gold-toned silver gelatin print, 16’’ x 20’’.
These solo exhibitions display the black and white silver gelatin prints of photographer Chuck Kelton in Run From View and the latest paintings by Shelton Walsmith in Day for Night. Drawn from autobiographical experiences, Kelton’s work celebrates the chaos and fragmentation of life. He constructs abstracted images that become narratives saturated with metaphorical structure. Inspired visually by landscapes these images tend to be more mythological than temporal. Demonstrating classical black and white techniques, each photograph will be executed as editions of three with the prints within each edition having slight variations. Day for Night features three distinct new series of paintings by Walsmith. The series, La Perambulati, Ill Corallo, and The New Phonetic each play with polarity. Sheldon extends the expanse between black and white, between opposing forces. His paintings represent this practice; like a waking
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Michael Behle, Constructed expulsion, bronze, wood and paint, 58’’ x 18’’ x 20’’. Courtesy of The Hogar Collection
In his debut New York solo exhibition, Animal Faith, Behle will present new cast bronze and toothpick sculptures along with collage-based works on paper. Taking its name from the writings Skepticism and Animal Faith by George Santayana, the exhibition explores the dichotomy between knowledge gained through pedagogical academia and knowledge gained through a more intuitive and phenomenological approach. The works reference recognizable imagery – ranging from the human figure, architecture, and advertising – while proposing a reconfiguration of openended, metaphorical narratives in which ambiguity supports the anti-absolute. Tweaked into a reality of subconscious thought, the works often deface the subjects: metaphorically by imposing appendages awkwardly protruding and creating surreal predicaments; literally by directly defacing and marking upon the subjects to alter the definable imagery. With an honest and forthright
Jackie Gendel, Fog, 2010, oil on panel, 22’’ x 28’’.
Combining the names of two vibrant pigment hues, Rose Madder and the Ultramarines, Jackie Gendel chose the title of her new show to reflect the social drama within her figurative compositions and the material exploration inherent in her painting process. Linking all of the work is the artist’s concentration on allover composition and color. Some of the paintings are overt in their depiction of a figure or scene, while others veer toward total abstraction. The paintings suggest an elusive narrative, in which the figure/ ground relationship that establishes the identity of the subjects is also that which disguises them. Gendel moves almost effortlessly between different modes of painting, using painting both as code and material experimentation. Gendel’s mining of various source
EXHIBITIONS
materials (portraits from different eras, New Wave films, found photographs or depictions of her friends) inspires this exploration of identity.
portraiture is completely stripped away. The crevices and folds of the hoods and jackets begin to appear as worlds within themselves.
Karel Funk 303 Gallery Manhattan
Charles Cohan Curator’s Office Washington, DC
[through May 15]
[through May 1]
Mountains of Oregon and Washington, also translates the physical activity of mountain-climbing to his art practice. According to essayist Jaimey Hamilton, “Instead of producing intimate sketches, he used topographical maps. In these views we see no trademark cliff faces, no indication of the unique geography of the land, no outstanding profiles from amazing altitudes.” On view in the exhibition are the ghostly and delicate topographies of Mount Hood and Mount Rainier.
Steven Cushner & William Willis Hemphill Washington, DC [through May 28]
Karel Funk, Untitled #29, 2008, acrylic on paint.
For his latest body of work, Karel Funk continues his progressive abandonment of the narrative of realist portrait painting. As his subjects become further enshrouded in the contours of their synthetic overgarments, they become channels for the amorphous color fields, shadow, and light interplay that is typical of Flemish and renaissance painting. Funk’s practice, however, creates in each hyper-real detail an abstracted element of a larger, extrinsic level of consciousness. The paintings are generally larger than life-size, rendering them disorienting in their overwhelming reality. Each subject is portrayed against a stark white background, typical of Funk’s work, and befitting of his dry, taxonomic approach. They face away, revealing little to none of their facial features. If any features are revealed, the subjects are androgynous, as the identity conventionally associated with
Charles Cohan, MGP09.I-IX, from the 2009 MotoGP Motorcycle Series of 18 Races, 2010, collagraph print, 46’’ x 40’’. Curator’s Office.
Charles Cohan’s new exhibition, Circuits, includes two distinct bodies of work. Tracks includes muscular collograph prints, each printed from 3 plates. Cohan continues his interest in typologies imposed by humans upon the land and researched Google Earth for aerial views of his racetrack subject matter. He then visited racetrack websites to develop his imagery for Tracks. According to Cohan, all the tracks are represented to an approximate scale of 17 inches = 1 kilometer. The racetrack circuits are layered according to a particular season of races. The resulting mysterious tangle of lines evokes a knot gone awry or a pile of unwound paper clips. Peaks includes ethereal 24 color/layer screen prints. Cohan, who grew up in the Cascade
William Willis, House with Stones, 2005, mixed media on paper, 6.5’’. x 8.5’’. Courtesy of artist and Hemphill Fine Arts.
Steve Cushner’s new paintings offer a revelatory and engaging experience for the viewer. The large format canvases convey Cushner’s unique visual language, rich in a vocabulary of pattern, color, symmetry, and repetition. Through this vernacular, he is able to perfect a balance between fleeting gestures and concrete forms. In his new body of work, Cushner experiments with new applications of color and metamorphoses geometric forms into more robust, undulating and fluid patterns. The result is an energetic exhibition that invites the audience to join Cushner on an emotional and EXHIBITIONS
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EXHIBITIONS
physical journey. It is during the process of drawing, meanwhile, that William Willis feels most liberated and impassioned. His works on paper are imbued with the same freshness and spontaneity found in all of his drawings. They are a continuation of the works on paper presented in 2004 and reflect the inspiration he has found in artists such as Giorgio Morandi and Pablo Picasso. The notion of art as a continuous journey with no final destination is evident in these pieces as Willis experiments with and repeatedly refines forms and patterns.
Susan Jamison & Susana Raab Irvine Contemporary Washington, DC [through Apri 24]
Kama Sutra manuscript paintings, Jamison composes startlingly original female figures adorned with vibrant pink embroidery patterns and heads exposed with early medical illustrations. Her imagined characters, male and female, are are often surrounded by symbolic and sympathetic birds, animals, butterflies, insects, and domestic objects that reference culturally familiar stories and images. In Jamison’s words, the animals, plants, and objects are carefully chosen for their symbolic meanings and give the Snow White-like female figures a contemporary, feminist point of view. Also on display is Susana Raab’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, American Vernacular. It will feature a selection of the artist’s photographs that represent her distinctive approach to capturing the often overlooked places, people, and events in daily American life.
appropriate manipulate duplicate Gallery Joe Philadephia [through April 24]
by artists into the development of their artwork. Whether gathering data from the internet or writing complex software, they are experimenting and mastering this versatile tool. This exhibition features five artists who use digital technology in the development of their artwork. William Betts gathers source material from surveillance cameras, then, using an automated system he developed he recreates thousands of pixels to replicate the images on mirrors. Gil Kerlin uses targeted searches on Google to mine hundreds of digital images that he then culls, resizes, and organizes to create a kind of visual compendium. Ati Maier digitally animates her drawings incorporating a sound track of her own music. Andrew Millner draws images of plants and trees with a stylus and graphics tablet, using digital images shot from different perspectives as reference material. Eva Wylie explores the nature of the connectivity of the Web, developing imagery which she then silk screens directly on a wall in the gallery.
Lance Letscher Eight Modern Santa Fe
[through May 15]
Susan Jamison, Doe in Heat, 2010, egg tempera on panel, 36 ’’ x 36’’. Courtesy of Irvine Contemporary.
Working with egg tempera on panel, Susan Jamison reflects on many traditions of imagery to create dreamlike portraits and figures that question gender conventions. Like dream images and memories, the paintings traverse the realms of desires, fantasies, and myths, while maintaining a playful innocence. Reflecting back on sources like fairy tales, Renaissance portraiture, botanical illustration, Persian miniatures, and
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William Betts, 03-08-2006 18:07:21, 2009, acrylic paint on mirror acrylic, 11.25 ’’ x 15’’.
Departing from the gallery’s regular program, this show s one in series of four exhibitions at the gallery curated to run concurrently with Philagrafika 2010, a citywide event in Philadelphia celebrating print-making. Computers have increasingly been incorporated
Lance Letscher, Day and Night, collage, 22.25’’ x 35.25’’.
Lance Letscher harvests defaced textbooks, children’s readers, vintage album covers, magazine clippings, handwritten notes, recipe cards, business
EXHIBITIONS
ledgers, and other bits of found paper from closeout bins, yard sales, and the dumpster behind a nearby used book and record store in his native Austin. In his studio, the artist winnows through and organizes these odds and ends, cuts them into strips and shapes and then pieces together the scraps of paper into remarkable collages. Letscher’s works are largely abstract and characterized by dense texture, color and pattern. They are rich and vigorous and compellingly complex. The formal appeal of the work is enriched by the memories and emotional associations evoked by the artist’s raw materials. Fragmented illustrations and dissected words and phrases hint at potential narratives. The works in this latest exhibition,The Perfect Machine, reflect his shift to a «storybook perspective.» Letscher’s colorful and dazzling abstractions have expanded to include more recognizable forms and childhood imagery, coinciding with the publication of a children’s book about invention that he wrote and illustrated.
Jumble Richard Levy Albuquerque [through May 14]
This show includes a sampling of the wide range of printmaking processes being utilized today. It features an an eclectic mix of editions by some of the most influential contemporary artists of the twenty-first century.World-renowned German photographer, Thomas Ruff, uses appropriated mathematic and physics renderings to produce his most recent series of pigment prints, Zycles. Matt Mullican put himself into a trance before composing a portfolio of etchings, Eight Dead Two’s. Alex Katz silkscreens on cut aluminum to
presents an installation of large black boxes, filled with charcoal and quilled black paper. She expands upon the ideas of Cicero’s writing about the relationship between God-created nature and the creations of humanity. The emphasis on this “third nature” is on Man creating in his own image, of conceiving, ruling and controlling nature.
Ed Ruscha, Cold Beer Beautiful Girls, 2009, three color lithograph hand colored Coventry Rag, 40.75 ’’ x 31’’. Richard Levy Gallery.
create his editioned sculpture, Sunny, a bright faced hairy dog. Rings, a glossy silkscreen print by Sara Morris is inspired by architecture and urban environments. Thorsten Brinkmann uses discarded urban materials to mask his identity in his classical photographic self-portraits. Works by Richard Serra, John Baldessari, and Ed Ruscha will also be exhibited.
Lauren Fensterstock Walker Contemporary Boston [through April 30]
For Laura Fensterstock, the act of making art is more a byproduct of her research. A self-proclaimed researchhistorian, she spends hours pouring over historical texts. Whatever title you want to give her, Fensterstock is undeniably an artist. Working in the past with ruby and diamond encrusted rotten potatoes and silver cherries, she creates a visual language that forces us to both look and see differently. For this exhibition, she
Lauren Fensterstock, An Arrangement of Hydrangeas, paper & charcoal under glass, 60 ’’ x 36’’. Courtesy of Walker Contemporary.
Fensterstock is completely seduced by this idea and pushes the definition even further. She doesn’t take actual natural objects or a natural landscape and alter them. She makes her own nature; flowers & grass made from black-quilled paper and charcoal in place of soil. Although her environments appear to thrive, the lack of color and absence of real living matter becomes unnerving, causing the viewer to ask if these landscapes are truly thriving or symbolic of a grim future. EXHIBITIONS
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EXHIBITIONS
Julia Mangold & Donald Judd Elizabeth Leach Portland [through May 1]
Michael Abrams Emily Amy Atlanta
Brett Smith Sandler Hudson Atlanta
[through May 5]
[through May 15]
Michael Abrams, Lighter Windham, oil on panel, 14’’ x 11’’. Courtesy of Emily Amy Gallery.
Brett Smith, 15 seconds, 2009, spray paint on paper, 15’’ x 11’’.
The setting of Michael Abrams’ childhood affected the artist more than he realized at the time. Growing up in Rensselear County in upstate New York, Abrams’ bedroom window gave him a view of Hudson River Valley that would become deeply engrained in his subconscious and that has since become the predominant subject of his work. His landscapes are loosely based on these Hudson River Valley vistas he remembers but are also partially fabricated in his imagination. The combination makes for atmospheric, luminescent, and ethereal paintings created from layering glazes from semitransparent to opaque. The result is a beautifully rendered edenic nature of Abrams’ own personal invention.
To go along with his show, Brett Smith conducted an interactive conceptual performance piece during the opening reception of his exhibition entitled, 15 Seconds. Based on Andy Warhol’s notion of everyone having their 15 minutes of fame, and on the instantaneous nature of a technology-based society, Smith used viewer participation, in order to determine if a work of art could be created in 15 seconds, a shortened version of Warhol’s construct. The performance included forty people, who used florescent spray paint in combination with a black light, so that at night only their work will be seen. Facebook was also integrated into the experience to give each participant their 15 minutes, in reward for their 15 seconds. Smith feels that this performance piece will lead the viewer “to understand conceptual art as well as the importance of accident in abstract expressionism.”
Julia Mangold, New Work, installation view, 2010. Photo credit: Dan Kvitka. Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland.
Julia Mangold’s austere wax and graphite-coated sculptures are fundamentally experiential. Presented in a subdued palette of black and grey, the softness of the wax surfaces contrasts dramatically with the hard, rectilinear forms, at once seducing the viewer, and provoking rigorous consideration of the formal qualities of the objects. The works’ precise placement, both in the room, and in relationship to one another, creates a palpable tension. Attention is drawn to the architecture of the gallery, as well as one’s own, often overlooked, physical relationship to other objects in space. These volumes are accompanied by a group of related graphite and wax drawings on paper and board. Donald Judd was a seminal Minimalist sculptor, known for his total commitment to formal exploration as well as his intensity of color and the sensuousness of his surfaces. Though originally a painter, Judd made extremely little two-dimensional work. This exhibition of prints from the 1960s offers an extremely rare opportunity to catch a glimpse of this lesser-known aspect of his practice.
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ACAMagazine.com Follow us on Facebook: American Contemporary Art
Spring Brings Great New Art to the Nation’s Capital BY F. LENNOX CAMPELLO Spring generally brings to the Greater Washington, DC area hundreds of thousands of tourists seeking the beauty of the famous cherry blossoms along the shores of the Potomac. It also delivers one of the highest pollen counts in the nation, packed museums and long lines outside nearly every tourist attraction in the city. Spring also brings new shows to the area’s many art galleries, and this season has also brought the surprise of several new galleries which are already making a noticeable impression on the area’s art scene. Located in the architectural award-winning gallery space at 625-27 E Street, NW which had been empty for years and formerly housed another gallery, “a pop up project” made its debut this spring with a powerful group show titled “I Dream Awake”, which runs through May 28. Curated by the gallery’s effervescent young owner, Amy Morton, the show explores original artistic expressions of awakened realities and unconscious dreams. Exhibition includes New York artists, Mikel Glass, Kenichi Hoshine and Margaret Bowland; Los Angeles artists Vonn Sumner and Susan Burnstine; and DC artists Rosemary Feit Covey, Laurel Hausler, Lizzie Newton and Tim Tate. The two large pastels by Margaret Bowland (whose work was a finalist for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and is currently also on display at the National Portrait Gallery) dominated the show. Bowland’s works show not only a remarkable technical facility made even more remarkable by
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Margaret Bowland, Thorny Crown,charcoal & pastel on rag paper, 60’’ x 48’’.
the sheer scale of her works, but also an enviable mastery of a deep psychological agenda that she delivers with pinpoint precision. The Fridge DC is not just an art gallery, but also a performance space, music venue and classroom located on Barracks Row (Rear Alley, 516 8th St SE) in the historic Eastern Market neighborhood. The space opened last
fall and has already become a destination for the area’s art aficionados. May brings” Perception Altar,” a solo show by Jeramie Bellmay. In Brentwood, just over the District line with Maryland at 3901 Rhode Island Avenue, the brand new Gateway Arts Center opened to a packed reception in March, and brings an attractive exhibition space, as well as
artists’ studios and classrooms. In the District itself, Conner Contemporary moved to a new location (1358 Florida Ave, NE) and offers Mary Coble’s third solo exhibition (May 15 – July 3). Titled “Source,” Coble will present three new videos, mixed media work, and a live endurance performance (to occur in the gallery courtyard during the exhibition opening ). In all of these pieces, Coble addresses themes of purification and renewal in endurancebased actions focused on the element of water. The exhibition demonstrates the depth and dimension of Coble’s art, which ranges from personal introspection to experience shared through public interaction.
Barnaby Whitfield, “Don’t Be Scared; You’re Supposed to Be.” This exhibition, which opens May 1st, presents works that have developed from an ongoing creative dialog between these two New York-based painters.
Covey, who is slowly but surely bringing the traditional genre of printmaking to new frontiers, exhibited a sexuallycharged show of light boxes and peep boxes titled “Peep Show” which married her exceptional printmaking skills with the display schemes of a pornographer’s darkroom. Fierce Sonia, a well-known local art model, has over the years been picking up a photographic thread where she uses her own body to capture exceptional images that blur the line between nude photography and the mind of the voyeur. Through May 3rd. Finally, in neighboring Bethesda, Gallery Neptune has a three-person show in May: Joan Belmar, Cameron Petke and Jared Ragland. All three artists favor a straight forward intimacy in their work created with transparent acetate, porcelain clay or Polaroid photographs. Look for Belmar’s work to stand out. Andrea Luria, Roseate Spoonbill, oil on linen, 60’’ x 72’’. Courtesy of Cross MacKenzie. His work alternates between paintings on paper to structured acrylic paintings In Georgetown, Cross Mac- using Mylar and acetate which create Kenzie (1054 31st Street, NW) offers optical illusions as you pass in front of the large-scale paintings of California each 855 INcA St.work. DENvER cO 80204 artist Andrea Luria, in an exhibition 720 935 2596 titled “Big Birds.” Widely shown on the www.DARLENEKUHNEARt.cOm west coast, this will be Luria’s first show in the DC area. The opening reception is May 21st. Also in Georgetown, at Addison Ripley (1670 Wisconsin Ave, NW), where the recent solo show by District favorite Amy Lin received rave reviews and sales, and continued Lin’s love affair with the DC art world, do not miss Dan Treado’s solo show in May. Across the river in Old Town Alexandria, the Art League’s (105 N. Union Street) recent shows by printmaker Rosemary Feit Covey and photographer Fierce Sonia seemed to mark a new departure point for one of Joan Belmar, Alchemy XI, acrylic and ink on canvas. Courtesy of Neptune Gallery. the area’s most traditional spaces. Feit
DARLENE KUHNE
Barnaby Whitfield, Bird Girl, 2010, pastel on paper, 40’’ X 33’’. Courtesy of Irvine Contemporary.
Also in the District, Irvine Contemporary (1412 14th St, NW) will have collaborative exhibition of new paintings by Aaron Johnson and
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Contemporary Painting , Sculpture & Photography
“Arcadia”, mixed media on canvas on panel, 72” x 61”, 2009
ERIK GONZALES 1280 Iron Horse Drive
Park City, UT
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alifornia ontemporary
APRIL 2010
ART
Schoening @ Blythe Projects
Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia
By Deborah Calderwood April 24 - May 23, 2010
207 W. 5th Street Los Angeles, CA 90013 CB��Gallery�Hours��Wednesday���Sunday��noon�����p�m� Clyde�Beswick��Gallery�Director www�cb�gallery�com ������������ gallery�cb�gallery�com Deborah�Calderwood��age���
ANAJUWA GALLERY CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART 8360 Melrose Avenue, Suite 106 CA 90069 Tel: 310.210.3024 www.anajuwagallery.com anajuwagallery@gmail.com
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CALIFORNIA NEWS
Blythe Projects: A New Gallery in Culver City Under the gales of January’s El Nino greatest inspirations traveling paths rains, Culver City welcomed their that weave between the spiritual and newest gallery, Blythe Projects and material worlds. “I revel in works that director, Hillary Metz. are beautiful, curious and sometimes Shaped by her formal strange. I welcome having an artwork museum training and two gallery directorships, fueled by her passion for painting, community and rock & roll, Metz founded Blythe Projects as a freewheeling hybrid of painters, designers, filmmakers and musicians. “I believe you have to learn ‘the rules’ and work within ‘the rules’ before you can successfully work beyond them,” she says. “Moving to Los Angeles was an experiment,” Metz recalls. “I left my directorship with a prominent gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico to shake things up…to expand my art field, really. At the time, I didn’t realize I had signed on for such an incredible ride!” Preferring to work deeply with a small group of artists, rather than juggle a hectic rotation of exhibitions, Metz has a thoughtful schedule planned for 2010. Hillary Metz, Blythe Projects. Each exhibition, on view for 8 to 10 weeks, will be complemented by interactive events, knock the wind out of me, but I choose lectures, and receptions. Aligning with to exhibit works that offer a slow trip her community spirit, Metz keeps her down the rabbit hole. Whether it be in program approachable and accessible. the art world or the world-at-large, I “It’s all about maintaining a balance seek out meaning and connection, not of demystifying and mystifying,” she simply information or commentary. muses. The artists I work with combine the Metz and her artists find their representational and abstract, creating
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a new imagery that stirs the unconscious. They live in big, beautiful worlds and really explore their capacities for being human…a truly wild task in today’s environment.” Blythe Projects focuses on mid-career artists, but Metz also lends support to emerging artists and serves on the MOCA Contemporaries Board and the Los Angeles Art Association Advisory Board. Her Inaugural show will introduce Cloudcuckooland by mixed media painter and sculptor, Mark Schoening. Cloudcuckooland is an unrealistic state where everything is seemingly perfect; yet the truth remains…instability and chaos have become the 21st century norm. Schoening’s palette of neons and metallics, layered and encased in resin, capture ‘information explosions’ and reflect the world we have created for ourselves: a world where on must remain partially unaware of reality in order to exist.
Blythe Projects is located at 5797 West Washington Boulevard in Culver City. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11am to 6pm and by appointment. Cloudcuckooland, new paintings and sculptures by Mark Schoening will be on view March 11th through May 1st. For more information call (310) 9903501 or visit blytheprojects.net.
CALIFORNIA NEWS
Martha Otero Charts Her Own Course
Martha Otero. Photographs by Roger Snider.
Martha Otero exhibition space: works by Damien Hirst, Luis Gispert, and Konstantin Bojanov.
Los Angeles art gallery Otero Plassart has changed ownership. Art dealer Martha Otero, formerly the director and co-owner of the gallery alongside entrepreneur Melanie Plassart, will now be the gallery’s sole owner and Director. The gallery will continue doing business as a new entity aptly titled, Martha Otero, and will remain at its current location. Martha brings a wealth of experience in the contemporary art markets to her first solo gallery venture. Before Otero Plassart, she worked as a sales consultant for Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills prior to consulting independently in the secondary market. Her breadth of knowledge of the art
business, and of the Los Angeles art markets specifically, can also be attributed to her time as the director of the Jack Hanley gallery and working for Regen Projects. Martha has also spent a significant amount of time assisting artists and organizing curatorial projects throughout Los Angeles. Before beginning her existence as a gallerist, Martha graduated from New York University with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, Film and Television. It was here that she laid the groundwork for her profession by interning with the legendary Leo Castelli gallery in New York. Her admiration of artistic talent continues to be a motivating factor in her work today.
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Martha Otero plans to continue with new exhibitions featuring artists Chris Beas, Konstantin Bojanov, Miguel Calderon, E.V. Day, Kathryn Garcia, Luis Gispert, Jacob Hashimoto, Richard Jackson, Jin Meyerson, Jose Parla, and Jeff Sonhouse.
Martha Otero is located in at 820 North Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood. The gallery will reopen on May 1st and will have the following hours: Tuesday thru Saturday from 11:00am to 5:30pm and by appointment. For more information, call (323) 951-1068 or visit marthaotero.com.
April 3 - May 15, 2010
LORA SCHLESINGER GALLERY 2 5 2 5 M I C H I G A N A V E T 3 S A N TA M O N I C A C A 9 0 4 0 4 3 1 0 8 2 8 - 1 1 3 3 GALLERY@ LORASCHLESINGER. COM WWW. LORASCHLESINGER. COM
EXHIBITIONS
John Jurayj5 Prospect & CharlesAve. LaBelle returning them to a vertical position White Plains, NY 10607 Walter Maciel Los Angeles and 287 inverting Tel: 914 287 0303 Fax: 914 7305 them into photographic [through May 15]
Untitled (Undead), a new set of projects by John Jurayj, continues his exploration of the aftermath and destruction created by the Lebanese Civil War. The series consists of life-size interpretations of dead bodies silkscreened onto polish stainless steel with ink and gunpowder taking cues from an earlier series, 15 Untitled Men.
Margaret Bowland, Thorny Crown.
negatives. Charles LaBelle will present a significant new group of over thirty drawings from his ongoing project, Buildings Entered. Begun in September 1997, the project documents every building the artist has physically entered since the start date.Part diary, part historical document, the project archive currently lists over twelve thousand buildings, with additional locations added almost daily. By foregrounding the act of “entering” these buildings, LaBelle’s project engages a broader, phenomenological framework: one that investigates the relationship between architecture and the body, between urban space and the construction of the subject. The buildings, with their dates andwww.donnachambersdesigns.com times, can be seen as a “body of evidence” and, individually, the scenes of various, untold, “crimes.”
Frederick Fisher Edward Cella Los Angeles [through May 22]
John Jurayj, Untitled (Undead), installation view.
Using photos of dead bodies appropriated from journalistic sources, Jurayj attempts to enliven the mortality of each victim through the disposition of imagery and the process of making the image. Jurayj attempts to free each casualty from his or her constraint by
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This exhibition of new and recent watercolors explores the form-making process and composition strategies that renowned West Coast architect Frederick Fisher employs when envisioning and creating proposals for a wide variety of potential architectural commissions. Surprisingly, this is Fisher’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and is the gallery’s first solo exhibition for an architect. Entitled “Frederick Fisher: Thinking by Hand, his work includes a variety of imagined public and private spaces through a series of elemental and geographic watercolors, exploring exciting and novel living/working spaces that connect art with nature.
In other works in the series, Fisher reevaluates the traditional museum structure by investigating the recycling and transformation of abandoned office buildings and industrial facilities into potential museums, inserting this repurposing into the process of urban growth and decay.
Frederick Fisher, Wells, 2010, watercolor and graphite on paper, 12.2’’ x 9’’.
Neha Choski Carl Berg Projects West Hollywood [through May 7]
Neha Choksi, Anesthetizing Black Goat (Bodies are just tragic), 2009-2010, mixed media & archival pigment print on paper, framed size,17’’ x 26’’.
Combining video installations with related drawings, paintings, and photographs, this new exhibition by
EXHIBITIONS
Neha Choksi is a follow-up to her successful exhibitions in India. It is also her first solo show in the US in five years. Continuing her long-standing use of absurd and traumatic as poetic devises, she unpacks the foundations of existence. In her videos, largely unscripted performances form the basis to explore presence as created by absence. Minds to Lose, a sixchannel video work, exploits the handheld home-video format to create a forced familial commonality between humans and animals as they submit to anesthesia and the subsequent loss of consciousness. They are paired with a series of small-format drawings that sketch the absented personality of the sedated creatures, human and animal. Leaf Fall, meanwhile, records a single day’s work of stripping a rural peepul tree of all its leaves, save an autumnal sprig at the tip of a single high branch. This lyrical sunrise-to-sunset look at a process of laying bare, of stripping away everything until the ordinary is made singular, is a picture of severe loss as a starting point for life’s renewal.
Axis Mundi CB1 Los Angeles [through April 18]
Appearing in many forms around the globe, the Axis Mundi takes shape in unique ways in the work of the three artists. Timothy Nolan explores and interprets fundamental patterns, geometry, and systems of order that occur naturally and unnaturally. While nearly everything we experience today is digitized, each convergence of shapes echoes back thousands of years through multiple iterations, revealing the building blocks of life and civilization. In Jaime Scholnick’s current series of
works on unadulterated Styrofoam, the artist plays with the hierarchical roles assigned to material goods, elevating a precisely machined material, formerly protection for a more significant object, into that which is now prized.
and cataloguing discarded, unsolicited portfolios. Levine has assembled this material to analyze cultural waste in a tangible way, while also displaying human-scaled statistics in an industry where everyone is trying to be discovered.
DARLENE KUHNE
Jaime Scholnick, In All Ion, 2010, sytrofoam, gesso and acrylic paint, 168’’ x 48’’ x 48’’.
David Levine, Hopeful, 2010.
855 INcA St. DENvER cO 80204
The drawings of Osvaldo Trujillo are Los Angeles is the mecca of the 720 935 2596 mysteries, begun with a vision during American dream, where actors migrate www.DARLENEKUHNEARt.cOm a dream and elaborated upon by the to reach their success, yet ninety-nine artist, adding details that bring the percent of the estimated twenty-five image into focus for both the artist and thousand headshots submitted to talent the viewer. Structures of all kinds are agencies weekly are routinely thrown the recurring subject in the work, some out. The number of those few who are architectural or anatomical or other succeed is minute when compared to the broader systems—underlying forms millions who try and fail. The images of of this world expressed in images of this exhibition all differ in proportion, another. pose and appearance, but collectively contain the same underlying desire to David Levine succeed. Ironically, Levine offers the François Ghebaly Los Angeles actors the access to voyeurism that they [through April 25] strive for, exposing the conventions and pretensions of creative professions “Hopeful”, a project by New York-born across the cultural field. and Berlin-based artist David Levine, is the result of several years of collecting EXHIBITIONS
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EXHIBITIONS
Rowan Wood Steve Turner Los Angeles [through May 22]
exemptions to the rules. Nevertheless, these boundaries present the possibility of control over expression while predetermining elements that affect the experience of the work. Wood explores the use of control and manipulation in an attempt to evoke different, new, or undefined experiences.
both conflict and collaboration, while his formal experimentation finds its psychological analogues in the blurring of beauty and grotesquerie, nostalgia and critique. This conflation of high and low awakens the mind and eye to the possibility of intense aesthetic potential in the suburban environment.
Robert Melee David Kordansky Los Angeles
Lisi Raskin The Company Los Angeles
[through April 17]
[through June 19]
Rowan Wood, Bubble Solution 08 and 09, 2010, oil on linen, 36’’ x 36’’. Robert Melee, installation view.
The boundaries of visual language and the varieties of experience that art provokes are central concerns running throughout Rowan Wood’s work. In his series titled Copy, Wood investigates the use of simple mark-making in an attempt to communicate without relying on familiar or pre-conceived forms. His Cage series paintings are statements on the limitations of human thought and the role words play in human life. Wood’s newest work will be featured in For the Benefit of Humanity, and in it, he has concentrated on several standard categories of expression within the discipline of painting. This body of work consists of a single visual message that is repeated in a spectrum of shifting compositions and protean categories, including autobiographical/ psychological; formalism; and pop art. Defining the values of a visual symbol that result in it falling under one category or another is fraught with problems and
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New works by Robert Melee transform elements of modernist and classical formalism into the building blocks for his own irreverent, kitsch-filled language. Melee has always sought to relocate the formal debates of the Western art historical tradition in the psychological realm of the suburban home, and he situates his practice in a place where high and low not only interact but crosspollinate. After working on short films almost exclusively for a period in the 1990s, Melee shifted toward making physical works that work encompass, abstractly, the same issues he tackled in the films: class, obsessive, behaviors, nostalgia, and humor. In this new work, he uses of beer bottle caps – found objects that accumulate as a result of drinking – as both a formal gesture and a sociological one. Melee’s paintings can also be seen as sites where urban and suburban attitudes enter into
Lisi Raskin, Container, 2009, collaged paper, archival adhesive, graphite, acrylic paint, 28’’ x 22’’.
Lisi Raskin’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Mt. Disappointment, makes use of the main gallery and garage to create a immersive play environment that the artist has staged. Over the past ten years, Raskin has explored the nuclear-powered sublime on a first hand basis and used her findings in the field to develop artwork. This show’s narrative begins in the garage where Raskin has installed a large collage to serve as a stand-in for the incoming bomber threat that the Nike/Hercules2 missile program was designed to thwart. In
EXHIBITIONS
response to this bomber collage, Raskin constructs a crude replica of a Browning M2 machine gun, a versatile, firearm usually mounted to tanks. However, in this case, Raskin has mounted the machine gun to a sculpture instead. Over the course of the exhibition, the garage space will also be the site for various performances that Raskin will stage. In the main gallery space, Raskin retrofits an architectural gesture/framing device for various smaller scale collages that both describe the Nike/Hercules sites that she visited on her research trip and use abstraction to loosen the semantic attachment to the nature of the sites, bringing to the foreground ideas of form, composition, color and geometric abstraction.
Kohei Yoshiyuki M+B West Hollywood [through April 24]
early seventies. Yoshiyuki first came upon this hidden sexual underworld while photographing skyscrapers in front of Chuo Park in Shinjuku. There, he witnesses a couple having sex and quickly discovered an entire subculture of young lovers – and their peepers. Returning with an inconspicuous 35 camera, a filtered flash, and infrared film, he documented these coupling and the spectators lurking in the bushes. The combination between sexual acts, which avoid graphic depiction, and the voyeurs, all immersed in the nightscape, provide a complicated, dense tableaux. On top of this, the snapshotlike quality of these images implicated the photographer, viewer, and subject, making for both intriguing and poignant work. In addition to the Park collection, the exhibition also includes work from Yoshiyuki’s Love Hotel, a group of video stills pulled from un-erased videotapes made at hotels famous for prostitution.
Sarah Rossiter & Dorsey Dunn den contemporary West Hollywood [through April 30]
Kohei Yoshiyuki, Untitled, 1971, From the series The Park, gelatin silver print. © Kohei Yoshiyuki. Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, and M+B Gallery, Los Angeles.
First exhibited in 1979 at Komai Gallery in Tokyo, Kohei Yoshiuki’s The Park captured couples meeting for clandestine trysts in the park. A public uproar surrounded the show, and it was moved from public viewing for the next 28 years. This West Coast premiere of the recently unearthed exhibition presents a series of black and white photographs shot in three Tokyo parks in the the
Working together for the first time. Sarah Rossiter and Dorsey Dunn present a large-scale installation of sound and image, Illuminating Devices, that transforms the gallery into an elevated, floating landscape. The installation consists of a 36-channel sound field by Dorsey Dunn and multiple largescale photographic murals by Sarah Rossiter, with additional smaller works also on display. Expansive floor-toceiling photographs that share a low and continuous horizon line create a panorama that places the viewer in an unexpected observatory. The sound
field take the shape of an outstretched bird wing, with custom-designed speakers arranged in long strands throughout nearly 3,500 square feet. Via this sculptural array, rhythmic, selfgenerating tone structures sonically unfurl in the gallery.
Illuminating Devices: Dorsey Dunn, Illuminating Devices (Garden), 2010, custom 34-channel sound installation with speakers and software, and Sarah Rossiter, Illuminating Devices (Horizon), 2010, color photograph on fabric, 108’’ x 444’’. Photo: Courtesy of den contemporary art, Los Angeles.
lluminating Devices opens up an imagined audiovisual arboretum that is outside of time: the piece is visually mixed and hourless, and the accompanying soundscape continues to wander and develop itself endlessly – just as the photographic horizon implies an extent far beyond the confines of the walls. The work provides an intensely immersive experience.
Kelly Reemtsen Skidmore Santa Monica [through May 15]
“I’m not falling for you” is Los Angeles artist Kelly Reemtsen’s first one-person show in LA in four years. Her paintings explore the role of the modern woman in contemporary society and focus on the contrast between how a woman views herself as opposed to how she is viewed by others. Some of Reemtsen’s paintings depict women clothed in EXHIBITIONS
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vintage party dresses. Though the artist makes no overt allusions to film or television, one can’t look at Reemtsen’s paintings without thinking of classic television icons of femininity from the 50’s and 60’s in bright, sumptuous dresses.
images published in 1962 by the Soviet Union. Many of the source photos originally came from U.S.S.R. propaganda tracts written in German and aimed at Eastern Bloc audiences to promote and celebrate its achievements and influence. In 1962, the Soviet Union reached its greatest extension of territorial control and morale of its people was high, having just sent the first man into space the previous year.
Downtown L.A. will be featured in the East Gallery. After years in Italy, Matsuno returned to Los Angeles and revisited the streets of Downtown L.A. Fascinated with the city’s history, architecture and life, Matsuno began to photograph the graffiti facades of the many buildings that were once lived in or part of a bustling company, now abandoned and decayed. Searching for new ways of resurrecting these old buildings, he has taken his photographs and turned them into three-dimensional clay reliefs, a historical documentation of what was once but now is gone.
Lawrence Yun Sarah Lee Santa Monica [through May 15] Kelly Reemtsen, I’m not falling for you, 2010, oil on panel, 36’’ x 36’’. Skidmore Contemporary Art.
Despite the seeming optimism, a dark undertone is conveyed by the presence of an ambiguous tool in her hands, ones commonly associated with masculinity: a coiled hose, a pair of bolt cutters, a chain saw, a pair of lawn shears, a crow bar. Contrasted with her attire and jewels, the tools holds more than a hint of menace. The tools, though, can also be seen as symbols of feminine empowerment, the women ‘doing it all.’ The titles like “The load I carry” affirm the dark humor of the work. Reemtsen’s luscious, thick paint, meanwhile, push the confectionary quality to the point of dark humor as well as perhaps tempting the view to taste the paint.
Lawrence Gipe & Jeff Matsuno Lora Schlesinger Santa Monica [through May 15]
Lawrence Gipe’s latest paintings and drawings are derived from photographic
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Jeff Matsuno, Fire Escape (detail), 2010, mixed media, 30’’ x 40’’ x 5’’. Lora Schlesinger Gallery.
Lawrence Gipe, No. 11 from 1962 (Factory), 2010, oil on canvas, 33.5’’ x 53’’. Lora Schlesinger Gallery.
What intrigues Gipe about the year 1962 is how a totalitarian power decided to portray itself through a self generated photographic record. Choosing a variety of genres – bucolic and industrial landscapes, portraiture and magazine journalism – Gipe re-presents them as paintings and drawings, creating a new, critical context for the images. Jeff Matsuno’s urban themed wall reliefs depicting
Lawrence Yun, Palm in Bond (Green Berries II), 2010, watercolor on paper, 13’’ x 13’’.
Lawrence Yun’s latest watercolor series “Hybrid Romance” delivers a seemingly natural, yet imaginative oddity beneath the surface aesthetic of his meticulously orchestrated floral compositions. In the style of realism, Yun focuses on the manipulation and manufacturing of nursery culture as both artificial and natural hybridizations between man and earth. These paintings represent an observation of universal technological and evolutionary living patterns, which
EXHIBITIONS
appear as genetically-modified and biologically-enhanced experiments practiced throughout all aspects of life—a “miracle grow” sensation that is beyond real. The paintings are meant to be aesthetically pleasing, yet the deliberate awkwardness of the structured subject matter conveys subtle messages that trigger the audience to question the imagery. Yun is aware of art historical precedents and accordingly tries to depart from the tradition with a modern interpretation.
Charles Garabedian L.A. Louver Venice [through May 8]
portrays Eve defenseless and open, with arms raised above her head, while Adam has an exasperated pose, presenting an oppositional balance with a central tree dividing the composition. The largest painting in the exhibition Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City), 2009, harkens to the opera of the same title by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. It presents an accumulation of imagery in foreshortened space: a panoply of architecture derived from different cultures and ages, trucks and cars (one on fire), and an image of three dancing figures through a window that references Matisse’s great 1910 painting La Danse. In his indefinable and singular manner, Garabedian addresses the human condition with lightness of touch and in disarming fashion.
Jeffrey Gibson & Steve Hough Arin Contemporary Laguna Beach [through May 30]
Charles Garabedian, Hippolyta, 2009, acrylic on paper, 48’’ x 44.25’’.
Diversity of form and image is the hallmark of Charles Garabedian’s idiosyncratic paintings, a dozen of which are presented at this exhibition of new work. Mythology and reality intermingle, time collapses, and surreal imagery is born. His lively compositions, both raw and whimsical, belie the serious content of the conveyed narrative. Painting in vibrant colors in acrylic on canvas or paper, Garabedian continues to mine literary and mythological sources for his inspiration. Adam and Eve, 2009,
Towering over the gallery is Jeffrey Gibson’s 7’ x 10’ painting, Submerge (2007), accompanied by many smaller, recent collaged works on paper. In this painting, Gibson layers seemingly endless amounts of oil and spray paint onto the oversized canvas, juxtaposing a brilliant neon color pallet with an omnipresent black cloud. These layers are equally dynamic and symphonic, intensively and intentionally enveloping the entire space of the canvas. Although nonrepresentational, the graffitilike drips of spray paint mixed with the precision of his brushstrokes never break from continuity; its dimensions are transporting yet controlled, portentous and still lyrical. To accompany Submerge is a new series of acrylic and collage works on watercolor paper. A master of duplicity,
Steve Hough’s carved Plexiglas works defy the perceived inelasticity of their medium. Carved in monochromatic hues, they are reminiscent of a familiar sheen, eventually revealed as everyday auto paint.
Jeffrey Gibson, Submerge, 2007, oil & spray paint on canvas, 84’’x 120’’.
The soothing coats of car enamel are slick and streamlined, and never wavering from Hough’s characteristically rhythmic dimensions. Each piece exemplifies the actual pliability of its plastic medium. A shift in lighting combined with the viewer’s shadow reveal hidden complimentary colors, almost as if two or three paintings in one.
Introductions 2010 Art Zone 461 San Francisco [through May 30]
This show of new artists and their fresh works include five new oil painters, forming a cohesive and complimentary group. Jhina Alvarado works in oil and encaustic and calls herself a figurative abstract artist. Within an ethereal, ambiguous environment, she transforms individuals into anonymous “everyman”. Randy Beckelheimer documents the urban landscape, mixing luxurious color scenes with black & white pieces. Holly Downing brings thirty years of solo exhibition experience to her work, which uses mezzotinting. EXHIBITIONS
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anonymity. His highly conceptual works are alternately stark and impersonal, and seductively beautiful, yet all evoke feelings that are profoundly human.
Randy Beckelheimer, Hunter’s Point 27, 2010, oil on canvas, 72” x 96”. Courtesy of ArtZone 461.
Heidi McDowell’s paintings are contemplative and quiet. She sketches and photographs locations before painting, paying careful attention to quality of light and surface texture. Ryan Reynold creates images of the dirty industrial shore and suburban sprawl of the East Bay, documented a specific place and time fragmented by the artist’s memory and perception. [The works on Gorgon Cook, a painter who elevated household items to sublime elegance during his long run in the Bay Area, will also be presented in the Side Gallery.]
Stephen Sollins & Pard Morrison Brian Gross San Francisco [through May 1 & June 25]
In his work, Stephen Sollins transforms mundane objects into works of art, exploring ideas of family, memory, communication and non-communication in our daily lives. Sollins’ use of precious materials and re-contextualization of everyday objects forces us to reconsider the mundane. Sollins’ collages feature images of utilitarian objects, such as office chairs and filing cabinets, affixed to either blueprint paper or foil; isolated within expansive metallic fields and rigid delineated spaces, the small images conjure feelings of loneliness and
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Stephen Sollins, Detail of Nine Small Monuments, 2008-2010, 24K gold leaf and ink on hydrocal.
Colorado artist Pard Morrison’s works feature repeating blocks of solid colors, applied through an enameling process that results in surfaces durable enough to withstand permanent outdoor installation. The simplicity of form and gridded structure of his work builds on the Minimalist tradition; however, in place of the cold, quiet austerity associated with the movement, Morrison’s work boasts a bold, colorful palette, and the subtle texture of the oven-fired surfaces lends a painterly element to the rigid geometric forms. Juxtapositions of neutral and vivid colors create dynamic, rhythmic color fields that make for a unique optical experience. On view will be four new wall reliefs created specifically for the show.
Robert Hudson Patricia Sweetow San Francisco [through May 15]
Robert Hudson is celebrated as one our foremost American sculptors.
His painterly sculptures and complex constructions incorporating found objects, paintings on canvas, and works on paper, referenced not only the political environment, but also echoed his Pacific Northwest origins. For this exhibition, Robert Hudson exhibits work from the last 2 years. From modest scale, to over 5 feet, the sculptures have resolved into inventive elegance. The welded cast iron, porcelain enamel, and stainless steel sculptures offer graceful interaction of form with color and the playful spin of kinetic energy. Hudson’s pen and ink drawings mirror the strength of his sculpture, with repetitive spiraling forms that force the eye to trace their voyage on paper.
Robert Hudson, Cross Cut (detail), 2005, mixed media sculpture, 77”. x 34” x 24”.
This exhibition coincides with unveiling of a major commission of his work at One Hawthorne, a residential highrise in San Francisco. The exterior installation,145 feet tall by 12 feet wide, is a vertical mural comprised of multiple porcelain enamel panels, reproducing series of 30 x 23 inch pen and ink drawings created by Hudson for this project. Spanning 16 floors, it is located on the eastern facade of the building and is appropriately titled Landmark.
Hybrid Romance Lawrence Yun
WATERCOLOR EXHIBITION April 17 - May 22, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 17, 5-7 pm
SARAH LEE ARTWORKS & PROJECTS
Bergamot Station 2525 Michigan Avenue Unit T-1 Santa Monica CA 90404 310 829 4938
ARTISTS
MARK SCHOENING
IN HIS OWN WORDS
Mark Schoening, Untitled 15, 2010, mixed media on panel, 17’’ x 14’’.
A strong theme that has been at the forefront of my work for the last several years has been the aesthetic generated by the high-speed flash photographs that were being produced by Harold Edgerton at MIT in the 1950’s. For the first time we were given a chance to see a moment in time that had previously been impossible. Through modern technology, time was frozen. What seemed to be simple physical interactions and relationships soon resembled a series of magnificent complexity and at times ordered chaos. The paintings are constructed around a similar idea of this controlled chaos. Initial gestural marks are made and are then photographed. These marks are then recomposed in the computer using a series of self generated Auto CAD drawings that I begin to construct and deconstruct around each composition. The computer generated image is then applied directly over the
initial painting mark and the process then repeats itself. The painting mark is frozen and reinforced with a graphic structure. The final image attempts to convey the idea of an information explosion. This is achieved by the densely layering each moment between multiple coats of resin. The resin acts as a lens allowing the viewer to experience these multiple worlds simultaneously. In late 2009 after working in a strictly monochromatic palette for the previous four years, I reintroduced color into the work. A palette of neon’s and metallic distracts, attracts, and separates multiple layers within each composition. The result creates a more active range of possibilities within each viewing. This expansion in palette also pushed me to generate the paintings three dimensionally for the first time. I created a series of rules that would be followed throughout the process that would best emulate that of the creation of the paintings. Cube formations were constructed to best follow the constraints of working within the boarders of a two dimensional composition. I began stretching and manipulating spandex forms within each space to produce larger constructions. Treating the sculptural process as that of the painting allowed me to make constant and sweeping changes to the direction of each piece. I photographed the cube forms in a staged area. Each time I changing the angle and view of the form thus producing a moving image where the structure remained static and the composition within began to shift. Turning the series of photographs into a stop motion moving image, allowed
me as the artist another opportunity to view the work in a new way and continue to push the direction of the final sculptures. This result speaks of a current world where instability and chaos have become the norm. Creating a situation in which one must remain partially unaware of reality in order to exist.
Mark Schoening, Untitled 13, 2010, mixed media on panel, 16’’ x 20’’.
Mark Schoening, Sculpture Installation View, 2009, mixed media.
ARTISTS
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ARTISTS
A N T H O N Y M A S T R O M AT T E O
A PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST
Anthony Mastromatteo, detail of The American Dream, 2009, oil on linen on board, 30 ’ x 40’’.
Anthony Mastromatteo, The Superman, 2010, oil on linen on board, 30.5’’ x 27’’.
Anthony Mastromatteo’s sometimes crumpled, ragged and torn sheets are actually intricately detailed, nuanced, stunning treatises of American culture. His luscious and somewhat provocatively edgy still lives, shadowless and full of light, are paradoxically hyper-realistic. His paintings simultaneously capture contemporary thoughts, provoke analysis and pull on the viewers’ heartstrings. As high school senior – a brilliant student and first team high school soccer All-American – it was viewing of JMW Turner’s painting, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October,1834, at the Cleveland Art Museum that dramatically changed Mastromatteo’s course. With plans set in motion to study International Relations at Princeton University, Mastromatteo opted instead to study Art History. The painting was the catalyst, and in a case of serendipity, a class that covered JMW Turner was among Princeton’s
first semester offerings. The course’s examination of master paintings, including a special viewing of Vincent van Gogh’s, Self-Portrait as a Buddhist Monk, at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University would prove pivotal to his development. Mastromatteo had an epiphany: whatever it was that made van Gogh conceive of himself in that way, was something he too had in himself. The combined access and exposure to New York City museums provided an abundance for Mastromatteo to explore and embrace. It was not be until the Fall of 1996, at the Art Student’s League in New York, that 27-yearold Mastromatteo began to paint. Mastromatteo weaves his proud, noble, triumphant and sometimes sexy narratives, intending to tug at our memories and address our collective sensibility, while challenging, quite literally, our very sense of reality. In his trompe-l’oeil paintings, Mastromatteo
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painstakingly seeks and chooses the iconic, wrinkled and worn, and haphazardly tapes these found pieces of American culture, casting stunning shadows. He presents these once prized morsels, now on the verge of discarded, and persuades and teases the viewer to see an unreality as reality. Mastromatteo’s lovely come hither still-lives, washed in seductive color and form, taunt with an intensely fierce reality that belie their freedom from shadowy constraints. Bright and gleaming, Mastromatteo serves up these visually sculpted delectibles on a platter. Mastromatteo’s work begs a multitude of questions. The pop artists of the 60’ forward, vow, almost as a religion, to reinterpret and re-translate our childhood stuff into a new vision. Their re-spinning of our culture in their own image declares that American art, culture, commerce, beauty and sex are inextricably intertwined. It is in these new visions and reflections, Mastromatteo provides a bright new perspective for us to contemplate our heroes and legends – and the sweetest of innocent treats – pursuing, dissecting and thus challenging our purest of childhood memories. Ultimately, Mastromatteo’s process is one of deconstruction and reconstruction, and it is his intent to build a painting with a vision, which is at once, beautiful, intellectual and uncanny. Anthony Mastromatteo’s paintings are available from Adler & Co. Gallery in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.adlerandco.com.
ARTISTS
PETER SARKISIAN
DECONSTRUCTING THE FOUNDATIONS OF VIDEO
Peter Sarkisian, Extruded Video Engine, Large Shape 1, Version 3, 2008, vacuum formed thermal plastic and video projection, 39’’ x 40’’ x 8’’, unique in a series. Courtesy of I-20, New York.
In Extruded Video Engine, series 20072008, Peter Sarkisian imagines how video itself might look: a clinking, cartoon-like facade through which snippets of text scroll in random burst. Here the text element is derived from audio recordings in which friends and colleagues recall personally significant experiences. By transcribing these memories, dynamic events are reduced to passing references, which then function as mere information within the imaging device. In this way the Video Engine parodies the world of media, transforming real-life content into a few inconsequential bylines. An allegory for media in general, the Video Engine catches us in the act of watching TV; only here TV is not confused with narrative or storyline, rather it is the mechanism itself. To watch TV is to stare into a cartoon-like medium totally bereft of experiential
value. Intent on deconstructing his own methods and tools, Sarkisian asserts that our own collective experience, as it exists within media, has become cartoon-like as well. Sarkisian’s video engine has a contoured screen that was designed using 3D modeling software, and which was sculpted by machine from slabs of mahogany using computer-guided technology. He combined hundreds of film clips together to form cohesive images that match the contours of the shaped surfaces. Sarkisian has created a futuristic work that leans on the past at the same time: the film clips gears, pistons, and ball bearings in vivid colors are Cold War remnants that were filmed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Surplus facility in New Mexico, which granted the artist access. The final work is a vacuum-formed thermal plastic and video projection.
Peter Sarkisian is represented by I-20 in New York. For more information, visit i-20.com or petersarkisian.com.
ARTISTS
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ARTISTS
JEAN KAZANDJIAN
EXPLORING THE DEPTHS OF PERFECTION BY JOHN LAVITT
Jean Kazandjian, Spiral in Five Movements, oil on canvas, 57’’ x 45’’.
Jean Kazandjian moved to Paris in 1963 during the height of the artistic revolution of the 20th century. As a consequence of the Diaspora brought on by the Armenian genocide in Turkey, Kazandjian’s family of Armenian descent lived in Beirut, the city often referred to as the “Paris of the Middle East.” Discovering his creative voice in the real Paris, Kazandjian’s paintings evolved in an ongoing engagement to transcend the boundaries of perception. This evolution has continued in a multitude of dimensions since the artist moved to Santa Monica, California in 2000. The selection of works in the two-part exhibition at Galerie Anais
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Jean Kazandjian, Woman Walking in a Garden, oil on canvas, 57’’ x 45’’.
emphasizes the multiple layers of Kazandjian’s work, ranging from the three-dimensional screen paintings to playful interpretations of American popular culture. Not tied to a single form of expression or a dominant art movement, Jean Kazandjian embraced the freedom of his own visual journey while living in Paris. Since moving to Southern California, the interplay of surrealism and popular cultural has become an ongoing part of his work. As Kazandjian so clearly expresses in his own words: “Perpetually, like Sisyphus, I embark on a quest for an ultimate, but even more elusive reality, yet each time I draw near, it appears slightly different
to me.” Unlike Sisyphus and the despair of forever rolling the rock up the hill in Hades only to have it tumble back down before ever reaching the top, Kazandjian’s vibrant paintings are characterized by both a wondrous sense of play and an ongoing investigation of shadows and depth, dimensions and movement. By painting in oil, Kazandjian embraces a dynamic rhythm in his work that leaves a lasting visual sensation of spontaneity. The play of infinite variation becomes a quest with the living traditions of modern painting. Rather than be defined by any specific movement, each painting is a separate part of his ongoing visual quest.
ARTISTS
JEAN KAZANDJIAN
Jean Kazandjian, Sequences -Seated Woman - Nine Rectangles, oil on canvas, 36’’ x 28’’.
In Venus in Disneyland, the largest painting in the first show at Galerie Anais, Kazandjian mixes the classical sensuality of the European reclining nude with silhouettes of Mickey Mouse, the ultimate image of American popular culture. With a playful expression, a modern Olympia beholds the consumer kitsch of the new world. As Kazandjian once said, “My work constantly rouses and goads the demons of illusion and absurdity.” In his screen paintings, Kazandjian creates an intriguing depth through the interaction of shadows and silhouettes. The images on the screen often hide parts of images underneath while at the same time revealing a
Jean Kazandjian, Sequences - Freeway, oil on canvas, 60’’ x 48’’.
new aspect of the painting. As one image is revealed another vanishes in a sequence of rhythmic visual movement. The repetition of images in the Screen Paintings is about recording the fleeting moments that are passing away. In the first exhibit at Galerie Anais, the Screen Paintings foster an aesthetic experience where the revealed and the unseen interact to unveil a realm of infinite possibilities. Kazandjian illuminates the evolution of the process: “Things don’t have to appear immediately. I want to show a part of it so someone can discover the rest.” The exploring of such a threedimensional interplay creates a visual dynamism that is reminiscent of film.
The screen paintings use the kinetic process to present an array of aesthetic interactions, ranging from historical commentary and thematic jousting to architectural depth and shadowy movements. Jean Kazandjian provides his audience with the unique sensation of freeing Sisyphus from his repetitive fate as we join him on an endless creative quest to reveal the depths of perception. After all, as the painter recently said, “The canvas is not the frontier line of the work because the possibilities of reality are infinite.” For more information about Jean Kazandjian, visit galerieanais.com.
ARTISTS
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“Infinite Love” “Coffee Waves” “Discantus 2”
Tansey Gallery is now representing
Merlin Cohen
520-577-6301
www.TanseyGallery.com
3001 E. Skyline Dr. • Suite 109 Tucson, AZ 85718 NE Corner of Skyline & Campbell M-S 10 to 6 • S 11 to 5
Merlin L. Cohen • “Infin-8” • Colorado Marble, Black Granite Base • 64” x 18” x 15”
Tucson-based Sculptor
JAMES GRAY GALLERY PRESENTS
ANOTHER ROUND, OIL ON CANVAS,
52 X 40
NATE SEUBERT ON DISPLAY THROUGH
OPENING RECEPTION: SEPT. 11, 2010 FROM 6-9 PM. COINCIDES WITH THE 16TH ANNIVERSARY OF BERGAMOT STATION
OCTOBER 10
2525 MICHIGAN AVE. D4, SANTA MONICA, CA CONTACT@JAMESGRAYGALERY.COM
(310) 315-9502
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