Fabrik Magazine - Issue 20 by Fabrik Media

ART. DESIGN. ARCHITECTURE.

ISSUE 20

AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS 2013 The American Photography Awards recognizes excellence and honors advances in contemporary photography. WORLDWIDE EXPOSURE

CATEGORIES

The American Photography Awards

We invite ALL types of photogra-

are an international open call for

phers – professional, non-profes-

photography possessing uncom-

sional/amateur, student and mobile

mon vision. Take your photographic

photographers – in the following

career to the next level! Winning in

categories: Abstract, Advertising,

the contest guarantees you:

Architecture/Cityscape, Collage,

• Recognition amongst your peers,

Conceptual, Documentary,

as well as the photographic and

Editorial, Experimental, Fashion,

creative communities

Landscape/Seascape/Nature,

• Worldwide exhibition

Nudes, People/Portraits, Political,

• Gallery representation

Photojournalism, Still Life, Street

• Exposure to agency art and creative directors worldwide • Publication in the American Photography Annual, and more...

Photography, Video/Moving Images. For additional information or to submit your work, visit us at www.americanphotoawards.com

ENTRY DEADLINE

CALL FOR ENTRIES

May 19, 2013

americanphotoawards.com

PHOTO: SURRENDER © MALLORY MORRISON. VISIT ARTCAPITOL.COM FOR MORE OF MALLORY MORRISON’S WORK.

CONTRIBUTORS JACKI APPLE is a Los Angeles-based visual, performance, and media artist, designer, writer, composer, and producer whose work has been presented internationally. Her writings have been featured in numerous publications including THE Magazine LA, The Drama Review, Art Journal, and High Performance. She is a professor at Art Center College of Design.

MASTHEAD Publisher Chris Davies Associate Editor Peter Frank Managing Editor Aparna Bakhle-Ellis Creative Director Chris Davies Art Direction & Design Chris Davies & Paul Soady Contributing Writers Jacki Apple Aparna Bakhle-Ellis Peter Frank Lanee Lee Phil Tarley 5790projects Account Executive Dale Youngman

EDITORIAL & ADVERTISING Editorial editorial@fabrik.la Advertising ads@fabrik.la Contact 269 S. Beverly Drive, Suite 1234 Beverly Hills, CA 90212 Tel 310 360 8333 • http://www.fabrik.la

APARNA BAKHLE-ELLIS is a writer enthralled by the consonance and dissonance of ‘being’ in Los Angeles. L'écriture féminine, outsider art, and altered states of consciousness rank high among her myriad interests. She is also Fabrik’s Managing Editor. PETER FRANK is art critic for the Huffington Post and Associate Editor for Fabrik magazine. He is former critic for Angeleno magazine and the L.A. Weekly, served as Editor for THE magazine Los Angeles and Visions Art Quarterly, and contributes articles to publications around the world. Frank was born in 1950 in New York, where he was art critic for The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News, and moved to Los Angeles in 1988. Frank, who recently served as Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum, has organized numerous theme and survey shows for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and other venues. McPherson & Co. -Documentext published his Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography in 1983. A cycle of poems, The Travelogues, was issued by Sun & Moon Press in 1982. Abbeville Press released New, Used & Improved, an overview of the New York art scene co-written with Michael McKenzie, in 1987. LANEE LEE is a Los Angeles-based writer who uses her craft to pursue her passions: travel, culture, cuisine, and discovering artisans from around the globe. You can follow her latest quest at www.laneelee.com and @wanderlushdiary.

INFORMATION Fabrik is published Quarterly by Fabrik Media Group, Inc., 269 S. Beverly Drive, Suite 1234, Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Contents cannot be reproduced in part or in full without the written permission of the copyright holder. The opinions expressed are those of the artists and writers themselves and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Fabrik or Fabrik Media Group. Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved. PRINTED IN LOS ANGELES

ON THE COVER ART. DESIGN. ARCHITECTURE.

ISSUE 20

Andy Warhol, 2011 ©Karen Bystedt From THE LOST WARHOLS Collection. Image Courtesy Karen Bystedt. Five pieces from THE LOST WARHOLS collection will be on exhibit at the Robert Berman Gallery from April 6-28.

PHIL TARLEY is a Fellow of The American Film Institute and an artist member of the Los Angeles Art Association. As an art and pop culture critic: he regularly posts stories on The WOW Report; he writes about art and photography for Fabrik Magazine; and he is a juror on the Lark International Art Competition. Tarley is currently working on a book of narrative non-fiction travel stories and on a variety of photographic art projects. He has recently been appointed to a City of West Hollywood task force on Public Art Installation. Phil Tarley now curates for Artist’s Corner, Hollywood’s newest fine art photography gallery. 5790projects is a curatorial entity that produces quarterly pop-up exhibitions in Los Angeles, and was founded by Catlin Moore and Matthew Gardocki in 2011. Moore is the Director of Mark Moore Gallery (Culver City, CA), where Gardocki is also Assistant Director. Gardocki studied at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and is one of the founding members of Igloo Tornado arts collective. Moore is completing her MA at California State University, Long Beach, and is a contributor to several art publications, including Daily Serving, Beautiful/Decay, and ArtLog.

CONTENTS 10 Iconoclast: Better Leiter Than Never 24 Spotlight: Karen Bystedt and The Lost Warhols 38 Fresh Faces in Art: Emergent Presence: Eight LA Artists You Should Know 56 Profile: Locating Self: Photographer Katrina Umber 68 Exhibition: Cohen Gallery: Falling From Great Heights 74 Review: Redcat’s “Gatz” 80 Coming Out, Going In: Shulamit Gallery: Coming Out: “Leaving the Land of Roses” Going In: Doni Silver Simons, “de-noue-ment (n)”, Pouya Afshar “The Mystery of Süveyda: Within the Artist’s Mind” 84 Art About Town: Peter Frank’s Museum Views 88 Agenda: MOPLA: Month of Photography Los Angeles

PARIS, 1959 © SAUL LEITER

WORDS LANEE LEE IMAGES COURTESY HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY

BETTER LEITER THAN NEVER

A pioneer in color film. A genius autodidact. A New York School street photographer. These are just a few terms art critics and contemporaries have used to describe Saul Leiter. At 94, he really doesn’t give a hoot what he’s called. »

ICONOCLAST

LIKE FRANK SINATRA’S song, “I Did It My Way,” Saul followed the same theory in life — which may have contributed to his late-in-life discovery. “In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music… I prefer so many things than plotting how to conquer the world.” *** For over a half of a century, Leiter shot the same New York City neighborhood in which he lives, transforming mundane urban moments into dreamlike magic. Utilizing the effects of depth of field or the lack of, his photographs lure the viewer in, forcing a second or third look in examining what lies beyond. “I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness.” Son of a Talmudic scholar, Leiter attended rabbinical school under severe pressure from his father, only to drop out and head to New York City in 1946 to pursue his passion for painting. Within the year, his work was exhibited alongside of William de Kooning and Philip Guston. As a way to ‘pay his light bill,’ in his words, abstract SAUL LEITER expressionist painter Richard Poussette-Dart encouraged Leiter to consider taking pictures for magazines. Bartering a few prints of his friend, the renowned photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, for a Leica, Leiter’s lifelong liaison with the camera began. Similar to Vogue’s street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, New York City became his muse. He started with the only respectable photography medium at the time — black and while film.

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PARIS, 1959 © SAUL LEITER

HARLEM, 1960 © SAUL LEITER

SNOW, 1960 © SAUL LEITER

ICONOCLAST

Yet, this didn’t last long. Much of Leiter’s life has been outside the norm, conforming to none. In the late 40s and early 50s, color photography was considered gauche, used only for commercial advertising. That didn’t stop him from bucking the trend. He swapped it out for color film, Kodachrome specifically, and the pantone spectrum he used on the canvas was now available in a print as well. Unsurprisingly, Leiter’s overall photographic style is reminiscent of impressionistic paintings in mood, tone and light. “Painting is glorious. When I am laying in bed, I think about painting. I love photography but it is not painting.” Within a few short years of working with his first serious camera (his mother gave him a Detrola camera when he was 13), influential insiders recognized Leiter’s keen vision for poetic, abstract imagery. His black and white series “The Wedding as a Funeral” was published in LIFE. MoMA and MOCA included his photos in exhibitions and Harper’s Bazaar, among other magazines, hire him on for fashion shoots. “One cannot say that I was successful [as a fashion photographer] but there was enough work to keep me busy. I was constantly aware that those who hired me would have preferred to work with a star such as Avedon. But it didn’t matter. I had work and I made a living. At the same time, I took my own photographs. Strangely enough, I knew exactly what I wanted and what I liked.” After 1957, Leiter’s art world accolades went dark. But this was nothing out of the ordinary. Growing up in a home where his every move was scrutinized, he excelled at going unnoticed. “I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see... Many want to be rich, famous and successful. Me, I just wanted to be left in peace.” This ability to disappear is what makes his images so arresting. It’s like he was a fly on the wall with little ego or insecurity muddying the frame, capturing a scene in its purity. A man’s foot propped up on a train bench, street scenes reflected on a store window where his reflection is strangely absent, a woman dressed in red with a red umbrella in a snowstorm. Like a very long intermission, it wasn’t until the early 90s that Leiter’s photographic work was discovered once again. According to Leiter, Richard

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FOOT ON EL, 1954 © SAUL LEITER

SPAIN, 1959 © SAUL LEITER

CANOPY, 1958 © SAUL LEITER

ICONOCLAST

TAXI, 1957 © SAUL LEITER

Avedon recommended Jane Livingston to include Leiter’s images in her book, The New York School: Photographs 1936-1963. In 2005, Howard Greenberg, owner of the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City, mounted the first exhibition of his color work in nearly fifty years at the age of 82. Before this time, the only ones to see his “Early Color” work were friends he invited over in the 1950s to his East 10th street studio for private viewings. It’s common talk to hear of the new young, up-and-coming artist but the new old, up-and-coming artist? Leave it to Leiter to break the mold once again. From 2005 to the present, it’s been a dizzying rocket launch of Saul Leiter’s work into the mainstream art world. In 2006, Steidl published Saul Leiter: Early Color 1948-1960. In 2008, The Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson

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ICONOCLAST

in Paris mounted Leiter’s first museum exhibition in France. Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen mounted over 400 pieces of his work in spring 2012, the largest retrospective to date. Rose Gallery in Santa Monica exhibited the show “Saul Leiter: PostWar Color” in February 2013 and there are talks of doing a show of his black and white photography at Howard Greenberg in New York City to coincide with his new black and white photography book titled Early Black & White, publishing by HGG/Steidl this summer. “I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.” His body of work is at the height of exposure, with no signs of slowing. Published in August 2012, the book titled Saul Leiter is the first major retrospective of Leiter’s entire work, featuring his early black and white and color images, his fashion photography, overpainted nudes, paintings and sketchbooks. As the documentary In No Great Hurry: 13 Life Lessons with Saul Leiter (innogreathurry.com), examining his struggles in clearing a memory-filled apartment and becoming world famous in his 80’s, screens at film festivals this year, Leiter is no longer ‘the unnoticed.’ “I always assumed that I would simply be forgotten and disappear from view.” Think again. Leiter is better than ever.

*** When we approached Howard Greenberg Gallery for an interview with Saul Leiter, we were politely refused. According to gallery assistant Margit Erb, Saul wants to spend his days photographing, painting and organizing his archive. How can you argue with that? All italicized quotes are Saul Leiter’s from an interview with Sam Stourdzé, director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, in the self-titled photography catalog published by Steidl in conjunction with Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in 2008. n

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BEIJING, CHINA, 1965 © MARC RIBOUD

KAREN BYSTEDT AND

THE LOST WARHOLS WORDS PHIL TARLEY // PHOTOS COURTESY KAREN BYSTEDT

SPOTLIGHT

KAREN BYSTEDT IS A TALL, ELEGANT WOMAN, WITH LARGE, SEDUCTIVE, SAUCER-SHAPED EYES. SHE WEARS HER BLOND STRAIGHT HAIR IN A CHIC, SHORT BOB THAT ACCENTUATES HER FACE AND SEEMS TO HELP HER FRAME THE NARRATIVES SHE LOVES TO RELATE. BYSTEDT IS FULL OF STORIES. EVERY PHOTOGRAPH SHE TAKES OR APPEARS IN HAS A TALE TO TELL A TRAIT, SHE SHARES WITH THE BEST OF PHOTOGRAPHERS. PHOTOGRAPHERS ARE STORY TELLERS AND KAREN HAS SOME GEMS. I first met Karen at the Artist Corner Gallery, where I curate photography and help artists make books. Karen was designing a beautiful giant box, the first of ten, to contain The Lost Warhols. The Lost Warhols? I had to ask. It seems that Andy Warhol always wanted to be a model. Thirty years ago, when Karen Bystedt saw a Barney’s Clothes store ad that Andy posed for, she got that. Bystedt was a film student at NYU. She rang up the Factory and Andy himself picked up the phone. Warhol was excited by the young photographer's desire to have him model. He wore his best wig to the shoot. Shortly after, Bystedt left New York. Ever on the move, the young photographer somehow lost the negatives. Though she missed them terribly, they were gone. Thirty years after Warhol mugged for her, Karen Bystedt was cleaning out a L.A. garage and found a box of old Andy Warhol contact sheets. There in the very bottom of a worn-out corrugated cardboard box were the all negatives and an audio cassette. The clever girl had taped Warhol during her shoot. Karen’s Warhol collection comes in a boxed set of 10 twenty-four inch by twenty-four inch archival pigment prints of which five are black and white, five in color. Of note are Bystedt’s collaborations with pop artists, like Peter Tunney and Tonia Calderon. Taking her Lost Warhol prints into another contemporary realm, that of

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ANDY WARHOL, FROM THE LOST WARHOLS COLLECTION © KAREN BYSTEDT

UNVEILING PRINTS AT THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM IN PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA. © KAREN BYSTEDT

ANDY WARHOL WITH GOLD SKULL A MIXED MEDIA COLLABORATION WITH PETER TUNNEY © KAREN BYSTEDT & PETER TUNNEY

BRAD PITT © KAREN BYSTEDT

JOHNNY DEPP A MIXED MEDIA COLLABORATION WITH TONIA CALDERON © KAREN BYSTEDT & TONIA CALDERON

SPOTLIGHT

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SPOTLIGHT

celebrity pop artists, is a move that I am sure Andy would approve of. It was a bit of a shock seeing AW in color but looking at Bystedt’s color shots became a guilty pleasure. I kept peeping into her big top-secret box. There are two other, smaller, individual print editions. A forty by forty inch went to Prince Albert of Monaco and another sold to Tomasso Buti, a wealthy jewelry designer and manufacturer who owns the original Andy Warhol Factory building in downtown Manhattan. I instantly fell in love with two amazing portraits, where Andy was shot quite handsomely, almost as a pin up. Many of these Warhol photographs offer a rare look at the pop artmeister. The best intimately connect us to the man who usually hid behind a faux, highly effected and vacuous persona. To see Andy, father of contemporary pop, making eye contact with Bystedt’s camera, humanizes him and makes him an object of affection and desirability — just what every model hopes for. A selection of Bystedt’s 40 x 40 inch prints headline The Robert Berman Gallery Month of Photography in L.A. (MOPLA) show, opening April 6 until April 28, 2013 at Bergamot Station. Berman is thrilled to show the Warhols. “It’s rare that

(LEFT, TOP) KAREN BYSTEDT WEARING A NABIL HAYARI GOWN AND MARIO TESTINO DURING HIS OSCAR WEEK OPENING AT PRISM GALLERY. LOS ANGELES, 2013 PHOTO BY PHIL TARLEY (LEFT, BOTTOM) PRINCE ALBERT, KAREN BYSTEDT, PRINCESS CHARLENE OF MONACO, ELENA ALEXANDRA (BYSTEDT’S PERSONAL PUBLICIST IN EUROPE AND AMBER EVENT PR CO-COORDINATOR) MONACO, 2012 PHOTO BY DHARGYA LOBSANG (RIGHT) SHARON STONE, KAREN BYSTEDT AND PUBLICIST ELENA ALEXANDRA AT AMFAR EVENT DURING FASHION WEEK MILAN, 2012 PHOTO BY KEVIN TACHMAN

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SPOTLIGHT

a photographic body of work, that’s been hidden for so many years, suddenly surfaces and gives us a fresh look at one of the most celebrated artists of the Twentieth century. Bystedt’s photos are austere and provocative. They see past the model’s ironic gaze and show Andy at his best.” After photographing Warhol, Bystedt moved firmly into photographing celebrity movie stars, before they became famous. She seems to have a savvy, prescient sense of being able to suss out nascent, serious actors who are hard at work getting the work. She knows which ones have the iconic good looks, the talent and the industry insiders on their team grooming their clients to become big movie stars. Then she shoots them. Bystedt has written the narratives and interviews that accompany the four books of photographs she has published. NOT JUST ANOTHER PRETTY FACE

(1983), THE NEW BREED (1988), BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS (1992) and THEY DARED TO DREAM (2009). Karen does her homework and then works at getting to know the right people who can open doors for her. She is gracious, bright and is enormously skilled in the social graces of celebrity wrangling and maneuvering. She is a sensitive, generous and genuinely caring woman. But most of all she is purposeful, singularly focused on getting access to and shooting those “anointed” for stardom. She establishes an intimate trust with those she photographs, she engages them on-camera and then makes them look beautiful — a skill well honed on Andy Warhol — and one the photographer used throughout her career. Last year, at an Amber Lounge Charity event in Monaco, where Prince Albert of Monaco bought one of her Warhols, Bystedt met Parisian couture designer Nabil Hayari, who loaned her the stunning pink gown that Bystedt wore all over Los Angeles during the Oscar week events she attended, promoting her Warhol prints. Bystedt uses glamour and publicists, two powerful levers of celebrity, to become one in her own right. I remember seeing Andy Warhol, many years ago. He was the supreme fashionista. He loved glamour, models, beautiful men and women. Fashion comes and goes but truly individual style transcends the moment, and makes an impression in our collective unconscious that is long and lasting. Such was the brilliance in the way Bystedt photographed Andy, and such was the genius of Warhol. He iconicized the pop cultural touchstones of his times; branding them in his own unique way. Then, as the consummate impresario; he presented them to the cultural zeitgeist. The Lost Warhols make us wish he was still around. n 34

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MIGUEL PAREDES

MOLLY'S DIRTY LIL SHORTS, 60 X 88 INCHES, MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS, 2013

MOLLY'S NOT A HIPSTER

EXHIBITION DATES

May 4-May 18, 2013 OPENING NIGHT RECEPTION

Saturday, May 4, 9-11 pm

Known Gallery 441 N. Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036 info@knowngallery.com

MICHAEL R. STOKLOS ASSIGNMENT, INDUSTRIAL, STOCK, PORTRAITS & GALLERY PRINTS TEL: (520) 471-0005 EMAIL: mstoklos @ gmail.com WEB: www.stoklosphotos.com IMAGE: DRIED SUN FLOWERS

FRESH FACES IN ART: EIGHT LA ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

EMERGENT PRESENCE BY CATLIN MOORE AND MATTHEW GARDOCKI, CO-DIRECTORS OF 5790projects

1. MATTHEW BRANDT Firmly rooted in a time and place where haste is king, Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles) actively works towards deceleration. To merely say the photographer's practice is process-oriented is to minimize his methodology; Brant is enamored with process to the point of complete absorption - in the most literal sense. Brant re-stages the tradition of capturing rural Americana with the experimental instinct of its pioneers, wedding 19th century techniques with contemporary narratives and aesthetics. Images of lakes and reservoirs appear as scorched or hallucinatory landscapes, a result achieved by submerging his c-prints in the water pulled from the depicted pool itself. Panoramas of forests are printed upon paper made from the branches of the featured regional terrain, and reproduced with charcoal-based ink reclaimed from the burned remains of leftover timber. In Brandt's hands, the subject becomes the material as well as the procedure, resulting in sublime abstractions and a romantic kind of organic self-portraiture. http://www.mbart.com

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(ABOVE) JELLO 1, 2012 JELLO ON PAPER (MULTI LAYERED SILKSCREEN PRINT) © MATTHEW BRANDT, COURTESY M+B GALLERY, LOS ANGELES (LEFT) CRACKLING LAKE WY 1, 2012 CHROMOGENIC PRINT SOAKED IN CRACKLING LAKE WATER © MATTHEW BRANDT, COURTESY M+B GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

FRESH FACES IN ART: EIGHT LA ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

2. LENAE DAY If you're a female self-portraitist with a collection of wigs, chances are that you will inevitably be compared to Cindy Sherman. Lenae Day (b. 1986, Berlin), however, takes Sherman's penchant for dramatized caricature and proliferates it into a full-fledge production. Reinterpreting advertisements and photojournalism from LIFE Magazine during the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Day crafts satirical mise en scĂŠnes for which she makes the props, sets, costumes, and storylines. Typically assuming the role of every character on set, Day is a one-woman show with a proclivity for parody both behind and in front of the camera. Her exhibitions will often consist of live readings from the fictional narratives her photos illustrate, in addition to the display of her theatrical accoutrements and mock retro "DAY Magazine," in which they all appear. Similarly, in her "Snapshots" series, Day re-creates discarded family photos of strangers that she has accumulated over the course of several years, fusing her interest in fabricated and factual histories as she tenaciously seeks her own. http://www.lenaeday.com

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(ABOVE) ASTRONAUTS' WIVES, 2012 ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT • 10.5 X 14 INCHES (LEFT) TEST BLAZE, 2012 ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT • 8 X 10 INCHES

FRESH FACES IN ART: EIGHT LA ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

3. WHITNEY HUBBS Whitney Hubbs (b. 1977, Los Angeles) fashions indeterminate topographies in which representation and abstraction coalesce. Void of signifiers such as color or distinguishing locale, her black and white photographs offer a dramatic regeneration of chiaroscuro. As if composing the anatomy of her images with shadow and light, Hubbs engages in a kind of cinematic surrealism that makes bodies, earth formations, animals, and water alluringly nebulous forms. Depth and texture become the vague cues between eerie and beautiful, seductive and terrifying, oftentimes resulting in an instinctual tension between extremes. Her figures' features are often obscured behind hands, sheets, or foliage, as her landscapes are cropped excerpts from a larger vantage point – both subjects epitomizing the simultaneous arousing and fearful qualities of the unknown. http://www.mbart.com

(ABOVE) UNTITLED (HAIR), 2012 • GELATIN SILVER PRINT © WHITNEY HUBBS, COURTESY M+B GALLERY, LOS ANGELES (RIGHT, TOP) UNTITLED (HORSE), 2012 • GELATIN SILVER PRINT © WHITNEY HUBBS, COURTESY M+B GALLERY, LOS ANGELES (RIGHT, BOTTOM) UNTITLED (STAIRS), 2012 • GELATIN SILVER PRINT © WHITNEY HUBBS, COURTESY M+B GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

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FRESH FACES IN ART: EIGHT LA ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

4. SIRI KAUR In her most recent exhibition at Blythe Projects (CA), Siri Kaur (b. 1976, Boston) demonstrated what it means to live within the moment. Featuring a selection of her tranquil, contemplative imagery, "Know Me for the First Time" seemingly illustrated the space between thoughts, and the pause between breaths. In other words, stillness, a kind of transfixed meditation threatened by technology and dwindling attention spans. The unfeigned composure and informality of her subjects offers a kind of humble elegance, a sincere invitation to slow down and absorb the moment at hand. Angela napping in the weeds, fog settling in a field, and sunlight peering through cave walls share an unanticipated material and metaphysical connectivity best exemplified through Kaur's lens. Through her sentimental observation of the seemingly insignificant and simplistic, we are treated to the delights and marvels of being. http://www.blytheprojects.net

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(ABOVE) GOAT, 2011 PIGMENT PRINT • 30 X 30 INCHES (LEFT) FOREST HOUSE, 2011 PIGMENT PRINT • 43 X 56 INCHES

FRESH FACES IN ART: EIGHT LA ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

5. MATT LIPPS In his most recent work, Matt Lipps (b. 1975, San Francisco) combats institutionalized idealism with paper dolls. Scrutinizing the convention of a predominant voice in subjective histories and taste, Lipps arranges groupings of the cut-outs based on basic commonalities in order to highlight the inequitable nature of the "exemplary" form. His subjects range from gender to architecture, but his fascination with culturally informed aesthetics is present in each handcrafted pageant. A display of paper women ranges in figuration from statuesque Greco-Roman models to the exaggerated curves of Henry Moore's subjects, both of which are flanked by the contentiously represented anatomies of "primitive," holy, and elite icons. His staged genres like men, artifacts, animals, shape, and youth demonstrate the impossibility of simple categorization when variance is globally sustained. Lit in garish reds, blues, violets, and yellows, Lipps' cast of characters become cartoonish dioramas that exemplify the absurdity of the ideal, and the partisan nature of "shared" narrative. http://www.mattlipps.com

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(ABOVE) UNTITLED (ARCHITECTURE), 2010 C-PRINT • 40 X 53 INCHES (LEFT) UNTITLED (FORM), 2010 C-PRINT • 40 X 53 INCHES

FRESH FACES IN ART: EIGHT LA ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

6. JEFF RAU The art of observation is increasingly lost upon each passing generation. Notions of the ephemeral and fleeting are abstractions when so much of our experiences can be documented, shared, and archived – yet, Jeff Rau (b. 1978, Long Beach) uses all three of these tactics in order to typify the transitory. With Southern California as his backdrop, Rau explores the whimsical curiosity intrinsic to simple pleasures like climbing trees and informal science experiments. Seemingly born from a desire to demonstrate the necessity of cognizance in our participation with the world, Rau's exploratory performances highlight our innate leanings towards obliviousness and paranoia. In "30 Days Over LA," the artist painstakingly documented the air quality over the Downtown skyline, and arranged the monochromatic samples in elegant bands of blues, grays, and browns –empirical evidence of our imperviousness to subtle change. Similarly in "Climbing Trees," the artist documented thirty consecutive days of the innocent activity through video and journaling, an investigation that ultimately led to a heightened awareness for both Rau and his bewildered bystanders. http://www.jeffrau.com

(ABOVE) 30 DAYS OVER LA (DECEMBER 2011), 2011/2012 ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINT • 22 X 34 INCHES (FRAMED) (RIGHT, TOP) CLIMBING TREES – 30 DAY GRID, 2011 VIDEO STILL WITH SCANNED JOURNAL PAGE • ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINT • 9 X 14 INCHES (FRAMED) (RIGHT, BOTTOM) CASTLE MOAT OVER GRAY TIMBER WOLF (MAY 4, 2011. 11:00AM), 2011/2012 ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINT • 48 X 38 INCHES (ON ALUMINUM CLAD PANEL)

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FRESH FACES IN ART: EIGHT LA ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

7. MARCO RIOS In the tradition of performance artists of the late 1960s and 70s, Marco Rios (b. 1975, Los Angeles) utilizes his own body and cognition to exemplify our uniquely human preoccupation with death and ego. Oftentimes placing himself in the role of the afflicted protagonist, Rios produces videos, installations, sculptures, photos, and site-specific performances that harness a collective anxiety about mortality and its subsequently ironic, contradictory, and darkly amusing tendencies. With a wry and candid voice, Rios creates intricate narratives and excerpts thereof – story lines that often require the artist to shift personalities and perspectives as a means of demonstrating metaphorical collective experience. Whether he affixes a boulder to his head, sheds exaggerated waterfalls of tears, or assumes the simultaneous roles of murder, victim, detective and witness, Rios unravels the mysterious elements of corporeality with equal parts gravity and wit. http://www.simonprestongallery.com

(ABOVE) INSTALLATION VIEW, MELANCHOLY (AND A BAGUETTE) 13 JANUARY - 17 FEBRUARY 2013 COURTESY SIMON PRESTON GALLERY, NEW YORK (RIGHT, TOP) CRYGASM, 2010 VIDEO, TRT • CONTINUOUS LOOP COURTESY SIMON PRESTON GALLERY, NEW YORK (RIGHT, BOTTOM) UNTITLED, 2009 ARCHIVAL PRINT ON HAHNEMULE GERMAN ETCHING PAPER • 13.5 X 16 INCHES COURTESY SIMON PRESTON GALLERY, NEW YORK

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FRESH FACES IN ART: EIGHT LA ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

8. ASHA SCHECHTER When rummaging through the recesses of our memories, each image we recall is subject to fluctuating clarity and lucidity. Asha Schechter (b. 1978, Portland) pushes and pulls us through those excursions with an assiduous hand, placing clearly representational images atop obfuscated shapes and colors so that our eye travels between nostalgia and the newly observed. Schechter masterfully derails and regains our focus with his manipulation of time, subject, and form until the sensation of revisiting a transcendent place is achieved. In his newest works, Schechter distorts his forged reminiscences by combining newsprint and wistful imagery or patterns, eliciting a sense of personal archive that is both solitary and familiar. With the increasing role of digital reproduction, Schechter's composite imagery appears to toe the line between celebratory and critical of such contrivances, a tension that is as palpable as it is relevant. http://www.asha-schechter.com

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(ABOVE) PARK LA BREA NEWS (MICKEY), 2012 INKJET ON NEWSPRINT • 11.5 X 17 INCHES (LEFT) PARK LA BREA NEWS (CHERRIES ON GINGHAM), 2012 INKJET ON NEWSPRINT • 11.5 X 17 INCHES

PROFILE

LOCATING SELF: PHOTOGRAPHER KATRINA UMBER — WORDS APARNA BAKHLE-ELLIS IMAGES COPYRIGHT AND COURTESY KATRINA UMBER

ENCOUNTERING THE WORK of photographer Katrina Umber, it was evident that as an artist she is constantly striving to live her practice. The quiet confidence exuded by her person is also embodied within her images. Her photographs reflect the witnessing of a mind dedicated to looking for and seeing the presence of ‘self.’ I experience her gaze as one that is humanizing and therefore discreetly compassionate in its recognition of the vulnerability encompassed by being itself. The fertile stillness of Umber’s work urged me to deepen my understanding of her practice. Fabrik: Working concurrently on multiple bodies of work, you explore what you designate a fundamentally ontological question, “in what ways is it possible to access the experience and emotions of other beings, if at all?” I sense this investigation as potentially being deeply empathic. Is it and if so, can you speak to how engaging in your particular practice has cultivated the subtlety of your perception? Katrina Umber: My practice derives from responsive encounters, an engagement with life as well as with the photographic process itself. I grew up artistically with so much theory about the potential violence of the gaze. While I take these ideas very seriously, along with a recognition of my own agency as photographer and the vulnerability of my subjects – it felt so good to come across Kaja Silverman’s idea of a “look whose fundamental mode is one of affirmation.” I also sustain a mode of continual self-questioning and exposure as a maker and subject of photographs in my long-standing practice of self-portraiture.

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INCLUDED MIDDLE (HIGHLAND PARK FLIGHT), 2011 © KATRINA UMBER

SOFT MIRROR (FIRESHRINE), 2013 © KATRINA UMBER

SOFT MIRROR (YELLOWPOMEGRANATE), 2013 © KATRINA UMBER

PROFILE

Fabrik: In my understanding, utilizing photography to locate presence as well as make it palpable might bring artistic practice and spiritual discipline closer in that faithfulness and regularity will yield insights not otherwise accessible. Your images contain the certainty of witnessing, of an “I” who is looking, seeing. Could you also share in words what presence means to you and what informs your quest, if I may call it that, to locate it? Embodiment is probably the best word to describe this sense of “presence.” That and the idea of being as a constant state of becoming. I look for a confluence of the physical, psychological and metaphysical. I view my objectmaking as a process of cathexis. In giving these fleeting encounters a physical reality, I imbue these objects with my desire, emotional energy, and investment towards my subjects through the sheer amount of time and energy spent. Fabrik: Is there value that resides in making presence palpable? I strive to create work that asks to be experienced rather than simply read, works that encourage the viewer to feel and to be aware of their relationship/s to it. Fabrik: An intimacy inscribing your photography renders time vulnerable to capture. I feel the quiet triumph of deepening life’s ‘blessed-ness’ as well as complicating it by truth’s simplicity. How did you first find photography and can you share some of the journey that finds you here, in your Highland Park studio? My first exposure to art was at the public library in the art stacks. I discovered photography in my mid-teens and was grateful to find a tool to help me think through my life. At some point early on I made a decision that whatever occurs in my life would be the parameters I would make my work within. My journey is all there in my work. For example, U records 15 years of emotional attachment and changes within my family as well as in my own development as a photographer. I’ve made books of portraits of artists in communities that I’ve been a part of, and portraits of myself over the last ten years, which essentially trace me becoming a woman.

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INCLUDED MIDDLE (DATURA FLOWER PUNCTURE), 2012 © KATRINA UMBER

INCLUDED MIDDLE (JESSE SUBWAY/STONE ACROBAT), 2012 © KATRINA UMBER

SOFT MIRROR (BLUEEMBRACE), 2013 © KATRINA UMBER

SOFT MIRROR (ULTRAMARINEVOID), 2013 © KATRINA UMBER

PROFILE

Fabrik: Can you elaborate on your experience with digital processes in your work? I still shoot exclusively with film. Digital processes entered my work through my book-making; scanning, lay-out, etc. Included Middle will be my first series of inkjet prints because the photographs in that body of work ask for that – shot with a split-frame camera, they are real time and space juxtapositions that point simultaneously to my movement in the world and the films movement within the camera, hence the paper moving through the printer. Fabrik: How does the materiality of time inform your practice of chromogenic printing? I would say time is really addressed and built into all of my work in different ways. Analog photography is not instantaneous- I must wait to see each exposed image and then deal with how the medium transforms the bit of reality I photographed (along with my experience and memory of it). This delay encourages that which is beyond what I may have intended. Currently I’m inviting more contingency into my practice with Soft Mirrors - chromogenic prints that have been soaked, the emulsion and original photographic image is etched away layer by layer, making and unmaking the image/object simultaneously. Fabrik: You studied at Art Center as an undergrad, graduated from the MFA program at UCLA where you studied with Mary Kelly, Cathy Opie, and Jim Welling, and recently were a resident at Skowhegan. What is it like being an artist in Los Angeles right now with regard to community and how does this inform your work? Conversations and studio visits with friends and colleagues like Catherine Fairbanks, Job Piston, Kelly Kleinschrodt, and my husband artist Jesse Robinson have been invaluable. I could easily fill a page with the names of wonderful artists who live and work in this city. We have great galleries, museums, weather, and affordable studio rent!

There’s nowhere else I’d

rather be.

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INCLUDED MIDDLE (MOM DANCE/PORCH SUCCULENTS), 2012 © KATRINA UMBER

INCLUDED MIDDLE (GOAT MILKING/DARK), 2011 © KATRINA UMBER

PROFILE

Fabrik: Technology continues to change so many aspects of our lives. What is the nature of your relationship to technology, generally and/or specifically? It’s complicated. We are in a really interesting time. The rise of digital photo is the reason my favorite film was discontinued and at the same time technologies like ‘print on demand’ have made book-making and self-publishing possible for so many artists. Technology is another tool I am trying to use consciously. Fabrik: What places/spaces in Los Angeles inspire you? I love the light, hills, succulents, and taco carts of Northeast LA! I’m challenged and inspired by my Yoruba African Dance class and the beautiful children I know. Fabrik: You are participating in FLICKER, an exhibition of black and white monochrome works organized by Jan Tumlir at the artist-run Control Room. Can you share something about the show and the nature of work you’ll have in it. Jan Tumlir is a LA treasure and I feel fortunate to be exhibiting in such good company with artists like Phil Chang and Kaari Upson. FLICKER will have two works from my Personal Affect Squares series, which were shot in a decommissioned county jail. The work looks at the intersecting spaces of the personal and the institutional and abstraction and subjectivity. FLICKER, an exhibition organized by Jan Tumlir, opened March 15th and runs through April 28th at Control Room, 2006 East 7th Street in Downtown LA. More info at control-room.org. For more information or to view more art from Katrina Umber, visit

www.katrinaumber.com. n

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INCLUDED MIDDLE (LAKE WESSERUNSET), 2011 © KATRINA UMBER

EXHIBITION

COHEN GALLERY EXHIBITION: FALLING FROM GREAT HEIGHTS — WORDS PHIL TARLEY IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTISTS & COHEN GALLERY

GALLERIST STEPHEN COHEN has put together a smashing group show. Falling from Great Heights is a troika of pictorial artists who cast a spell of color, shape and ethereal light that incant a phosphorescent and delightful display of lustrous images. Siri Kaur’s dabs of mesmeric color compliment John Knuth’s dense Polaroids of smoke and mirrors. Heather Rasmussesen’s handmade paper sculptures are stacked, scattered or crumpled into formations that replicate found images on the Internet of actual cargo accidents. The three Los Angeles artists, grouped together, offer up an exhibition that showcases their individual, distinct styles yet at the same time reveals their mutual fascination with photography as a vehicle to abstract locations and space. Each artist’s work transcends the materials used to dislocate the viewer by means of manipulation, scale, and movement. All of them engage with the sublime, the beauty and fear of the spectacle of nature and the unknown. The show, at the Stephen Cohen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard, opens on March 28 and runs thru May 11, 2013. A few images from the exhibition appear on the following pages. n 68

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UNTITLED (MV RENA, ASTROLABE REEF, NEW ZEALAND, OCTOBER 28, 2011), 2012 © HEATHER RASMUSSEN

UNTITLED (MV RENA, ASTROLABE REEF, NEW ZEALAND, OCTOBER 28, 2011), 2012 UNTITLED (STACKS DIPTYCH, DATE AND LOCATION UNKNOWN), 2011

FADED SIREN 17, 2012 © JOHN KNUTH

HIGH HARBOR 34, 2012 © JOHN KNUTH

ROSE (DARKROOM EXPERIMENT #2), 2012 © SIRI KAUR

BLACK HOLE (DARKROOM EXPERIMENT #4), 2010 © SIRI KAUR

REVIEW

GATZ — WORDS JACKI APPLE IMAGES COURTESY REDCAT

t is hard to imagine how anyone could translate F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s iconic American novel The Great Gatsby into a stage play, let alone a word for word rendition of the entire book. A risky proposition at best. Yet this is what the New York theater company Elevator Repair Service set out to do more than a decade ago. The end result is GATZ, an eight hour theatrical marathon recently performed at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles that leaves viewers much to think about both in terms of the relevance of Fitzgerald’s insights into the mythos of the American Dream, and the ways in which they still resonates in a very different world ninety years later. But then perhaps it isn’t as different as it appears. For it is not the familiar plot that echoes across the century but what lies beneath the surface of the images, the dark reality on the other side of our inflated material aspirations and our naïve belief that their attainment will bring fulfillment. The idea of self-invention and all that it promises is after all still very much at the core of our cultural identity. And so too is the vacancy behind the rhetoric that perpetrates that national fiction. Central to the novel’s impact are the poetics of Fitzgerald’s unadorned language as it unmasks the emptiness of the wealth and status we pursue so blindly. It is the naked detachment of his observations about this relentless pursuit of “happiness,” and the illusions that surround it, that gets under our skin. Much as in the writing of Joan Dideon half a century later, the picture that is being painted is the existential landscape of the American psyche. A belief in the necessity of maintaining the inflection in every word of exposition is at the heart of the structural conceit of Elevator Repair Service’s unconventional staging. In a drab slightly seedy nondescript small business office of the kind often found in pre-World War II buildings at mid century, a group of office workers double as the characters in the novel, seamlessly morphing in and out of their roles on the turn of a phrase. And so we are drawn in, chapter by chapter, by the shifting rhythms of the narrator’s voice, intercut by the often deadpan and sometimes exaggerated dialog rendered by the players. 74

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REVIEW

PICTURED FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: SCOTT SHEPHERD, JIM FLETCHER & VICTORIA VAZQUEZ. PHOTO BY STEVEN GUNTHER.

PICTURED FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: VICTORIA VAZQUEZ (ON COUCH), ROBERT CUCUZZA, SCOTT SHEPHERD & SUSIE SOKOL. PHOTO BY STEVEN GUNTHER.

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REVIEW

This is in no way a period piece in either its production design, or in any attempt to be true to the appearance and style of Fitzgerald’s characters. Quite the opposite. The casting is intentionally all “wrong,” more in keeping with the office workers than in Fitzgerald’s people. Rather than Daisy’s pale blonde demeanor and debutante airs, this Daisy is a much edgier dark-eyed brunette whose affectations seem far more calculated. Daisy’s golf-playing socialite friend Jordan Baker as played by the sassy office girl with street-smart attitude is a bit of stretch. Her tomboy posture and competitiveness mask Jordan’s privileged class ennui. But Tom Buchanan’s blustering boorish antics and exaggerated machismo appropriately played more as nouveau riche vulgarity than old money good breeding is unexpectedly on target. The skinny IT drone who repeatedly collects and returns a faulty computer melds perfectly into Wilson the cuckolded garage mechanic. The production, like the performances, re-situates the narrative in a shifting time/space continuum with multiple points of reference that operate as signs on the road between then and now. The set includes a metal desk with an old-fashioned 1980s era computer monitor and keyboard on it. On the opposite desk sits an immaculate manual typewriter, and in the far corner a young man in headphones is absorbed in his laptop (the actual sound engineer). But in that bleak room stretched across time zones, the frequently checked time on the clock by the computer never advances beyond twenty minutes before ten. When this computer frustratingly refuses to boot up after several attempts, a young man in standard office attire finds a paperback copy of The Great Gatsby in his rolodex. He begins to read aloud, tentatively at first, and then with increasing interest, gradually transforming into Nick Caraway, the novel’s narrator witness. Opposite him, seated at the manual typewriter, is a tall bald laconic man whose terse gestures and self-contained remoteness distinguish him from the others. He is Fitzgerald’s ghost, the writer to Nick’s reader. He is also Gatsby the outsider, the one with secrets to hide. His empty desktop reveals nothing. The lavishness of his mansion covers all. Part of the double entendre here is that he is not the Gatsby of our expectations, but the one seen through the eyes of the reader Nick. The book becomes an escape from the boredom and deadening repetition of the office workers routines. The descriptive nuances of language in the voice of the narrator transport us into Gatsby’s mansion and glitzy parties, the sweltering closeness of the Plaza Hotel room, Myrtle’s seedy NYC apartment, and the site of Wilson’s Queens garage, where we are confronted with the raw

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REVIEW

physicality of the actors performances. The fact that the unresponsive computer gives way to the intimacy of the book is perhaps an ironic commentary on our current infatuation with technology as a replacement for engagement with the living body. Although I found the occasionally farcical caricatures somewhat problematic, Elevator Repair Service’s re-enactment with its unsettling synchronicities and contextual reframing exposes Gatsby’s underlying themes in a more coldly contemporary light. In this rendition, Jay Gatsby’s charismatic glamour turns to something as insubstantial as cellophane wrapping, beneath which the self-delusions of his double life are revealed as inherent in the content of our culture’s deceptions, not simply those of his time but of our own. It is not Gatsby who is portrayed in this staging but Jim Gatz, the awkward Midwestern small town nobody with a secret dream of becoming somebody before he gets on that train to somewhere else and gets off as Jay Gatsby. Here we see the incongruent naivete of Gatsby’s arrogant ambitions based on a promise that can’t be kept, coupled with the vulnerability of a masquerade that thinly veils an inescapable fear of exposure. You would expect the chapter by chapter reading over so many hours would be counter to a contemporary audience’s short attention span. But in fact, it fits perfectly into the way we consume on-going narratives week to week in the hour-long television drama series. Our current updated version of The Great Gatsby is Mad Men. Movie star handsome Don Draper is Jay Gatsby reborn in early 1960s America. Draper’s invented identity succeeds where Gatsby fails because he believes in his fiction in a way Gatsby didn’t. He inhabits his persona in the advertising world where image is everything, and he will do whatever is necessary to protect his secret. Even so, the SCOTT SHEPHERD AS NICK CARAWAY. issues of social class are ever present. PHOTO BY PAULA COURT.

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REVIEW

PICTURED FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: SCOTT SHEPHERD & JIM FLETCHER. PHOTO BY STEVEN GUNTHER.

Icy blonde debutante Betty Draper is his Daisy — a former model whom he makes his trophy wife until three children later she discovers he is not whom she thought. Ironically, it is not his numerous affairs but his low class origins that she regards as the unforgivable betrayal. Likewise, in a room full of WASP corporate business leaders, he is reminded that no matter his professional successes, he will never be “one of them.” Regardless, for Don Draper, the externals of the American Dream are made real. Yet an existential emptiness remains. GATZ succeeds in stripping away the illusions surrounding the lies we are willing to live with and accept in our personal, social and political culture. For George Wilson, shooting Gatsby is his only recourse for justice. He doesn’t know he has been set up. When Nick tells us that Tom and Daisy are “careless people,” he is reminding us again that the rich and powerful living inside their privileged world take no responsibility for the damage they do, the pain they inflict. They can go as far as causing someone’s death and get away with it. In today’s world, social status can now be bought like everything else. Still, I cannot help but think of the futility of the images of “success” portrayed by our violent, vulgar celebrity driven media culture. As the chasm between surface and substance grows wider, the betrayals of the American Dream seem more devastating than ever. At least we still have an artwork like GATZ to wake us up. 78

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REVIEW

GATZ, Created and performed by Elevator Repair Service. Director: JOHN COLLINS Cast: SCOTT SHEPHERD (Nick), JIM FLETCHER (Jim /Gatsby), VICTORIA VAZQUEZ, (Daisy), ROBERT CUCUZZA, (Tom), SUSIE SOKOL (Jordan), LAURENA ALLAN (Myrtle), FRANK BOYD (George), KATE SCELSA (Lucille), KRISTEN SIEH (Catherine), GREIG SARGEANT (Chester), BEN WILLIAMS (Michaelis), MIKE IVESON (Ewing), ROSS FLETCHER (Henry C. Gatz). November 28 – December 9, 2012 REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater) West 2nd & Hope Streets, Los Angeles, CA 90012 www.redcat.org

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COMING OUT, GOING IN

SHULAMIT GALLERY 17 North Venice Boulevard, Venice WORDS PETER FRANK

COMING OUT: “Leaving the Land of Roses” (Jan. 14-Mar. 9)

he Iranian Jewish community, tossed on the churning sea of recent history, has become a sub-nation of exiles. An especially cosmopolitan and yet deeply entrenched people, their roots in Persia going back thousands of

years, the displaced Jews of Iran have taken up residence with equal dignity — and yet equal melancholy — in the United States (especially Los Angeles) and Israel. “Leaving the Land of Roses” brought together four artists working in a variety of formats. Three of the artists live here, the fourth in Israel. Three of the artists rely on the figure and on kinds of narrative, the fourth works far more abstractly. Yet all conflate the fantastical with the material, the contemplative with the dramatic, a sense of longing with a sense of presence. And all four are children of a changed Iran. Tal Shochat is the one Israeli amongst the group, born there and working in Tel Aviv. Shochat works with photographic images, focal, even isolated subjects presented as large color prints lit from behind. Best known for a series of denuded trees, shot as individual presences before dark backdrops, Shochat here introduced another, far more elaborate but no less elegant series, depicting women who embody mythic and historic figures from Persian-Jewish, and general Persian, culture. A line of Farsi poetry, taken from the work of a classic or modern Iranian poet, underscores each image. Large, illumined photography is also central to Marjan K. Vayghan’s work, notably in her “Legacy Crates,” ready-to-ship minienvironments that replicate in enterable miniature the pillow-lined lounges key to social recreation and familial intimacy in the Middle East. Outfitting these boxes with large photos (again lit) of places in Iran, Vayghan activates these memoryladen sites by entertaining individual visitors with poetry reading, story-telling, tea-serving, and other classic practices. But the stories — and the soundtracks often heard inside these mini-rooms — touch upon Vayghan’s sometimes harrowing experiences of the new Iran, which she often visits. Krista Nassi, trained in Teheran, also bridges Los Angeles and Iran in her experience as well as sensibility, but relies on more visually intricate narrative

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COMING OUT, GOING IN

MARJAN K. VAYGHAN • "FLY WITH THE CAGE" LEGACY CRATE, CEILING SERIES, 2009–2013 • KINETIC, AUDIO, LIGHT INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE

forms – although often reverting to photographic means. In fact, Nassi’s collages, photomontages, and multi-layered paintings rely on relatively standard late-modern formal devices. The images they yield, however, are invested with their own poetry, the relationships between the elements provoking powerful, if oblique, associations. By contrast, the structures of David Abir offer no recognizable imagery whatsoever. He builds maze- or altar-like presences that draw us towards light sources and surround us with slowly evolving tones, which turn out to be derived from pre-extant symphonic music. The sensation is of incomplete synesthesia, and of a light-and-space-style perceptual illusion rendered at once more concrete and more improbable by its expressionist overtones.

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COMING OUT, GOING IN

GOING IN: Doni Silver Simons, “de-noue-ment (n)”, Pouya Afshar “The Mystery of Süveyda: Within the Artist’s Mind”, thru May 23

oni Silver Simons has long explored rich narrative themes through austere and sometimes forbidding processes, involving live performance frequently enough but always engaging performance of a sort.

Silver Simons doesn’t simply fabricate her markings and countings and weavings and unweavings, she realizes them in a demonstrative way that bridges the fact of her materials and the inspirations she derives from fiction (here, the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale) or other, exterior “fact” (in the case of the Caesura series here, the relationship of sea and tide to human activity). As art objects, the results of Silver Simons’ efforts are rarely beautiful, but always mysterious, intriguing, and brimming with charisma. Even her pages of notational strokes — revealing her to be a pacer and mark-maker at heart, dependent like a choreographer on nature’s, and the body’s, pulse — are as persuasive in their obsession as they are in their sensuous engagement of materials. This is an exhibition only secondarily about objects, but it honors objects in the breach as bearers of ideas and as the “wounded” survivors of arcane but all-toohuman practice. The most stunning works in “de-noue-ment (n)” are the unpainted half-unraveled canvases the Rumpelstiltskin myth inspired Silver Simons to produce (live at least at one point, as a video document reveals). They have become sculptures made, or unmade, out of a painter’s materials, movingly vulnerable in their partially dissolute nakedness. There is a poignant abjectness, too, in Pouya Afshar’s animations, at least in the three he projects on adjoining walls here. One seems to depict a desert or at least deserted landscape with a figure beneath a tree, a kind of set-up for an exotic tale, perhaps a Persian fable. More powerful are the two side images, inferring no narrative but begging for one. One is a horse, bucking and convulsing in an ambiguous space. The other is an unidentifiable but clearly composite creature/thing, part machine, part animal, part human, also looped in a never-ending demonstration of fitful, implicitly anguished movement. In their scale, implied texture, and erratic motion, Afshar’s apparitions come across as animated paintings, expressionist fantasies coming to life but still entrapped on the picture plane, clearly yearning for the solidity Afshar implies with his quasi-sculptural rendition but never grants. He has allowed his confabulations a life in the fourth dimension, but not the third, and they come across as the more abject for this. n

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COMING OUT, GOING IN

SHULAMIT GALLERY INSTALLATION VIEW OF DONI SILVER SIMONS' EXHIBITION DE-NOUE-MENT(N.) (LEFT) THE BOOK, 2013, ACRYLIC ON UNATTI HAND-MADE PAPER, 13” X 6 3⁄4” X 1”. (CENTER LEFT) TIED (FROM THE TIDAL SERIES), 2012, ACRYLIC AND GRAPHITE ON CANVAS 79” X 20" . (CENTER) HOMAGE TO A FAIRYTALE, 2012 WOODEN STRUCTURE AND CANVAS, DIMENSIONS VARIABLE, HEIGHT 94". (CENTER RIGHT) CAESURA - TIDAL, 2012, ACRYLIC AND GRAPHITE ON CANVAS, 28” X 8’. (RIGHT) UNTITLED, 2008, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 24 1⁄4” X 24 1⁄4”

SHULAMIT GALLERY PROJECT SPACE BY POUYA AFSHAR • THE MYSTERY OF SÜVEYDA: WITHIN THE ARTIST’S MIND

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ART ABOUT TOWN WITH PETER FRANK

Peter Frank’s

MUSEUM VIEWS SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART Abundance and Devotion: The Art of Miriam Wosk THROUGH APRIL 20 In the 1970s, Vancouver-born Miriam Wosk was a thriving magazine and fashion illustrator in New York. At the end of that heady decade, she blew off her career and the city that nurtured it. Back then, moving from commercial to fine art was considered no mere step up, but a graduation. Leaving New York, however, was regarded as a surrender, a declaration that you couldn’t take the heat of the art-world capital’s rough-and-tumble discourse. But in Wosk’s case, it was a strategic move to allow her focus on her art – to give up her commercial past and paint paintings. The delicious irony here is not so much that Wosk eventually did succeed in her second career, but that she did so by cultivating rather than abandoning the effulgent qualities that helped her succeed in illustration. As her retrospective demonstrates, Wosk enjoyed frequent work with New York’s periodicals at a time when they, too, were flourishing and proliferating and willing to experiment. Her fanciful way with cartoon and collage linked her to Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and other bright, post-Pop New York-based innovators, but she was quick to establish her own style. Luminous, curvaceous, dreamy and witty by turns, Wosk could animate a New York Times fashion article or a New York — and, notably, Ms. Magazine — cover with a simple figure or concatenation of figures, intricately conceived but starkly rendered, as vivid as a tarot card and as no-nonsense as a child’s drawing. Wosk brought this sense of visual drama and optical lushness into her painting, certainly at first, taking a maximal approach to imagery and rendition — stuff piled on stuff, done in psychedelic hues — but rendering and composing pictures that make almost classic sense. She clearly took license from the Pattern & Decoration movement and other feminist and feminist-adjacent forms of visual thinking. (Maybe the West 84

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ART ABOUT TOWN WITH PETER FRANK

MIRIAM WOSK • THE GOLDEN SERPENT, 2007–2008, PAPER COLLAGE AND PAINTED METALLIC FOILS ON CANVAS, 63 ½ X 118 ¾ INCHES, COURTESY OF THE MIRIAM WOSK FAMILY TRUST.

Coast’s relatively more friendly regard for such forms was one thing that lured her out here.) As she evolved artistically, however, Wosk allowed her thinking, her imagery, and her world view to deepen and complectify. Where once she was painting glowing still-life piles of fruits and blocks, she was now collaging human and animal body parts together, conjuring hallucinations emerging from watery and other depths, and, ultimately, painting and pasting together the cosmos itself, one microbe at a time. No matter how large she worked, though, nor how involved and wacky her imagery got, Wosk still thought pictorially, even iconically. She was still illustrating concepts, with equal doses of flare and care (her immense collages are veritable tapestries of paper). Only now, the concepts were metaphysical and even existential. No doubt, her long battle with the cancer that caused her so much discomfort and eventually claimed her life weighed on Wosk’s sensibility. But, if anything, the deepening of her vision and the growing ambition of her craft bespeaks a transcendence of pain and an embrace of mortality effected through finding the universe in a man’s or an insect’s, innards. For more information, please visit http://www.smmoa.org Web fabrik.la

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ART ABOUT TOWN WITH PETER FRANK

HAMMER MUSEUM Llyn Foulkes THROUGH MAY 19 Los Angeles has a rich tradition of social protest art, one which came to a head in the late 1950s and 1960s and which constituted a facet of southern California assemblage and Pop art. No L.A. artist better exemplified such a practice, and attitude, than Llyn Foulkes — especially considering that Foulkes’ “pop expressionism” became more and more caustic as time went on. The survey of Foulkes’ work that begins its tour in his hometown spans more than half a century. Instead of a crest and long, easy decline, it shows Foulkes building up a towering thunderhead of anger and disillusionment — a social fury that he always controls with self-deprecating humor and graphic playfulness. Foulkes made his reputation in the 1960s with several series of collages, assemblages, and, finally, paintings in which found objects and images were juxtaposed to both nostalgic and politically critical effect. In the paintings, Foulkes cultivated the démodé qualities of physical wear and technical obsolescence he exploited in his assemblages, rendering what seem to be fin-de-siècle landscape postcards but inscribing them with ominous, perhaps subversive notations. He also did straightforward “portraits” of livestock, but these fall comparatively flat in comparison to the visually and contextually nuanced postcard pieces. And it was those postcards, with their odd arrays of Pop heraldry — lettering, road-danger stripes, miscellaneous objects — that led to Foulkes’ next series, the “bloody heads.” In the long run, these heads, along with several large social commentaries produced in the last decade or so, are going to be what Foulkes is remembered for. He’s been doing them since the early 1970s, and at this rate will be producing them from the grave — which, given their zombieesque quality, seems appropriate. They follow a simple formula: frame a stark head, usually a portrait redolent of 19th century photography, in a heavy frame or shallow box, possibly adding a few weird or snarky objects, and invariably smacking something right on the poor subject’s face — anything from a geometric shape to a mysterious envelope to a head of Mickey Mouse — that seems to cave in the now-bloody visage. Over the 86

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ART ABOUT TOWN WITH PETER FRANK

LLYN FOULKES • INSTALLATION VIEW AT THE HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES. FEBRUARY 3-MAY 19, 2013. PHOTO BY ROBERT WEDEMEYER.

years Foulkes has wrung many possibilities out of this seemingly one-note grand-guignol slapstick; indeed, as the exhibition shows, it gains in uproarious silliness from repetition and variation. Foulkes saves his bile for his large paintings, built-out tableaux that command stage-like (or, more to the point, cinematic) space and, Pop to the last, reference cartoon characters and headlines in an ever-more intense, committed embrace of topical issues. Mickey Mouse is a stand-in for corporate manipulation; Superman is rendered impotent in the face of the military-industrial complex; and the environment’s grandeur is compromised by its increasing exploitation. Foulkes tends to endow his images with a dramatic complexity and even depth that can fire up something in the viewer besides liberal guilt and second-hand protestation. In fact, given how long he’s been at it, Foulkes was hipper sooner to a lot of these issues than were the rest of us. He earned his Occupy creds before Reagan – and, arguably, even Nixon – was in office. Dude’s still fumin’. And doing it as oddly and eloquently as ever. For more information, please visit http://hammer.ucla.edu Web fabrik.la

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AGENDA

MOPLA

MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY LOS ANGELES The Month of Photography Los Angeles (MOPLA) showcases the enormous photography community in Los Angeles. MOPLA was established and exists to advance the celebration of Photography through a variety of events and programs designed to inspire and invigorate the photography professional, enthusiast, emerging professional and collector. MOPLA's 5th Anniversary edition theme, Wide Angle: Exploring New Photography From Los Angeles and Beyond will continue to showcase Los Angeles-based photographers with an emphasis on showing work previously unseen or shown publicly or formally. Additionally, the Official and Featured Exhibition Program will display new works never exhibited in Los Angeles from contemporary photographers nationwide and abroad. Following is a list of MOPLA events and exhibits throughout the month of April.

ONE SHOT: SPACES – INSIDE, OUTSIDE, THE SPACE BETWEEN MARCH 30 @ LOFT AT LIZ’S EXHIBITION

Saturday, March 30, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Exhibition Runs Through May 3, 2013 Winning work from 2012 International Photography Awards’ annual single-image, themed competition, One Shot. PHOTOGRAPHERS INCLUDE:

Alma Photos Thomas Ahern Marioandrea Barbantini David Barbe Mary Ellen Bartley Drora Bashan Yingting Shih Kathrin Simon Marleen Sleeuwits

Kjetil Vatne Zoe Wetherall Georg Worecki David Seung Lee Angie McMoniga David Oliete Thomas Pololi Vin Rathod Andy Rudak

Laura Sauchelli Franck Bohbot Corrado Chiozzi Matteo Cirenei Kathy Corday Gabriele Croppi Seulki Ki Thiemo Kloss

LOCATION

The Loft at Liz’s 453 S. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036 http://www.photoawards.com/oneshot

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AGENDA

PULP ART BOOK EXHIBITION APRIL 4 @ SPACE 15 TWENTY EXHIBITION + BOOK SIGNING

Thursday, April 4, 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Book Signing 7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Exhibition Runs Through April 10, 2013 Pulp Art Book is a creative multi-media collaboration between photographer Neil Krug and model Joni Harbeck, resulting in fine art books, limited edition prints and short films. While touching heavily upon the societal and artistic dimensions of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s, the project also plays with simple nudes and mood pieces. “Husband and wife Neil Krug and Joni Harbeck have given birth to a poignant ballad of imagery that incorporates both psychedelia and spirituality. Pulp Art Book is an examination of societal life during the 1960s and 70s as well as a stylistic homage to B movies and © JONI HARBECK & NEIL KRUG Spaghetti Westerns. Krug has drawn attention in recent years for his commercial work with the likes of Ladytron, The Horrors, and Devendra Banhart, while model Joni Harbeck has been a muse to many and is the heroine of the print trilogy.” – Planet This event is free with RSVP to pulpart@monthofphotography.com LOCATION

MOPLA Pop-Up Gallery Space 15 Twenty 1520 N. Cahuenga Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028 http://www.pulpartbook.com

EN FOCO/IN FOCUS: SELECTED WORKS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION APRIL 5 @ VENICE ARTS GALLERY EXHIBITION

Friday, April 5, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Gallery Talk with En Foco’s Executive Director Miriam Romais 6:30 – 7:00 p.m. Exhibition Runs Through May 5, 2013 This national traveling exhibition highlights a plurality of photographic visions from 48 artists affiliated with the New York-based nonprofit En Foco over the past four decades.

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AGENDA

En Foco is dedicated to promoting cultural diversity in the field of photography. PHOTOGRAPHERS INCLUDE:

Pipo Nguyen-duy Dulce Pinzón Bonnie Portelance Sophie Rivera Juan Sánchez Kunié Sugiura Jane Tam Hank Willis Thomas Hong-An Truong Kathy Vargas Víctor Vázquez Wendel White. Photographers include: Adál Jaishri Abichandani Max Aguilera Hellweg Sama Alshaibi

Don Gregorio Antón Chuy Benitez Louis Carlos Bernal Dawoud Bey Charles Biasiny-Rivera Terry Boddie Samantha Box Roger Cabán Nitza Luna George Malave Frank X. Méndez Héctor Méndez Caratini Stephen Marc Rania Matar Annu Palakunnathu Matthew Larry McNeil

Groana Melendez Tony Mendoza Néstor Millán Delilah Montoya Valdir Cruz Gerald Cyrus Phil Dante Ana de Orbegoso Luis Delgado Dean Dempsey Lola Flash Ricky Flores Myra Greene Muriel Hasbun Germán Herrera Kenro Izu

LOCATION

Venice Arts Gallery 1702 Lincoln Boulevard, Venice, CA 90291 http://www.venicearts.org

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AGENDA

FRESH LOOK—A PORTFOLIO REVIEW APRIL 5 + 6 @ PIER 59 STUDIOS WEST PORTFOLIO REVIEWS Friday, April 5, 11:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. Saturday, April 6, 2:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. A stimulating and interactive review of photographic work. Lucie Foundation is pleased and excited to announce the fifth installment of Fresh Look - A Portfolio Review. The program pairs photographers with top photography experts in their respective fields for an in-depth conversation that provides professional feedback and critique in a casual, relaxed environment. Participants are invited to attend a post-review mixer and will have the opportunity to be featured in the first-ever Fresh Look Reviewer Picks projection, to be archived online. Cost: $45.00 per twenty-minute review session (plus one-time $25 application fee). Apply at: http://www.luciefoundation.org/education/freshlook/index.php LOCATION

Pier 59 Studios West 2415 Michigan Ave, #300 Santa Monica, CA 90404 http://www.pier59studioswest.com

OFFICIAL OPENING NIGHT APRIL 6 @ ROBERT BERMAN GALLERY EXHIBITION

Saturday, April 6, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. Exhibit Runs Through April 28 The 5th installment of MOPLA will officially kickoff at Robert Berman Gallery in the heart of Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica. Robert Berman organized an Official MOPLA Group Exhibition that includes artists Karen Bystedt, Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French, John Colao, Christopher Felver, Marc Fichou, Sharon Johnson-Tennant, Lauren Marsolier, Marla Rutherford, John Valadez and Dietrich Wegner. In addition, the first-ever, experimental and interactive MOPLA Pin-Up Show will be on view with over 60 photographers “pinning-up” images that speak to the theme Desire. On view for one night only.

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AGENDA

Bergamot Station Arts Center galleries participating in MOPLA’s opening night include Frank Pictures featuring Carol Beckwith & Angela Fisher, in addition to Colin Finlay. ADC Contemporary & Building Bridges International will present the installation and photography work of Jessica De Muro, and dnj Gallery hosts two exhibitions, Bill Sosin and Sharon Harper. Additionally, artist John Chiara will be on view at Rose Gallery. This event is free with RSVP to opening@monthofphotography.com LOCATION

Robert Berman Gallery, B7 Bergamot Station Arts Center Santa Monica, CA 90404 http://http://robertbermangallery.com

CAROLL TAVERAS PHOTO STUDIO APRIL 7 - 13 @ SPACE 15 TWENTY PHOTO STUDIO + EXHIBITION Opening Event, Sunday, April 7, 12:00 p.m. - 3 p.m. Studio Runs Through April 13, 12:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. (closed Mondays) Exhibition, Thursday, April 18, 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Brooklyn-based portrait photographer Caroll Taveras presents the fourth edition of the highly successful Photo Studio Project at Space 15Twenty in Hollywood. The Photo Studio Project aims to re-create the tradition of the portrait studio, with a fresh and modern approach. Taveras uses color, large format, 4x5 film, and instant film. Participants will receive a free copy of instant film (to pick up at the end of the project), and will have the option to purchase an enlarged digital print. The Photo Studio Project is free and open to anyone who wants to participate by having their portrait taken. The project will culminate in a final exhibition of selected prints and instant film on April 18, 2013. LOCATION

MOPLA Pop-Up Gallery 1520 N. Cahuenga Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90028

http://www.thephotostudio.org

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AGENDA

PRO’JEKT LA PART ONE — ALL VISUAL LA APRIL 11 AT THE STANDARD, HOLLYWOOD PROJECTION Thursday, April 11 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Projections begin at sundown All Visual LA: A. Dola Baroni and Henry Diltz curate a special slideshow. All Visual LA showcases new work that has never been seen before. Their project happens monthly so new work is all they really care about. What excites us most is new subject matter, new concepts and new processes for making visual work. AVLA believes that photography is in a vulnerable position now more than ever, with the future bringing medium collaborations of all kinds. Many of the artists featured in AVLA make films, practice dance, paint and create art on a daily basis. They are the people thinking about new ideas and making new work. They are the ones who are re-inventing the world of photography and shaping a new era of visual art.

Music provided by DJ Son Zoo. This event is free with RSVP to projekt1@monthofphotography.com $10.00 Valet Parking available LOCATION

The Standard, Hollywood 8300 W Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069 http://www.allvisual.org http://www.standardculture.com

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AGENDA

46 PICTURES EXHIBITION APRIL 12 @ UNION EDITORIAL EXHIBITION

Friday, April 12, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. 46 pictures and Union Editorial present an evening of work from 46 Pictures photographers. Photographers include Sabrina Hill, John Huba, Charles Imstepf, Mike McGill, Michael Miller, Jen Rosenstein and Sean Thonson. This evening is part of an ongoing series that has been presented since MOPLA 2009 entitled ON PAUSE: photography in the creative workspaces of commercial production houses. This event is free with RSVP to 46pictures@monthofphotography.com LOCATION

Union Editorial 12200 Olympic Blvd #140 Los Angeles, CA 90064 http://www.46pictures.com http://www.unioneditorial.com

INSTRAGRAM JAM EXHIBITION APRIL 12 @ GRAFFITI HOUSE LA EXHIBITION + FUNDRAISER FOR SNAPSHOP! Friday, April 12, 8:00 p.m. to midnight April 13 & 14, 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. MOPLA’s first annual Instagram show featuring work from Instagram sensations! Select Instagrammer prints will be available for purchase to help raise money for SNAPSHOP!, Lucie Foundation’s photography workshop program for under-served youth. Photographer Andre Hermann (@shutter_se7en) will also be executing his “Hide and Seek” a Photo Book Project’ in association with this event. Once the books are hidden, visual clues will be posted across his blog, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram revealing hints about the book’s whereabouts. FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHERS:

Frank Ockenfels (@fwo3) Shaughn Crawford (@Shaughncrawford) Lauren Randolph (@laurenlemon) Alejandro Chavetta (@silvermule) Theron Humphrey (@thiswildidea) Bryce Duffy (@bryceduffy)

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AGENDA

Coral Von Zumwalt (@coralvz) Andre Hermann (@shutter_se7en) Matt Sartain (@matt_sartain) Daniel Arnold (@arnold_daniel) Michael Oneal (@Moneal) Ronn Brown (@Rbtsinc) Wayne Lawrence (@waynelawrence) Jared Mechaber (@Jaredmechaber). Joe Pugliese (@joepug) Susana Blasco (@descalza) John Crawford (@johnkraw) Justin Fantl (@Fantl) Sian Kennedy (@thirstynomad) Brendon Snake Craighill (@snakedumpster) Sharon Kim (@sharonkim_) Free with RSVP to: instagram@monthofphotography.com Donations to SNAPSHOP! will be accepted throughout the evening

LOCATION

Graffiti House LA 310 N. Madison Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90004 http://www.luciefoundation.org/education/snapshop/index.php

KIRK PEDERSEN: URBAN ASIA APRIL 13 @ MOPLA POP-UP GALLERY EXHIBITION Saturday, April 13, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. Exhibition Runs Through April 19, 2013 An exhibition of prints from Kirk Pedersen’s two volume set of books entitled Urban Asia and Tradeoffs. Images from cities including Bangkok, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shenyang, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Shanghai, Dalian, Beijing, Singapore, and Phnom Penh. Wandering the streets and alleys, Pedersen observed the city’s unique signage and symbolism, corners and crossings, sidewalks and cracks. Both books will be on view and available to allow an even deeper understanding of the project.

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AGENDA

In Special Projects Room: Susan Swihart: Passing/Outdoors The Special Projects room will feature the photography of Susan Swihart. Passing/Outdoors with Jamie Burris is a collaboration of performance art and photography. Susan Swihart’s images document days spent capturing Burris’ investigation of nature to explore dance and movement. During the opening of the photo exhibition, Jamie will be bringing a bit of that exploration indoors. LOCATION

MOPLA Pop-Up Gallery 725 S. Los Angeles Street Downtown Los Angeles, CA 90014 http://www.urbanasiaphotos.com http://www.susanswihart.com

MOPLA + SMASHBOX GROUP SHOW APRIL 17 @ SMASHBOX STUDIOS WEST HOLLYWOOD EXHIBITION

Wed., April 17, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Exhibition Runs Through May 1, 2013 This annual group show collaboration is a submissions based exhibition curated by Dee deLara (Smashbox Studios), Jen Jenkins (Giant Artists), and photographer Diana Koenigsberg. The Los Angeles Times will also present a special projection of images from their newspapers archives. LOCATION

Smashbox Studios West Hollywood 1011 N. Fuller Ave. West Hollywood, CA 90046 http://www.smashboxstudios.com © BENJO ARWAS

PRO’JEKT LA PART TWO: THIS IS THE WHAT AND LAS MPELES APRIL 18 @ SPACE 15 TWENTY COURTYARD PROJECTION

Thursday, April 18, 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Projections begin at sundown MOPLA presents Part Two of Pro’jekt LA, a double-feature with projections curated by Kate Osba of This is The What magazine, and Las mpELES: A Slideshow organized by Yasmin Alishav.

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AGENDA

This is The What features photographs by Los Angeles based photographers Peter Bohler, Robyn Twomey, Ryan Schude, Sam Comen, Gregg Segal, Claudia Lucia and Jesse Chehak. Additional photographs by Melissa Golden and Nadia Sablain will also be shown. Las mpELES: A Slideshow is organized by Yasmin Alishav and features 69 ASMP LA members. Free with RSVP to: projekt2@monthofphotography.com LOCATION

Space 15 Twenty Courtyard 1520 N. Cahuenga Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028 http://www.thisisthewhat.com http://www.asmpla.org

TOM PAIVA: LOSS — THE LA AUTO DEALERSHIP SERIES APRIL 19 @ MOPLA POP-UP GALLERY EXHIBITION

Friday, April 19, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Inspired by an article in the Los Angeles Times that addressed the state of auto dealerships in the LA area, Tom Paiva’s work documents the businesses that have closed or been abandoned. The images, captured in color on an 8x10 camera, convey drama and damage of the recession and its lasting significance. In Special Projects Room: Stephen Weissberger: MysteriaLA

The work of Stephen Weissberger will be featured in the Special Projects room. MysteriaLA is an attempt to showcase the unseen Los Angeles—our physical surroundings that are often ignored as we conduct the business of our daily lives. LOCATION

MOPLA Pop-Up Gallery 727 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90014 http://www.tompaiva.com http://www.sweissberger.com

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AGENDA

LOS ANGELES AND BEYOND APRIL 20 @ MOPLA POP-UP GALLERY EXHIBITION

Saturday, April 20, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Exhibition Runs Through April 24, 2013 This group exhibition features focused bodies of work never before exhibited in Los Angeles from five emerging and established photographers. Irish born, Los Angeles-based photographer Brian Cross (aka B+) will share works made from several trips to Colombia. Japanese photographer Motonori Shimizu’s photographs depict Hashima, an abandoned, ruined island off the coast of Nagasaki, where coal was produced 35 years ago. First-person Shooter is the result of French photographer Thibault Brunet’s focus on virtual universes, where his photographs vascillate between different techniques. A selection of award winning photographs from Belgian artist Stéphanie Roland’s Les Enfants - Modéles series will be on view, in addition to selections from Mexico’s emerging photographer Maria José Sesma’s series Todo en Orden.

LOCATION

MOPLA Pop-Up Gallery 725 S. Los Angeles Street Downtown Los Angeles, CA 90014 http://www.mochilla.com/bplus http://www.thibaultbrunet.fr http://www.mariajosesesma.com http://www.stephanieroland.be http://www.m-shimizu.net

20 X 20: DIFFUSION LA APRIL 23 @ THE HUB LA DISCUSSION Tuesday, April 23, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Reception: 7:00 p.m. Presentation: 8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

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AGENDA

A discussion of photography, following the PechaKucha 20 x 20 format. Local photographers, including Emily Shur, Art Streiber, and more, will each present 20 images, 20 seconds at a time. The event will encourage photographers to meet, network, and explore new ideas and approaches to the field of photography. Powered by PechaKucha. LOCATION

The Hub LA 830 Traction Avenue, Suite 3A Los Angeles, CA 90013 http://www.pechakucha.org http://www.thehubla.com

WISH YOU WERE HERE APRIL 25 @ MOPLA POP-UP GALLERY EXHIBITION Thursday, April 25. 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Exhibition Runs Through April 30, 2013 MOPLA presents Wish You Were Here, a group show of 30 photographers from Los Angeles and beyond, curated by Stephanie Gonot. The work will be presented on a series of postcards which viewers can purchase and mail directly from the gallery space, sending contemporary photography around the world, via snail mail. PHOTOGRAPHERS INCLUDE:

Ramon Haindl Stefano Marchionini Synchrodogs Thomas Prior Trey Wright Van Robinson Zen Sekizawa Amy Lombard Andy J. Scott Angie Smith Bea de Giacomo Ben Goddard Bobby Doherty Bobby Scheidemann Charlie Engman

Corey Arnold David Brandon Geeting Delaney Allen Elizabeth Weinberg Emiliano Granado Grant Cornett João Canziani Maryanne Casasanta Matt Tammaro Maxime Guyon Michael Hernandez Nathaniel Wood Nico Krijno Osma Harvilahti Philippe Jarrigeon © BOBBY DOHERTY

LOCATION

MOPLA Pop-Up Gallery 725. S. Los Angeles Street Downtown Los Angeles, CA 90014 http://stephaniegonot.com/Curatorial

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AGENDA

VERGE: NEW WORK APRIL 26 @ DUNCAN MILLER GALLERY EXHIBITION Friday, April 26, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Verge Photographers is an initiative, sponsored by Duncan Miller Gallery. The five talented emerging artists included in this initiative – Liz Huston, Jamie Johnson, Claire Mallett, Rico Mandel, and Marjorie Salvaterra – work primarily in the photographic medium.

LOCATION

10959 Venice Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90034 http://www.duncanmillergallery.com

OFFICIAL CLOSING NIGHT APRIL 27 EXHIBITION, PROJECTIONS AND AUCTION Saturday, April 27, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. MOPLA’s Official Closing will be a celebration of photography not to be missed! This invitation-only event will feature projections, exhibitions and a special auction to raise money for SNAPSHOP! 2013, Lucie Foundation’s four-Saturday workshop program that serves talented yet underserved Los Angeles high school students who are passionate about photography. This year’s auction will include photographs and publications by Joel Meyerowitz, Greg Gorman, Nick Veasey, Roxanne Lowit, Michael Muller, Jamey Stillings, Doug Menuez, Helen K. Garber, Kwaku Alston, Pulp Art Books, Ian and Erick Regnard, Chris Anthony, Jason Florio, and many more! Closing night will also feature a special projection curated by Pieter Wisse of 500photogaphers.com and never before seen Jazz Photographs by Jerry Stoll.

For more information, please visit http://www.mopla.org

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F I F T H

A N N I V E R S A R Y

E D I T I O N

MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY LOS ANGELES 2013

WIDE ANGLE: EXPLORING NEW PHOTOGRAPHY FROM LOS ANGELES AND BEYOND

www.mopla.org

APRIL 2013