Luis de Jesus Los Angeles Press Release

LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES

For Immediate Release:

PHOTOGRAPHY NEWS

October 2010

Luis De Jesus is very pleased to announce the participation of four Gallery artists in the upcoming 2010 California Biennial: David Adey, Brian Dick, Glenna Jennings, and Andy Ralph. Two of these artists, Glenna Jennings and Brian Dick, employ photography as the primary medium or central component of their work. The exhibition will be presented at the Orange County Museum of Art, in Newport Beach, CA, from October 24 through March 13, 2011.

GLENNA JENNINGS The Biennial will present selections from three separate bodies of work created by GLENNA JENNINGS. Inheritance (2007) documents an event that never took place: a family dinner with her father and his prized gun. When he passed away the previous year, leaving Jennings a 22-cal Ruger and 16 other guns (which she had no idea how to deal with either physically or ideologically), she created an odd theater of domestic ritual in which she staged her initial private performance. Soon after, she invited other women to the table to commemorate their own fathers through food and drink and talk about guns. The result is a series of portraits that investigate the creation and maintenance of private memory from a gendered perspective.

In Raskolnikov (2008-09), Jennings uses her own former high school cheerleading uniform to enact a conflation of Crime and Punishment from her fictional novella Granite, which is a retelling of Dostoevsky’s novel from the viewpoint of a high-school cheerleader and her methaddict boyfriend. The photographic images exist in tandem with these two disparate texts and portray 13 different blue and white-clad bodies in an array of semi-dystopic suburban spaces, ultimately playing with deconstruction in the territory of cultural studies and identity.

Her most recent body of work, Likely Stories and other sides (2009-10), investigates the small California-Mexico border spa town of Jacumba with a book of creative non-fiction and a series of lowtech photographic light boxes. Jennings lived in the town during the summer of 2009, traversing the boundaries of insider vs. outsider research and art. Likely Stories is an origins-based project that deals with the multiple meanings of space and place, moving from the highly codified and individualized subject to the open terrain of humanistic geography. It is a progression from inside to outside, from the body in particular to space in general, that relies on universalities or larger dichotomies (public vs. private, rural vs. urban, absence vs. presence) in order to produce local meaning.

GLENNA JENNINGS was born 1974 in San Diego, and attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA (BFA, Photography, with honors, 2004) and the University of California, San Diego (MFA, 2009). In addition, she earned BAs in English (2001, Magna Cum Laude) and Spanish (2001, Cum Laude) from Pepperdine University. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

2525 MICHIGAN AVENUE / BERGAMOT STATION F2 / SANTA MONICA CA 90404 USA V 310 453 7773 / F 310 453 7778 / GALLERY@LUISDEJESUS.COM / WWW.LUISDEJESUS.COM

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BRIAN DICK Los Angeles-based BRIAN DICK was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico and raised in Southern California. He received his B.A. from UCLA (1991) and MFA from the University of California, San Diego (1995). Working in a poststudio style of practice that he often documents in photography, film, and video, Dick creates playful sculptures and performances that are meant to last for a brief amount of time.

In a photo series titled Making My Bed, Dick documents his daily ritual of making an artwork out of simple bedding (from sheets, pillows, quilts and blankets)—whether at home, visiting family or on a vacation trip—into a temporary sculpture, costume or performance. In some cases, he or someone else physically inhabits the phantom sculpture, extending the work into a performativeinterventionist context.

In the ongoing Nationwide Museum Mascot Project Dick fashions temporary individual mascots for unwitting museums from second-hand materials often found on the spot at local thrift stores—a process he calls “working low to the ground.” Among the many mascots that he has created to date are “Bushy” (Brooklyn Museum of Art), which toured New York City as part of Bushwick’s SITE-FEST 09. For the 2010 California Biennial, he will be creating a new mascot, which he has affectionately named “Ocmascot”.

More recently, he has explored identity through “facial memory” in the Muscle Mimicry and Knick-Knack Mimicry series. In these works Brian delves “below the skin” by embodying the essence of his subjects (actors and entertainers or that humble staple of American décor, the knick-knack).

CHRISTOPHER RUSSELL Luis De Jesus is pleased to present CHRISTOPHER RUSSELL in his first solo exhibition at the Gallery, titled "Runaway", on view from October 23 through November 27, 2010.

Christopher Russell employs photography, writing, bookmaking, and digital printmaking to create allencompassing environments that challenge the traditional divide between these practices and expand the very idea of a book. In “Runaway”, he continues his explorations of the darker side of the human psyche, using photographs as a drawing surface and negotiating Romanticism within the post-modern frame of mechanical reproduction. (continued ) 2525 MICHIGAN AVENUE / BERGAMOT STATION F2 / SANTA MONICA CA 90404 USA V 310 453 7773 / F 310 453 7778 / GALLERY@LUISDEJESUS.COM / WWW.LUISDEJESUS.COM

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Russell’s latest fictional text is brought into the gallery through images of ships, trees and wallpaper that relate to longing for and domestication of new experiences. Through the lens of a present-day flâneur, viewers are made privy to Russell’s observant, analytical wanderings along the physical and emotional outskirts of society. The exhibition will include several large-scale, multiple-panel photo murals and installations of framed photographs onto whose surface the artist has scratched, or “etched”, intricate drawings and patterns. In some works Russell also slashes the surface and employs metallic spray paint.

Christopher Russell received his BFA (1998) from California College of the Arts and Crafts in San Francisco and his MFA (2004) from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. Russell was the subject of a 2009 Hammer Projects exhibition titled “Budget Decadence” and this coming December will present a solo project with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles at the 2010 NADA Art Fair, in Miami. Landscape, a monograph of his photographic series of the same name, was published in 2007 by Kolapsomal Press. From 2001 to 2005 Russell edited, designed, produced, and distributed the “destroy-to-enjoy” literary art zine Bedwetter. Additionally, he has written more than two dozen articles and reviews about art in Los Angeles.

Christopher Russell’s work is included in various public collections, including the Hammer Museum/Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, J.P. Getty Museum Research Institute; Dennis Cooper Archive at The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University; Rhode Island School of Design Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

For further information and hi-res images, please contact the Gallery at 310-453-7773, or email: gallery@luisdejesus.com

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles 2525 Michigan Avenue Bergamot Station F2 Santa Monica, CA 90404 T 310-453-7773 F 310-453-7778 gallery@luisdejesus.com www.luisdejesus.com

2525 MICHIGAN AVENUE / BERGAMOT STATION F2 / SANTA MONICA CA 90404 USA V 310 453 7773 / F 310 453 7778 / GALLERY@LUISDEJESUS.COM / WWW.LUISDEJESUS.COM