By Tyler Stallings   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

On July 12, 2006, the six photographic artists of The Legacy Project unveiled this mammoth photograph. It is three stories high by eleven stories long and provides a panoramic view of a portion of the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro that is destined to become the heart of the Orange County Great Park. It will be one of the largest urban parks in the United States.

The six members of The Legacy Project (Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh, and Clayton Spada) have made a complex and multi-faceted statement about the history of photography, photography’s changing technology in a digital age, and the interchange between process and subject matter in the making of a photographic image. Any one of the following ideas deserves their own essay, but the aim here is to provide some historical context and to simply touch upon the many ideas that The Great Picture provokes in its viewers.

The Legacy Project’s grand statement counters the extreme side of digital technology today that often relegates the photograph to a seamless, uncluttered surface that, in the world of fine art, is often discussed merely in terms of issues of representation. Conversely, the artists refocus our attention on the tactility of a photograph’s surface, and re-embrace the imagination’s expression through photography via analog, handmade, and chemical processes. Its scale and provisional status is also a statement that raises questions about a work being both art and monument. Lastly, as an object, The Great Picture expands upon, in a most gargantuan manner, a particularly California take on photography that asks, what is a photograph?

The Great Picture’s “Ancient Way”

The camera was a converted hanger. It was transformed into a camera obscura, or pinhole camera; one of the oldest techniques for making images, discovered by the Chinese in the 4th century BC. It is apt that it was produced with lensless technology, only to be reproduced in the equally lensless digital realm of the internet. Its image spread around the world within minutes of completion; making it more permanent that in its original, physical state, only seen twice now.

The fact that The Great Picture and its airplane hanger-camera were the world’s largest, and hence, the world’s first of its kind (documented in the Guinness Book of World Records), there was a feeling of time travel when you stood within the cave-black camera, unable to see your hand. This initial experience, paired with the later one of walking the 111-foot length of the developed picture, created a sensation of being at the beginning of something new and wondrous, such as modern, chemical-based photography. The fact that the image was actually a negative and that it, like a painting on a stretched canvas, was produced by coating stretched linen with photographic emulsion, evoked the spirit of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative / positive photographic process, the antecedent to most photographic processes known today.

Aesthetically, The Great Picture’s process and final, murky image, share a closer kinship to Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secessionists. In the early 20th century, they were a group of photographers who felt that photography had arrived at a point when its easy mechanical means of reproduction had consigned photography to commercialism and to an emphasis on discussing only the merits of how well it documented the subject. Instead, the Photo-Secessionists developed a “pictorialist” aesthetic in which the treatment of the image during the process and an artist’s subjective vision were paramount, thus raising such photographs into the realm of fine art. However, the motivations of The Legacy Group arose less from the romantic sensibilities of the Photo-Secessionists. Instead the image arose out of The Legacy Group’s pioneering technological innovations with old techniques.

The Great Picture’s use of an Olympic-swimming-pool-size tray with 600 gallons of developer and 1200 gallons of fixer, underlines the abiding interest of The Legacy Project in the chemical processes of making a photograph through what will soon be considered an “ancient, ritualistic technique that takes place in a darkened room.”

In the past few years, there have been several exhibitions and books that have recognized artists retrieving early techniques of photography for their expressive qualities. Exhibitions include Lost & Found: Rediscovering Early Photographic Processes at the Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California in 2001 and Secret Victorians: Contemporary Photographers Working in 19th Century Processes at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego in 2003. In between them, Lyle Rexer’s book Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes was published in 2002, which features sixty artists working with the time-consuming and seemingly alchemical “pouring of chemicals” amidst the instantaneity of digital technology.

Tellingly, the exhibitions and book were produced at a major point of transition as torrents of consumers exchanged 35mm film cameras for those using charge-coupled devices (CCD). It was also the time when art departments in universities and colleges were decommissioning their darkrooms and installing computers and large format, ink-jet printers. In addition, it was when the predecessor to the instantaneous abilities of the digital camera and printer, Polaroid, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2001, unable to compete.

The aforementioned exhibitions and book from the early 2000’s highlight artists who create calotypes, ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, cyanotypes and tintypes. The list of chemicals unique to each procedure is long and the final results can be unpredictable. However, it is the irregular outcomes that attract artists to their use.

The most notable contemporary artist whose work has brought attention to this new wave of antiquarians is Chuck Close with his daguerreotype portraits. Other artists, such as Sally Mann have used the wet plate collodian process to explore the heady subjects of life and death and what remains thereafter, literally, metaphorically, and spiritually.

It was perhaps not the intention of The Legacy Project’s photographers to embody the chemical process within their subject to the degree that it did in the end. The 31 x 111 foot image is a panoramic view of a part of the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, which was closed in 1999, and depicts a control tower and runways. It is a desolate, lonely, and foreboding image; qualities that are emphasized by its grey tones from the gelatin silver process. It seems that part of the motivation by The Legacy Project with The Great Picture’s process was an attempt to capture the nostalgia and melancholia associated with the passing of the air station, a ubiquitous, man-made mark in the heart of Orange County, California.

Lately, a desire for the tactile in conjunction with a recognition of the prevalence of the lens-based image in our society has led artists to treat the printed image as simply another material to manipulate. This is due in part to the affordability and accessibility of home printers. The cost of a print is not exorbitant and the object is thus not precious. My own curated exhibition, Truthiness: Photography as Sculpture, organized for University of California, Riverside’s California Museum of Photography in 2008 explores this trend. It surveys how a new generation of artists in California is using photographic prints as the basic medium in the creation of sculptural works in an effort to expand the use of the media and to examine the nature of the photographic image. The exhibition follows in the footsteps of earlier generations of artists working in California who, in the 1960's through the late 1980s, began to use the photograph in radically new art contexts. John Baldessari, Wallace Berman, Robert Heinecken, Susan Rankaitis, Edward Ruscha, Ilene Segalove, and Alexis Smith are key among them.

This challenge to modernist aesthetics in photography has been a particularly Californian pursuit, reinforced in part by the predominance of experimental art schools, such as California Institute of the Arts, and art departments, such as UCLA. They are still gathering spots for experimental artist-teachers and graduate students who carry forward this spirit.

Within this California challenge to modernism, the subject matter of The Great Picture, an abandoned air base, can also be traced to the New Topographics aesthetic from the 1970s. Unlike Ansel Adams’ reverential images of California’s landscape, other California-based photographers such as Lewis Baltz and Joe Deal found new subject matter in an industrialized, tract house landscape clearly affected by human alteration. It was a fresh focus but also a reflection of the shift in California’s mythology from an Eden state to a failing, indulgent, and less virtuous one.

Presently, The Great Picture also ups the ante on the significance of scale in photography, exemplified by the internationally famous Andreas Gursky and the “Düsseldorf School” of photographers from the late-1990s. They carried forward the aesthetic of their German teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher; a team of photographers who, like the New Topographics photographers, developed a detached style for taking images of industrial architecture. It was both a new documentary aesthetic and a commentary upon a post-World War II urban landscape in Europe and the U.S. Gursky raised the level by producing never before produced large-scale prints, possible in part because of accessible and affordable technology. Though his images often featured anonymous, consumerist landscapes, such as a 99-cent store, or the atrium lobby of a hotel, their scale and glossy surface inspired some critics to describe the work in terms of the sensuality of painting and the sublime. They reinvigorated the ongoing debate between the aesthetics of paintings and photography, and their influence on one another since photography, as we know it now, came on to the scene in the 1830s. The Legacy Project then went beyond Gursky-big to a cinematic scale, but without the aid of digital manipulation or billboard-size printers. Instead, The Legacy Project opted for the idiosyncratic qualities of the hand-made and the chemical.

The Great Picture as Painting

One of the most striking features of the final print on the stretched fabric is its painterliness. It results from the hand application with a stain applicator of the gelatin silver black and white photo emulsion. Again, the paint-like quality harkens back to pictorialism’s aims for fine art status at the beginning of the 20th century. Its subject matter, a vacant, military complex, along with the painterliness, also references the deadpan, industrial and commercial imagery of Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha’s pop art paintings from the 1950s to the 70s that used hardedge techniques, silk-screening, and/or light sensitized canvas surfaces. Exhibitions such as Painting into Photography/Photography into Painting at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 1996, and then ten years later, Painting on Photography: Photography on Paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago in 2005 have updated the dialogue between photography and painting. Together, these exhibitions surveyed artists such as Uta Barth, Chuck Close, Tim Gardner, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Wall, and Joel-Peter Witkin, among others. Written earlier, a seminal text that investigates the relationship between painting and photography, is Peter Galassi’s exhibition and accompanying book from the Museum of Modern Art in 1981, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography. In it, he discredits the notion that photography was merely a scientific and technical invention that disrupted “the cause of painting.” Rather, Galassi states that it is not only a technical achievement but also an aesthetic one. He traces the motivations for photography’s invention to the 15th century invention of linear perspective—a practice from drawing and painting.

The Great Picture’s scale does bear some comparison with a uniquely Californian encounter, especially in Los Angeles: its numerous outdoor, painted murals. Located in neighborhoods, school playgrounds, freeway underpasses, and the sides of office buildings, they include the social realist work of José David Alfaro Siqueiros in the 1930s to The Citywide Murals Project established in 1974 to the Los Angeles Olympic Committee that commissioned a host of commemorative murals in 1984. But the difference with The Great Picture is its transitory state—as it can be rolled up and never seen again. It has been on exhibit only once more in 2007 at the Art Center College of Design’s wind tunnel building. In this respect, its grand gesture and bringing together of community shares a muralist’s sensibility, but its equally grand “disappearance,” at least physically for the moment, shares kinship with conceptual art’s preoccupation with ideas and dematerialization of the art object. It is a conceptual mural.

At a distance, the scale of The Great Picture’s grayish canvas and hazy image also possesses the minimalist monumentality of the two black granite walls that form Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Great Picture’s military-related subject reinforces this reference. But The Great Picture is more an anti-monument. It is temporary and less commemorative of historical figures or events, and more about the passing of time. This is embodied literally in the process of its making, in the gestural markings, and in the subject matter of the Marine Corps air base, a scene that no longer exists.

The passage of time as an ongoing subtext is underlined by the fact that The Great Picture is only one phase of the much larger Legacy Project. The six artist involved have and will continue to employ all manner of photographic processes and techniques to document the changing landscape of the air base’s footprint. Their techniques range from traditional photography to innovative digital methods, including video, aerial, and GigaPan. The Great Picture is part of a minimum fifteen-year commitment by the Legacy Project members to leave a dynamic record of the air base’s change as it transforms from a military base into an urban park.

The Great Picture embraces and challenges many questions that have surrounded photography in its 150-year-plus history. By embodying the exchange between photography and painting, it demonstrates that it is not important to determine whether it is a painting or a photograph in today’s world, but to realize that lens-based images are thoroughly ingrained in our society. In essence, the boundary (previously a source of friction) between photography and painting/painterliness has become porous. In an image-soaked society, it does not matter about the precise pedigree of the image. Hybrids are everywhere.

The Great Picture is both a photograph and a painting. The Legacy Project members equate the importance of the artistic process behind its making and its final objecthood. The viewer’s experience of tactility and presence amidst its scale were paramount at first, later to exist in the internet for the most part. The artists’ use of old, photographic printing methods yet taken to a scale in which the darkroom becomes a public arena. Lastly, that it has become an object and experience so monumental and expansive that it now exists beyond walls. These amalgamated methods and intentions, combined with its present intangibility, have instilled The Great Picture with an affecting resonance in our image-burdened way of life.

Forthcoming essay in The Great Picture: The Making of the World’s Largest Photograph is a 196-page book, published and distributed by Hudson Hills Press, that accompanies the exhibition with essays by Tyler Stallings, Dawn Hassett, and Lucy R. Lippard, and features photographs documenting this monumental and unprecedented project.

By   Mon, Jul 11, 2011

West of Center features of both emerging and mid-career artists and is intended to introduce Los Angeles to the vital and flourishing art scene in Utah. Not the scene you might imagine, however as there are no plein air landscapes or traditional quilts, no saccharine nature photographs or hokey, pseudo-indigenous crafts, rather an array of contemporary subjects presented with vision, talent, wit, and innovation.

You will see animals, landscapes, and even Joseph Smith, but in ways you likely didn't expect. The landscape in Utah is indeed stunning, and it's hard to avoid - whether you’re an artist or not, it just seeps into your consciousness, aesthetic, and activities.

Several of the artists in West of Center do address landscape in unique ways. Adam Bateman's altered photographs, for example, explore the confluence of modernism and rural landscape, water usage, and our contemporary relationship with the land. Jared Latimer redefines plein air painting with observational paintings of the landscapes that he sees while touring his hometown and nearby areas via Google street view. Davey Hawkins and Jan Andrews present uncanny and philosophical musings on land, body, and the personal relationship to landscape with stunning film and video sequences that recall sci-fi movies and structuralist films. Josh Winegar takes up classic notions of westward expansion, monumentality, and nostalgia in landscape photography with his stunning large format, manipulated photographs. Myranda Bair tackles the landscape through the aesthetics and language of rock climbing, merging the practicality and sublime of the outdoors with the artifice and economy of the gallery space.

There are animals, too! Claire Taylor makes impeccably illustrated drawings of animals and the magical universe over which they reign. Cara Despain exercises her admirable cat whispering talents to lure live kittens to her modernist Pussy Grotto sculpture. Morganne Wakefield experiences and tracks cycles of life, commerce, and consumption in her videos and performances about work on a sheep farm with kick ass feminism that will make you jealous, and actions you could never imagine doing yourself. Mary Toscano's elegant and poetic drawings capture rural regionalism in a postmodern world.

Several of the West of Center artists engage in seductive gestures of abstraction. Robert Mellor creates meticulous and multilayered paintings that are dynamic explosions of texture and space. Jason Metcalf stitches the unlikely histories of modernist abstraction and barn paintings to illuminate the role of superstition and religious lore. Laurel Hunter's drawings reduce golf courses and lawn sports to beautiful abstract compositions of line, circles, and color. Michael Ryan Handley’s sculptures explore material, texture and structure to form social and psychological metaphors. Tessa Lindsey works in paint, ink, and collage to create imagery that is simultaneously narrative and abstract with Rorschachian subjectivity. Kenny Riches also fuses figuration and abstraction in his house-lath-cum-geometric abstractions and figurative portraits of his father's nostalgic past. Lenka Konopasek's paintings of disasters present a world that is aesthetically beautiful and physically traumatized.

Daniel Everett's sleek photographs question the role of technology in the everyday. David Ruhlman's mystical paintings appear as alchemical rubric's to a secret world of human and animal codes. Stephanie Leitch's installation mines visceral, political, and social constructs of the body. Several other artists in the show present work about the body. Laura Decker's illustrations humorously venerate celebrity and bemoan social constructs of femininity. Alison Buck's performative videos are a tour de force of feminine strength and resolve and Amy Jorgensen's body is her subject in the documentation of a 48 hour performance. Joseph Christensen's biomorphic sculpture recalls a geode, but has uncanny allusions to the body as well. Aniko Safran's photographic self-portraits re-perform the identities of historic male performance artists, and Jorge Rojas will be performing for the duration of the opening as insight to his interlocutor's psyches are revealed via tortillas.

West of Center opens July 16 from 6-9pm at Jancar Gallery and runs through August 6.

By   Mon, Jul 11, 2011

There once was a fisherman named, William, whose only friends in the world were the ocean and the creatures that lived in it….One day while William was exploring the ocean floor, he stumbled upon the most amazing sea creature he had ever seen in his life…

Inspired largely by fairy tales, mythology and his childhood fascination with horror films, Morgan’s work explores universal human experiences – the 7 Deadly Sins and the unfolding of consciousness- and reflects how people orchestrate their own private worlds to make sense of relationships and life on the material plane.

Beneath the Sea follows the story of William, a lonely fisherman who spends his days searching for the most unique sea creatures to fill his home aquarium. William’s is a quest for fulfillment leading to capture and containment and the consequences of taking what has not been freely offered.

Morgan builds elaborate miniature sets that hold one stunning animated moment after the next. He also blends puppets with photographed or painted stop-motion figures, continuing to explore new relationships between the mediums. Morgan says, “The narrative always complements the process. A common theme involves the protagonist overcoming adversity by using creativity as a solution, or in some cases, discovering the power of one’s creativity as a force to be reckoned with.” His films are distinguished by their clever skill, emotional power and direct simplicity.

By   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

Simone Lueck: CubaTV

Jeffrey Milstein: Cuba - In The Streets

Jeffrey Milstein's Cuba is a rhythmic, colorful, sophisticated, and intimate isolated island that has long existed in a state of paralysis, immobile in time. Milstein captures and delves deep into the beauty, soul, and the extremes of Cuba's urban life, the character of its people, the atmosphere of the region, and the country's visual attractions and landscape. Capturing streetscape and street life in Havana, Cienguegos, Santiago, and Trinidad, these photographs provide a rare glimpse into a place that has remained inaccessible to many in the United States.

By   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

Drawing on the cultural and geographic influences of his California roots, Greg Miller explores images of the American urban and rural landscape of the mid-twentieth century. The work grabs us nostalgically, rousing a hared cultural memory, but also teaches something of their lingering pull on contemporary perception.

Labeled a “neo-pop” and “post-pop” artist by such critics as Donald Kuspit and Peter Frank, Miller does indeed draw from the pop-cultural imagery that saturated American consciousness during the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was a time during which advertising and text became indelibly encrypted into our experience of everyday life. Life as “advertised” and life as “lived” were insuperably intertwined on the pages of “LIFE” and “LOOK” magazines, on television shows, commercials, billboards, hotel signs, romance novels and even matchbook covers as never before. Miller’s paintings excavate this imagery and often appear as unreconstructed fragments of these signs, drips, patterns and phrases. These form the layers of Miller’s pop cultural imagery, both literally and figuratively.

Greg Miller's work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation. The Get Go, a volume of his writings, photography and paintings, was published in 2010, and the first comprehensive monograph on the artist, Signs of the Nearly Actual, was published in 2008.

By   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

In 1989, Nelson was selected to be in the prestigious Whitney Biennial. Known for working within a Postmodern sensibility, Nelson combined minimalist form and art historical content culled from artists ranging from Titian to Turner. Her choice to paint on a simple form—a square, wooden box—is a nod to such Modern Masters as Donald Judd. Transcending into the realm of sculptural objecthood, Nelson's paintings have a distinctly contemporary feel while cultivating their place within a long history of landscape painting.

Her newest work continues to combine Minimalist form and Post-historical subject matter while capturing a complexity that brings new life to her unique practice. Inspired by the beautifully lush and remote area in which she lives, Nelson keeps a visual database in her mind that she draws from for her paintings. This process of internalizing her surroundings allows her to represent more the presence of a tree or vine, for example, as opposed to its mere representation.

Playing with the idea of what nature is, and subsequently her role as an artist within it, Nelson brilliantly and subtly manipulates paint and allows it to realize its own nature and materiality.

By   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

Drawn to the romanticism of process, both artists share Neo-Constructivist underpinnings that rekindle notions of assemblage, "specific objects" and spatial engagement. Their choice in material and medium is pivotal to their practice, as they mine the everyday, discarded and peripheral for avenues to explore the substance, matter and presence of the human touch. Ryman fabricates sculptural paintings and installations that allude to a Judd-esque use of environment as art. He appropriates the space into his work with hidden strips of neon paint that toss warm hues upon a white wall, or playful stacks of wooden blocks hidden in an unassuming corner. Organic and spontaneous, his work makes reference to the action of art making while still engaging in the objet d'art – facetiously presenting scraps, glue and shavings as the precious refuse of the action itself.

Similarly methodical, Johnson belabors an operational aesthetic, meticulously building and drafting the constituents of mechanical gadgets and commodities that shape our cultural preoccupations. Rooted in the pop spirit of beautifully ordinary, Johnson dissects and scrutinizes a Polaroid camera the way an early scientist would a specimen or Oldenburg would a clothespin. Johnson invites a nostalgic relationship between viewer and object, oftentimes personifying the inanimate to illustrate the social construct of accumulation as an extension of oneself. Crafted from the ordinary materials of art transport, Johnson's cardboard, tape and plywood sculptures offer shrewd insight to role of context in our understanding of the precious and commonplace.

Born in 1975 (Kansas City, MO), Kiel Johnson received his received his MFA at California State University, Long Beach (CA). He has received numerous awards and honors including the Pollock-Krasner Grant, 2008; and the Durfee Foundation ARC Grant, 2007. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City and Irvine, in addition to museum exhibitions at the Taubman Museum of Art (VA) and McNay Museum (TX). His work appears in several important public and private collections including the Creative Artist Agency (CA), Tubert International (CA), Steve Martin Collection (NY), Todd Oldham (NY), and Sprint World Headquarters (MO). Johnson currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Born in 1971 (New York, NY), Cordy Ryman received his BFA - with honors - from the School of Visual Fine Arts/Art Education (NY). In addition to solo shows in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Munich, Brussels and Gilleleje, he has been featured in exhibitions at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (NY) and Museum of Contemporary Art (FL). His work has been acquired for the public collections of Microsoft (WA), Museum of Contemporary Art (FL), Raussmuller Collection (Basel), RD Merrill (WA), Rubell Family Collection (FL), Speyer Family Collection (NY) and the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection (WA).

By   Mon, Jul 11, 2011

 Jade Bemiller is the daughter of Offramp artists Megann Zwierlein and Quinton Bemiller. Four-year-old Jade was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) on April 29 of this year. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles and will be in treatment for another two and a half years. Her prognosis is good but it will be a long journey.

There will be an opening reception with the artists on Sunday, July 17 from 2-5pm and a closing reception on Sunday, July 31 from 2-5pm.

www.offrampgallery.com/bemiller_benefit.html

Participating Artists: Lisa Adams, Frank Alvarado, Elonda Billera, Quinton Bemiller, Richard Bruland, Anita Bunn, Marilyn Cvitanic, Joyce Dallal, Jason Dawes, Asad Faulwell, Chuck Feesago, Sandra Gallegos, Janice Gomez, James Griffith, D. Jean Hester, Stanton Hunter, Myron Kaufman, Bianca Kolonusz-Partee, Kimi Kolba, Nicholette Kominos, Linsley Lambert, Pamela Lewis, Megan Madzeoff, Tony Maher, Kristan Marvel, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Tom Norris, David Pagel, Laura Parker, Josh Peters, Frederika Roeder, Susan Sironi, Veronica Stensby, Theodore Svenningsen, Jackie Tchakalian, Rebecca Trawick, Ruth Trotter, Michelle Wiener . . . and more.

By   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

Ever since he first started exhibiting in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, George Herms has been a central figure in the development of so-called West Coast aesthetic. Influenced by a beat generation more attuned to the musical nuance of the everyday than the modernist requiem to order, Herms's commitment to counterculture is expressed through his use of impoverished materials and his rejection of compositional devices in favor of loose associations of materials and ideas. The resulting assemblages blur the boundaries between art and life to make of each the other. Herms salvages elements from the trash heap of popular culture, combining them with words and phrases to create final entities that are neither pure thought, nor pure object—they are both prop and proposition. At times, Herms has been associated with landmarks of the developing L.A. art scene—Wallace Berman and Semina, Walter Hopps and the Ferus Gallery, Dennis Hopper and the film culture of Easy Rider—but his art has refused any singular identification. An advocate of all things free—spirit, material, and love—Herms is the spiritual godfather to an art of the unknown, forging something out of nothing, which continues to be a driving compulsion of artists today.

In 2008, Herms was invited to Florence by designer Adam Kimmel who was being celebrated by the fashion event organizer Pitti Imagine. It was there that he got to know and hang out with a generation of New York–based artists, including Lizzi Bougatsos, Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Ryan McGinley, and Rita Ackermann, along with artists from a somewhat older generation, namely Ari Marcopoulos, and Jack Pierson. Herms’s predilection for privileging the found over the made and for using the raw materials around him as the stuff of his art immediately dovetailed with the raw, unfiltered, and anti-art-establishment tendencies of a group that came of age when ever-higher production values corresponded with auction records and spiritual bankruptcy. Like the open dialogue that fueled the Semina collaborations of Berman, Herms, Hopper, Edward Kienholz, and others, this is a group for whom the free trade of ideas and art blurs the boundaries, not just of authorship, but also of distinctions between art and the everyday.

George Herms: Xenophilia: (Love of the Unknown) embraces these tendencies. Exploring the notion of assemblage from both material and conceptual viewpoints, the exhibition displays Herms’s signature junk art of the past six decades and recent collages alongside the work of a group of much younger artists from both coasts. The presentation merges the New York School, which emerged out of the first decade of this century, with artists from a similar generation who are living and working in Herms’s hometown of Los Angeles. The opportunity to reconsider not just the centrality of Herms's role but also the spiritual and material legacy of his improvisational aesthetic is offered out of the chaos.

The exhibition features works from a circle of friends Herms found in Florence, as well as artists introduced to him by the exhibition curator, Neville Wakefield, including Rita Ackermann, Kathryn Andrews, Lizzi Bougatsos, Robert Branaman, Dan Colen, Leo Fitzpatrick, Elliott Hundley, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Ari Marcopoulos, Ryan McGinley, Melodie Mousset, Jack Pierson, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sterling Ruby, Agathe Snow, Ryan Trecartin, Kaari Upson, and Aaron Young.

By   Mon, Jul 11, 2011

A key figure in the development of abstraction in Latin America, Szyszlo’s art evokes the beauty and mystery of Pre-Hispanic culture with a modern artistic language. Rich textural effects, lyrical color and a mastery of light and shadow characterize Szyszlo’s paintings. His art reflects broad cultural sources that include literature, philosophy and science. Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, says of Szyszlo’s art:

“Latin America exists in what we see and enjoy, in what disturbs, excites and also identifies us. This is what happens to us with the stories of Borges or Octavio Paz, the paintings of Tamayo or Matta. It also happens with the paintings of Szyszlo: this is Latin America in its highest expression, the best of what we are and what we possess.”

Born in Peru in 1925, Szyszlo had his first one-man show in 1947. Two years later he moved to Paris (1949-1954) where he met Andre Breton, Rufino Tamayo and Octavio Paz. Szyszlo has received over one hundred solo exhibitions, and exhibited at institutions world wide, including: Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico; The Art Institute, Chicago; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. The artist currently lives and works in Lima, Peru.

By   Mon, Jul 11, 2011

 Shadowlighter consists of works from two new series of airbrushed paintings. One untitled series consists of black-on-black paintings created with layers of matte and gloss paints. At first glance the surface of each painting appears to be a black, minimalist plane; but as viewers walk before the canvas the gloss paint seems to refract, revealing an elaborate representational composition of figures, like a drawing of a crowd by Bruegel the Elder. Depending upon light, time of day, and placement of the painting, the figures appear and dissolve, haunting the edge of visibility and perception.

Feldman’s other series, called the  Albedo Paintings, was created with white paint on white fabric; these works use ultraviolet-reactive paint and are exhibited under black light. The imagery is invisible until displayed under black lights, which causes the white paint to appear dark and the UV sensitive fabric to glow, thus revealing a high-contrast yet seemingly vaporous emergence of figures.

In both series, Feldman forms tension between individual and crowd, uniqueness and difference, abstraction and representation. His paintings are dense whirlwinds of figures that celebrate, protest, consume, dance, and embrace – juxtaposed against others that mourn, drown, burn, and dissolve. The crowds evoke the power and ecstasy of unified intention alongside a descent into mob mentality. The images recall the utopian pursuit of 1960s psychedelia, van murals, tattoos, and other airbrushed art forms. Historically, the airbrush – with its potential for soft edges and colors – is often used to idealize. For Feldman, the airbrush is a tool used to create images that reveal a thin veil between utopia and dystopia, civilization and chaos.

Roni Feldman (b. 1980 Los Angeles, CA) earned his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2008 and his BA from the College of Creative Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2002. He has had solo exhibitions at Toomey-Tourell Fine Art, San Francisco, CA; L2Kontemporary, Los Angeles, CA; Wilson Street Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont, CA; and Sloan Fine Art, New York, NY.

By   Mon, Jul 11, 2011

American Essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes hailed photography as “the mirror with a memory.” Certainly, portrait photography presents us with a mirrored likeness. Yet portraits reveal more than the physiognomy of the sitter; like a mirror, they invite us to reflect on ourselves. Rather than presenting the viewer with the facts about a person, these portraits provoke inquiry and engage the viewer in a dialogue. What can we learn from a portrait? What do we read into a portrait?

No series evokes these questions as poignantly as Grant Mudford’s unique assemblage of gelatin silver prints. Mudford’s larger-than-life works, made in the late 1980s, offer an unvarnished look at the Southern California artists who were his friends. Like passport photographs, with the subject placed against a white background and in harsh light, they seem to reveal both everything and nothing. To create the 15 large-scale gelatin silver prints of the series, Mudford invited these Southern California artists to collaborate with him to create their portraits. The artist-subjects chose what they wore and presented themselves as they wished to be seen. For instance, Renée Petropoulos had just returned from a trip to Turkey and brought a Turkish wedding outfit to wear.

In spite of the unrelenting honesty that the camera reveals about the physical appearance of these artists, Mudford’s images urge the viewer to reconsider the deceptive nature of the photographic portrait. Mudford notes, “I think photography, at its most interesting, and at its best, is full of illusion and abstraction. That’s kind of what photographs do to things. They transform them into photographs. The photographs are no longer reality..”

In some cases, portrait photography can be deceptive; in other cases, it can be affirming. Roger Eberhard’s work compels us to look long and hard at the face of homelessness in Santa Barbara. While the tendency on the street is often to avert one’s gaze―whether from fear, disgust or shame―these images reveal some larger truths about our society and ourselves.

Framed In Good Light (from which the series takes its title) against a gray background, each person was given free rein to pose and offered the opportunity to include any props or significant others they desired. Cool and self-possessed, smiling broadly, or locked in an embrace, these participants were in control of the image they projected. Eberhard made a contract with and paid each of the participants. He spent a long time talking with his subjects in order to gain their trust, but the actual photo session lasted only five to ten minutes. At the end of the session, Eberhard gave a Polaroid print to each of his subjects and later he sent a larger print to each person who could supply an address.

By   Mon, Jul 11, 2011

Out of the Desert takes place in Los Angeles during an unusually hot day, the result of intense Santa Ana winds blowing in from the Mojave Desert. The people and the city are running at half speed. There is also a heightened tension--sexual, restrained, or aggressive, expressed in subtle ways--a stillness before the storm, as if something is about to explode. Out of the Desert consists of a series of scenes played out between a man and a woman on various indoor and outdoor locations in Los Angeles. In each of the scenes there is a man and a woman, and then there is something else happening between them, something more abstract that takes place in their mind. In one scene you see a woman in full figure, stretched out on the grass by the beach, playing with a lighter. On a second channel you see her sweater, lying beside her, catching on fire. On a third channel you see, again, a close up of her arm, however, in this projection a man's hand is holding her wrist in a firm grip, pressing it down into the grass.

Drawing from a northern European tradition that ascribes romantic, spiritual, and enigmatic qualities to the natural landscape, Lauta's video installations map internal and external states of consciousness and are characterized by an undertone of unresolved suspense--the latent fear of a fatal event that is not directly revealed. The artist's camera does not present a decisive moment but functions instead as an instrument of premonition and doubt. Austere light, a lush palette, and evocative sound combine in Lauta's work to create liminal spaces that linger in memory, bringing together feelings of exhilaration, suspense, and danger.

Laerke Lauta was born 1974 in Denmark and studied at the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen (Master of Arts, 2001), the Cooper Union, New York City (1997), and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1995-1997). Her works have been featured most recently in solo exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA, and Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA, as well as in numerous venues throughout Europe and the Middle East, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK; The National Gallery of Denmark; The Brandts Museum, DK; Randers Museum of Art, DK; Møstings Hus, Copenhangen; Aarhus Center for Contemporary Art, DK; Altonaer Museum, Hamburg, Germany; Landesgalerie/Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; 7th International Photography Gathering, Aleppo, Syria; and ARTGENDA-2002 Biennale for Young Artist, Hamburg, Germany, among others. Upcoming solo exhibitions include "Hotel Auralia" at the Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Denmark.

By   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

fragilee Hors devors is an exhibition featuring collaborative works by Matt Chambers and Alexander Wolff.  The following letter from Matt Chambers best explains the making of this exhibition.

To Whom It May Concern:

Alexander Wolff and I will be introducing a collaborative body of work at Steve Turner Contemporary (July 14 - August 13) in the exhibition fragilee Hors devors.

In the introduction to Seeing Out Louder Jerry Saltz wrote:

The closest I've come to getting a handle on what art may be is an idea that painter Eric Fischl has talked about. Imagine calling two pets, one a dog, the other a cat. Asking a dog to do something is amazing, riveting experience. You say, "Come here Fido;" Fido looks up, pads over, puts his head on your lap, pants, and wags his tail. You've had a direct communication with another species; you and Fido are sharing a common, fairly linear language. This is a very special experience.

Now imagine calling over the cat. You say, "Come here Snowflake." Snowflake might glance over, twitch once or twice, possible circle a nearby table leg, rub it, lie down, flick its tail, and look away from you. There's nothing direct in this. Yet something gigantic has happened, something very much like art. The cat has place a third thing between you and itself. In order to understand the cat you have to grasp this non-linear, indirect, circuitous strange mysterious miraculous communication.

In short, art is a cat.

That seemed to clarify things for a while. Now, thanks to a conversation I had with artist Diana Spungin, I see a rub in the theory. It is still true that to viewers and the outside world, art is a cat. But it turns out that to artists, art is a dog!

Not when Alexander and I work together. What started out as Alexander wanting to make some figurative paintings and me wanting to let some chaos into the studio has blossomed into a group of dense paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and a video.

In our first meetings we just talked, an activity that we both noticed was largely absent in our respective circles. We both had plenty of ideas but neither of us liked anything the other suggested, and so it was that disagreement got us to begin working together. More talking ensued, also some drinking, yelling, some more work, and then some more talking. The slow process akin to erosion or senate-floor debates created pieces without precedent. Differences of opinion were constant, and each of us fought for and honed our objectives with the understanding that no argument could be used twice. There is no common ground between us in regards to "what is cool" or "what is not cool." And in contrast to the current fashion in abstract painting and in our own solo practices, we used no system that would allow our work to repeat itself.

There is no good or bad. There is boring and interesting; and if you're interested in cats, I think you will find this work to be interesting.

Sincerely,

Matthew Chambers
7 July 2011

It should also be noted that approximately half of the collaborative works (as well as numerous of my own works) were lost in a fire that destroyed my studio in early June. Alexander, Andrew Kennedy, and I watched the fire spread from a neighboring building into the studio that I shared with Brendan Fowler. Lesson: document everything in your studio everyday you're there and keep copies in different locations, not for your ego, but to save headaches with lawyers, insurance companies, and authorities.

Born in Boise, Idaho in 1982, Chambers earned a BFA at The University of Miami (2004) and an MFA at Art Center College of Design (2006). He has had solo exhibitions at UNTITLED, New York (2010) and at Angstrom, Los Angeles (2007). Born in Ostenburg, Germany in 1976, Wolff earned a BFA at The National School of Fine Arts in Paris (1998) and an MFA at The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2002). He has had solo exhibitions at Studio Sandra Recio, Geneva (2011); Peles Empire, London (2010) and at Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Zurich (2010).

By   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

Loud Flash: British Punk on Paper tells its story through a unique collection of several hundred posters, flyers and other ephemera assembled by artist and erstwhile punk, Toby Mott. With the passion of a true fan and an artist’s eye for an image, he has gathered the evidence of the short life and premature, messy end of British Punk. There are iconic images by artists such as Jamie Reid and Linder Sterling, as well as flyers, gig posters, and zines, crudely cut and pasted by anonymous hands. A fascinating collection of political material supplies further context of a nation of unrest, torn by extremism, recording attempts by political extremes of both left and right to co-opt the power of youth.

Ephemeral and throwaway as each of these objects were, collected together they tell, in uniquely immediate and visual terms, a part of the history of Britain, the history of ideas, and the history of art. Punk has always exerted a fascination, but perhaps never stronger than at this moment. The legacy of punk has permeated modern culture and society, and its visual vocabulary infuses much contemporary art, while the punk spirit resonates in particular with the anti-elitist, DIY ethos of today’s young, blogging artists and musicians. This exhibition recalls the anarchic spirit of authenticity and amateurism, the volatile and ambiguous celebration of negativity, creativity, violence and protest that was Punk.

By   Sun, Jul 10, 2011

The title of the show is a nod to a book written in 1884 by Edwin A. Abbott that details the experiential perspective of flat shapes living in a two-dimensional world. The intrusion into their plane by a sphere begins a dialogue, as the sphere attempts to explain three-dimensions to a flat creature who has no mental or bodily reference for it. By way of analogy, the classic tale begs consideration of a fourth dimension in the mind of the reader, awakening one’s imagination to alternate realities.

Piqued by this mathematical parable, Hernandez is interested in what gets produced when two worlds (worldviews, architectures, structural systems) collide. In preparation for the exhibit, Hernandez configured the gallery into its simplest architectural form defined by raw studs and skeletal framework. Hernandez then replicated the exact proportions of EGHQ to scale in the Mojave Desert using standard 2x4 construction. The replicate structure bisected an abandoned homestead such that the two structures crossed paths, sharing a portion of common space.