By Craig Stephens   Fri, Mar 11, 2011

Video art may not be new, but it certainly seems to be undergoing a renaissance here in Los Angeles. Challenged by the less cumbersome immediacy of the Internet and a trend towards more conventional artforms at various teaching bodies, its popularity seemed to wane in the early naughties.

A plethora of exhibitions incorporating video, however, suggest its spark has been reignited. The cost effectiveness and accessibility of the technology now sees artists making greater use of it as a component of their repertoire.

Artists of worth are now enriching their creative pallet via various media to express their vision and creativity. In turn they show versatility by combining video with other forms such as installation, painting, design, and sculpture, as typified by the likes of Mike Kelly, Cindy Sherman, and John Baldessari, considered an early adopter of video art.

Korean artist Nam June Paik, a member of Fluxus, is often attributed as having played a pivotal role in introducing artists and audiences to the possibilities of using video for artistic expression. With early work haring back to 1967, he combined use of video with music and performance.

While not quite as confronting or profound as the work of June Paik, several current LA shows incorporating video art are still bags of fun and well worth a look.

Fittingly described as “painfully hilarious,” by the LA Times, Kirsten Stoltmann’s show at the at Emma Gray HQ is a nice Pythonesque homage – exploring the determination of a devoted suburban jogger, who casually endures a barrage of arrows and bullets while on a seemingly mundane quest for her daily endorphin fix.

Stoltmann has had an impressive run of shows with solo exhibitions at Cottage Home and Sister, Los Angeles, Guild & Greyshkul and Wallspace, New York, and exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery, London, The Center For Photography, Stockholm, Honor Fraser and Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, and Western Bridge, Seattle, among others. Her current LA show, I AM SO HAPPY at Emma Gray HG in Culver City runs through March 24, 2011, concurrent with her solo show at Brennan&Griffin New York.

Removed from predictable commerciality, Connie Samaras draws from an arsenal of themes and visions, from futurism to industrialization and beyond. Her show, ‘After The American Century,’ at the California Museum of Photography (UC Riverside), offers a more literal focus on architecture and geography than Stoltmann’s cinematic, comedic narrative. Devoted to “built environments, speculative landscapes, and global capitalism,” it has a focus on the inanimate, though still belies admirable humanism.

Other digital exploits this month include Jennifer Steinkamp at ACME Gallery. Steinkamp creates interactive video environments that are designed for specific architectural spaces, using digital projection to transform architectural space.

While her career began with brightly colored abstract projections, since 2003 she has increasingly incorporated nature-based imagery into her work — gnarled trees that twist, turn, and change seasons; rooms filled with undulating strands of flowers. Offering insight to describe her work, she says, “It's kind of this ambiguous state between representation and abstraction."

In addition to her job as a Professor of Design and Media Arts, Steinkamp’s work is part of the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and MOCA, North Miami. She has been the recipient of two NEA grants, the Getty Individual grant, a research grant from Art Center College of Design, and two Art Matters grants.

L.A. Louvre plays host to Terry Allen, an artist and country music songwriter who uses video as a core component of his work. Since 1966 Allen has worked in a wide variety of media including musical and theatrical performances, sculpture, painting, drawing and video, and installations

His work, GHOST SHIP RODEZ: The Momo Chronicles, comprises a musical and narrative component, as well as a sculptural installation resembling a ship. Allen pursues a fictional investigation of what may have happened to French artist, playwright and actor Antonin Artaud during a 17-day journey restrained in the dark hold of the freighter Washington in 1937, and later, in various mental institutions.

The work features two large-scale video/sculpture works, metaphorical vessels constructed using books as a bough, with a metal frame mast on which sails serve a projection surface evoke the environment of the ship hold and the cot to which Artaud was laid captive. These sails or screens display projected excerpts of films in which Artaud performed.

MOMO Lo Mismo is a 40-minute recorded performance. In this sound-based piece, actress, writer and artist Jo Harvey Allen performs as the voice of “Daughter of the Heart,” a clairvoyant chameleon and multi-voiced narrator.

Video installation/performance artist Tiffany Trenda may be best know for her interpretation of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ "Le Grande Odalisque," featuring a live image of the artist as the subject on a video loop. Trenda received her BFA from Art Center College of Design. She has exhibited at Robert Berman, Farmani Gallery, Photo San Francisco, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Korean Cultural Center, Highways, and Track 16.

Her process is to take technology (LCDs, video projectors, cameras, etc.) and create a digital environment with an embodied performance that simulates the human psyche. Her work is an investigation of how we are defined and redefined through the integration of technology. Trenda amalgamates LCD screens and her body making her identity interchangeable.

Another worthy contender, Downtown’s diamond in the rough venue Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA) will stimulate and accommodate with their forthcoming show entitled “Analog to Digital,” featuring artists Joel-Peter Witkin, Mark Mothersbough and John Baldessari, among many others, who will explore conceptual relationships between the two forms.

By Anthony Miller   Fri, Mar 11, 2011

Suzan Woodruff’s viscous vistas conduct the viewer through mesmeric realms where colors seem potentially sentient, diffusing, roiling, billowing, erupting their way across surfaces of cosmic commotion.  The multihued tendrils and filaments that spread, striate and stratify before the eye bring to mind every manifestation of dynamic natural-world activity from the motions of tides and tempests to the configurations of solar flares and fractal patterns.  (Think also of the swirling clouds spurring Mitchell Feigenbaum on to his epiphanies in chaos theory.)  Some of these abstractions resemble satellite photographs of the Earth or distant nebulae or galaxies.  Other paintings appear as if summoned from within the Earth’s churning molten core.  Woodruff is a sensitive cartographer of deliquescent chromatic terrains, an acute surveyor of tumultuous ecosystems of radiance and perception.

For Woodruff, to paint is to embrace chaos.  “It’s the one thing I can count on,” she says.  To make a pact with chaos, she explains, means maintaining an intuitive balance between concentration and recognition of the forces of natural occurrence, understanding the rigor required in allowing for the unanticipated in her art.  Woodruff finds inspiration in art which makes its own personal covenant with the void, which delves into enigmas of light and color: O’Keeffe’s bold topography, Rothko’s deep abysses, Turrell’s optic environments, and the unearthly portraiture of that technological Eye of Providence known as the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Communication between elemental worlds lies at the heart of Woodruff’s “Psychopomp” series, a psychopomp being both a spiritual ambassador to the afterlife and a Jungian term for a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious.  Nature is this artist’s perpetual touchstone.  When bands of nacreous paint in a corner of “Psychopomp II” sparkle with the aventurescent shimmer I liken to the interior of a geode, Woodruff tells me about her grandfather, an Arizona prospector, and growing up around minerals and ores from his backyard mine in the desert. 

Luminous Matters describes Woodruff’s work to be sure, but also asserts that the luminous matters, that light holds the key to greater illumination.  Kabbalists spoke of prophecy as the act of looking into a “luminous mirror.”  An alternative title or a subtitle to Luminous Matters could be Light and Color (Woodruff’s Theory), after J.M.W. Turner’s 1843 supernatural vortex “Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory),” his depiction of the morning light after the great deluge.  “The sun is God,” proclaimed an expiring Turner, whose majestic nimbuses find a way to waft into Woodruff’s “Properties of Light” and “Luminiferous.”  Luminosity is revelation, deliverance out of darkness.  Woodruff’s images provoke the viewer to see with new eyes.

By Shana Nys Dambrot   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

The assembled artists all use stripes and layers as formal constructs -- but each has found a way to transform this staple of abstraction into genuinely expressive, individually poignant, and even quasi-narrative works of affecting beauty. Among them are those engaged with the current of life in a city, those finding their inspiration away from the man-made environment, and those who seduce the pattern-finding impulse in the mind of the viewer. The show presents works of heavy, gestural pigmentation; the cool regard of photographic science; the topographical layers of mixed media collage; and instances where evidence of the artist’s hand has been obscured. Above all, it demonstrates just how salient, resilient, malleable, and, so to speak, solid the stripe can be when it representing everything from a street, to a cresting wave, an emotion, or even an idea.

Nature is a fecund realm of astonishing power and chaotic harmony, where a prismatic array of simultaneous phenomena self-choreographs each moment of existence. Though sometimes cruel and destructive, the natural world is also a place of simple beauty and awe-inspiring splendor. Cities are bustling places that offer alternately vibrant, dangerous, crowded, lonely, sublime, terrifying, inspiring, haunted, architectural, energetic, intellectual, and violent experiences. Both city and nature are archives of interlocking histories; multidimensional, ever-changing networks of generations that continually replace, displace, and build upon one another, like the soil and stone in the strata of the Earth beneath our streets. Moving between these layers of Life and lives is man, who among his faculties are counted both the gift and the drive to try and sort all of this out.

Andy Moses generates a new visual language, using the forces and rhythms of gravity instead of brushes to create ambiguously evocative non-landscapes. Jay Mark Johnson’s hi-tech photographs reverse the usual roles of movement and solidity, capturing unmediated images of the outside world that are as much brain science and document. Philippa Blair uses a fair variety of techniques, the better to encapsulate something essential about the meandering way a city shudders into being over centuries, and what it is like to navigate that in real life. Painter Christopher L. Mercier organizes images and spaces in way that resolves the age-old battle between line and color, using masses of paint to conflate the x, y, and z axes in playful, unsettling tableaux. Gretel Stephens seems to turn line on its head, forcing paint into flattened, luminous cross-sections like halos, or single rings of a tree. Raul de la Torre is perhaps the most ebullient of the bunch, compressing linear splashes of latitude and longitude into colorful gestures that speak to the accumulation of memories.

--Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles 2011

On Saturday, April 2, from 3pm to 6pm, LAUNCH will host an artist discussion and reception at the gallery with participating artists, Shana Nys Dambrot and LAUNCH Director James Panozzo.

LAUNCH is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit social enterprise created in 2010 to produce, manage and direct events, programs and exhibitions for the purpose of developing artist - audience relationships throughout important Los Angeles communities. Passionate about promoting all contemporary art-forms and their hybrids, LAUNCH recognizes the need for exemplary productions that create important cultural happenings. With the assistance of commercial partners, cultural institutions and like-minded individuals and organizations, LAUNCH strives to engage a broad cross section of Angelenos in cultural events that foster mutual understanding and creative expression.

By   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

The exhibition, titled The Dialogue, is comprised of two recent kinetic sculptures that reference notions of passing time and Zen Buddhist philosophy. Each piece is constructed of sturdy redwood set in a platformed grid that sits inside a shallow pool of water. Suspended above the 5’ tall structures is an inverted pyramid consisting coral pebbles suspended in ice. As the ice melts the pebbles fall and create random sounds as they percuss the resonant natural materials of each piece. Bamboo, wood, and guitar strings produce Grimmer’s random organic and earthy music. These dynamic ‘performance’ installations directly reflect Grimmer’s lifelong interest in the natural world, aleatory music, and pay homage to artist/ composer John Cage whom Grimmer presented a project with at MOCA in 1993.

Grimmer’s exhibition at Koplin Del Rio comes on the heels of her 2010 solo show at the Irving Arts Center in Dallas, Texas where five recent sculptural works were on display. Further recent exhibitions include a solo show at the Menil in Houston, and group shows at the San Jose Museum, the Schneider Museum in Ashland, Oregon and the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. Grimmer’s work resides in the collections of the Menil, The Smithsonian Institute, The Norton Foundation and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, among others. Born in Japan, she earned a BA degree from Iwate University and BFA and MFA degrees from Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design (now Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles.

By   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

Frances Barth synthesizes contradictory ways of expressing light and space in her paintings that challenge the viewers’ notions of pictorial space and time. She pulls together different visual vernaculars for representing space, from geological landscapes and mapping to animation and abstraction. Layering expanses of painted colors with cartographical lines rendered with hand-made stencils and engineering drafting pencils, Barth affords the viewer an aerial perspective one moment, and in another, intimate views of lengths of abstract color.

As these landscapes expand and contract, they convey a flatness and volume simultaneously. Barth’s works demand that the viewer pause and consider the possibilities of painterly space and abstract geometric compositions. There is a powerful sense that these landscapes are moving, and are even in the process of becoming, and as such, her paintings convey a strong narrative quality.

As the viewer is shifted from one perspective to another in the same work, a sort of visual montage is created. These moments overlap but do not merge, and on one level, bring a sense of dislocation, and on another, imply the passage of time. Like her disparate perspectives, Barth’s use of indefinable and elusive color—in which hues are taken out of context further creates a sense of spatial dislocation.

A director of the Mt. Royal School of Art, Maryland Institute, Barth has exhibited extensively across the United States. Her paintings are included in prominent collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. Her work is also included in private collections including Chase Manhattan Bank and IBM Corporation, New York.

By   Mon, Mar 14, 2011

The first large-scale survey to present the innovative sculptures of Los Angeles based artist Phyllis Green, Splendid Entities highlights the important contribution Green has made to art and craft for more than two decades. Throughout her career Green has used the traditional techniques of craft to achieve unconventional outcomes in the realm of fine art. Cleverly combining such materials as clay, wood and fiber, she produces sculpture that pushes beyond the traditional boundaries of craft and challenges the lingering modernist assumption that decoration and ornament are enemies of high art. Many of her mixed media objects are hybrids of symbolic male and female representation: perforated and projecting, soft and hard, inside and outside. In her series Turkish Bath, amorphous organic forms recline on pillows, invoking the captive, reclining nudes in J.A.D. Ingres' Le Bain Turc, the painting from which the series takes its name. They are loaded to evoke all manner of “female” allusions by their small size and by the multi-layered use of flocking, feathers and fabric. The use of body imagery as form and content, and the location of the body as a site of desire and identity are consistent features of Green's artistic output between 1985-2010, the period on which the exhibition focuses.

This exhibition includes over forty objects, including small-scale reductive sculpture from the mid 1980's; an installation that recreates a portion of Green’s acclaimed Turkish Bath series; works from the Hairdo series; groundbreaking pairings of actual and virtual modeled objects that represent her work with animation video; and a provocative grouping of new forms, not previously exhibited, in clay and fabric that the artist refers to as “Odd Old Things.”

Raised in Canada, Phyllis Green moved to California and received her M.F.A. from UCLA in 1981. During the decades that established LA as a major force in global contemporary art, she developed a career as an influential and respected artist, teacher, curator and arts activist in the region. In addition to commentary on issues of feminism and craft, her practice reveals the pervasive influence of modernism and the recurrent expression of the self, themes that have preoccupied many West Coast artists. Few, however, have produced the witty and polished bodies of work that Green has done so consistently. She is the recipient of individual artist's fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, The Cultural Affairs Division of the City of Santa Monica, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; and was among the first group of artists awarded a COLA grant by the City of Los Angeles in 1996. Her work has been exhibited extensively locally, nationally and internationally. She has lectured in colleges and universities around the world, and currently is an adjunct faculty member at Loyola Marymount University and Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California. Phyllis Green produced and hosted a radio show on the visual arts, “LOOK/ hear” on KXLU, Los Angeles, from 1996-1998. She was appointed to the Santa Monica Arts Commission in 2000, and served as Chair from 2004 to 2006.

By   Sat, Mar 12, 2011

Los Angeles is a natural incubator for the development of video art, with more working artists than any other U.S. city and greater access to the converging influences of the entertainment industries - television, movies, music, and technology.

Readymade777 is one of an emerging breed of Los Angeles video artists who have been quick to adopt video as their medium of choice, and develop a unique style he refers to as “assemblages.” Although carefully orchestrated, each video works much in the way the mind delivers unexpected associations, forgotten memories, random thoughts triggered by seemingly arbitrary experiences.

We sat down with RM777 to discuss his work and influences.

AWLA: It appears that video art is not only making a “comeback” of sorts, it seems to be evolving into many sub-genres.  How would you define video art?

Readymade777: 'Video art' begs to be defined. Defining any form of art, however, violates every rule in the book.  (There's a book?)  An art piece should speak for itself, so when someone finds that they have to explain themselves in order to make the experience more palatable it destroys the initial unique experience. As an anonymous video artist, I believe that the identity of an artist shouldn't speak for the creation. The creation should stand alone as a genuine artwork.

AWLA: Describe your work for us? What makes it distinct from the work of other video artists?

RM777: In my “assemblages”, I have integrated my love for Marcel Duchamp with my own collected found footage.  I wanted to essentially incorporate the concept of the "readymade" (which describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function.) Duchamp was the originator of this idea in the early twentieth century.  In my case, I take existing pieces of visual media, and edit it into a flow that feeds into the subconscious. I want to allow the entire process and experience of video art to evolve into a new form.  There is no right or wrong way to watch the work.  Some forms of experiencing it have included installations, on television, in shop windows, and on YouTube (which was what they were originally designed for).  YouTube seems to have become one of the primary ways of absorbing our visual media, whether it be news, dramas, silly skits, daring stunts, or video letters to loved ones.  I think there is a lot of conceptual ground to be covered in that space where people go to get their visual fix. 

AWLA: So then, what would you say is your objective, your intention in piecing together these appropriated video clips? What response, if any, are you aiming for?

RM777: I try to take a little bit of everything and crank it all up into a form that is so fast and so vibrant and sensational, that I almost dull one's senses, hopefully causing those who watch my work to be painfully well-aware of the way we are manipulated daily by images and advertising.   My primary goal however is to entertain.  Bombarding a person with messages can be insulting or pretentious, and so I usually try to abandon all forms of obvious messages. 

AWLA: Can you give us an example?

RM777: In Readymade777's inception, I wanted to create an experience that is evoked when you find an old VHS tape.  You have no idea what is on it so you curiously watch it.  Upon playing the tape, the realization is immediate. This is one of those tapes that you have used to tape at least 100 shows. As you watch, one layer after another is peeled away, and each show blips to another, each reminding you of what your interests were at the time. You see all the things you used to watch. The "monster" film, Cloverfield is based on this concept.  You are watching a found tape for 90 minutes.  In my work, there may even be a quick little blip from your video-taped birthday that got erased.  It's all there, a minor history of the things you used to love, being quickly laid out for you in a span of minutes.  THIS is the experience that I wanted to create.  THIS is a new exploration of old treasures.  THIS is what I want the viewer to feel.   

AWLA: How do you accomplish this and, maybe more important, what have you found is the best way to deliver this concept to your audience?

RM777: As a result of this fascination, I digitally recorded all the VHS and static I could get my hands on. The idea was to use each piece of noise as a transition that takes you to the next place. The work appears totally random, but there is in fact a very well calculated symmetry involved in each work. 

Curators of this readymade video art have put their own visions and ideas to use. Some have looped a few of my pieces onto one DVD so as to make a 1/2 hour work that repeats itself.  This concept actually works quite well considering that I like the idea of the work hanging on a wall appearing much as an intriguing painting might appear.  There is a plethora of different intricate brush strokes. Each stroke typically isn't questioned or analyzed, rather one is made to step back from the work as a whole and take it in...as a whole. Each time one passes it, hopefully you will see something different.  It is with this idea in mind, and the combination of sound and visuals, that I hope to create a hyper-real experience.

AWLA: One last question. Who are your influences in the field? Which video artists’ are you interested in and moved by? Why?

RM777: My influences range far and wide.  The whole idea that we are influenced by all sorts of media around us holds true to myself as well. If I fall in love with the shape of a Coke bottle, it immediately influences how I make my work.  Other video artists that I have been primarily moved by include Pipilotti Rist, Bill Viola, and Michael C. McMillen.  My main influences, however, lie in cinema. Ever since my parents took me to my first Ingmar Bergman film in a theater, I have been hooked. The main reason why I took on art in a video form though was so I could shape it into my own idea what is fun, relevant and interesting.  I had no interest in following guidelines of what video art should be, because as I mentioned before, there should be no rules.

To view more work by Readymade777 go to: http://www.youtube.com/user/readymade7777

By   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

Artillery Magazine presents a selection of eight video shorts empathically framing behavior outside the norm: celebrity martyrs, social outliers, sexual taboo detonation experts, and obsessed rocketeers. The 30-minute program culled from a nation-wide open call will be screened at the Standard’s Purple Lounge in West Hollywood on April 5th. The line-up includes artists and filmmakers from Los Angeles and New York City many of whom will attend the screening:

Zig Gron, ApocoLips, LA filmaker
McLean Fahnestock, Grand Finale, LA artist
Readymade 777: It's My Desire, LA filmmaker
Jules Marquis’s Just You and Me, NYC art collaborative
Anne Sherwood Pundyk, My Atlas: Lindsay/A Report to an Academy, NYC artist
Lindsey Schulz: Rabbit Hole, LA artist
Sister: The Cutter, LA film Collaborative
Meghan Weinstein: Keepin' it Real With Keisha, LA artist

The judges, Tulsa Kinney (editor of Artillery), Steve Cioffi (videographer), and Paige Wery (publisher of Artillery) selected this outstanding video footage to be screened at the event, after which the audience will vote on the winners.

The evening will begin with a wine reception at 7pm, followed by the screening at 8pm and is free of charge.  The Standard offers $8 valet parking with validation for screening attendees.

By   Sun, Mar 13, 2011

More than 60 local artists and performers will have their private studios and works on view at the fifth annual Santa Monica Airport ArtWalk, including Santa Monica Art Studios, Santa Monica College Art Mentor Program and Ceramic Arts and the Ruskin Group Theatre. The airport arts community is a unique, cultural resource located in one of L.A. County’s oldest operating airfields. Throughout the day there will be firing demonstrations of Raku Japanese pottery, highlights from the Ruskin Group Theatre’s popular monthly offering L.A. Café Plays and theater and art workshops for kids. The Mad Alsacians, an accordion-driven ensemble, will perform traditional 1930s – 60s French music and food will be offered from local restaurants Typhoon and Spitfire Grill and the Border Grill food truck and The Sweets Truck.

ARENA 1 Gallery presents the exhibit Evolution Revolution: The Interconnectedness of All Beings, a collaborative art exhibition and forum between Buddha Cat Press, ten renowned visual artists, Santa Monica Studios and SociArts Productions. The team has come together to produce a socially conscious exhibition focusing on animal welfare and the environment. The mission of this project is to use art to open new dialogues and explore human perceptions about nature and the environment, awakening and inviting people to make more conscious decisions about their food, clothing, pet and lifestyle choices. The exhibition is curated by Karen Fiorito.

The Museum of Flying will have a sneak preview of their collections, exhibits, aircraft, and educational programs that will be offered when they re-open in late summer 2011.

The ArtWalk is part of Buy Local Santa Monica Expo 2011, a free community event dedicated to showcasing local businesses and the importance of buying local.

Event Details
Who: General public
What: 5th Annual Santa Monica Airport ArtWalk
Where: Santa Monica Airport, along Airport Avenue, between Bundy Drive and 23rd Street
When: Saturday, March 19, 12-5pm
Cost: Free Admission, Free parking, Free bike valet

For a brochure click here.

By   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

Obey Giant Art, Subliminal Projects, and Robert Berman Gallery present REVOLUTIONS, a project featuring the Album Cover Art of Shepard Fairey. This exhibition consists of over 80 pieces of Punk, Rock, New Wave, Jazz, and Hip-Hop inspired artwork based on the 12" record cover format. To mark this occasion, two special Limited Edition Album Cover Print Box sets will be released for the exhibition.

“Long before I knew about art galleries or even street art, I was excited about album cover art, if only because it was the visual counterpart to the music on the records. Album covers conjured a euphoric association with the listening experience. Most of my earliest home-made tee shirts were stencils based on punk album covers. I've had some very moving encounters with art in my life, especially in the street, but nothing can compare with the first time I heard the boots marching and first chord of the Sex Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun," or the air raid sirens leading into "too black, too strong" on Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, or the opening guitar scream of Black Flag's "Rise Above". That music makes my arm hairs stand up. Music is visceral and accessible, but also has the additional powerful layers of the lyrics with their content and politics, the style and personalities of the musicians, and the politics of their lifestyles. No matter how much I love art, or try to convince myself of its relevance in society, the fact remains that music is a lot cooler and way more able to reach people's hearts and minds... but I'm a populist and I look at this way: I may not play an instrument, but I'm gonna rock it hard as nails anyway. REVOLUTIONS is a celebration of all the great music and accompanying art that has inspired me over the years." - Shepard

By   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

Painter Vija Celmins, born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, has lived and worked primarily in New York since 1981. She immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of ten to Indiana where she attended the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis before completing an MFA degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965. With a palette focused on the gradations between black and gray, Celmins has been known since then as a painter of refined representational images—including night skies, ocean waves and spider webs. But the images that first grounded her interest were of war planes, smoking guns, and other images of death and disaster. In both instances, the precisely rendered paintings suggest the importance of slowness in viewing art and an attention to detail that is about her equally patient process. Though often associated with the Pop Artists of the 1960s, Celmins' work is equally indebted to Conceptualism.

Organized by The Menil Collection and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964–1966 will be the first exhibition to concentrate on an important segment of Celmins' art dictated by a specific time and subject matter. Recent survey exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have concentrated on her drawings and prints respectively. With approximately fourteen paintings and two small sculptures, this exhibition, organized by Franklin Sirmans and Michelle White, is the first to look at this distinct period, from 1964–1968, in this important artist's development.

Though Celmins often uses photographs from nature as source material, her early output reflects the mediated view of the first televised war. While several early images came from her own interest in painting common objects from the studio, such as the television itself or a lamp, this exhibition concentrates on images of war and the power (or lack thereof) of mediated representations. As the abundance of images continues to be maximized in the present, Celmins' work from this pivotal time, reflects on the moment when the printed image gave way to the ubiquitous screen of the television, updated today with the computer.

By   Mon, Mar 14, 2011

Wheeler’s installation is more poetic than narrative in structure, and more reflective than analytic in tone. Containing both video and structural elements, the project is an elegy to the struggle of a single life, with its grind and pull, and momentary flashes of beauty. With Bloom, Wheeler continues in the vein for which he is well known: stretching our perceptions of the everyday with canny juxtapositions, an eye for the metaphorical, and meticulous craftsmanship.

The darkened room is entered through a low Romanesque tunnel made of recycled paper bricks, forcing a physical engagement with the viewer at the outset. Inside, a video is projected in a clockwise movement around a velodrome-like circular track, minimalist in its construction. The video comprises a simple, but miraculous activity: a small bee swimming across a watery surface. A meditation on the life of a drone, the installation is quiet and seemingly uneventful for most viewers, except for those who are lucky or patient enough to catch and witness a momentary transformation of the bee.

Daniel Wheeler graduated from Brown University. His work has been featured locally at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Otis College of Arts, amongst others, as well as internationally in galleries in Japan.

By   Fri, Mar 11, 2011

For his sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, Tillmans will present compelling new pictures of his familiar territories (London, Berlin, and New York) intermixed with images from his recent world travels. As in his first exhibition at Regen Projects, the color prints and large inkjet prints will be unframed and taped or clipped to the wall in a primarily linear, non-hierarchical installation.

This will be the artist’s first show at the gallery since 1995 of exclusively camera-based works.  For two decades, Tillmans has pushed the limits of photography exploring the correlation between camera-less abstraction and figuration. With advancements in technology, the camera is now able to capture and convey information in a manner not previously possible when Tillmans began his practice.   While the possibilities of digital imaging techniques are often put to use to cover up and create a fantasy version of reality, Tillmans searches for clarity through a double-sided investigation of simultaneous observation and utilization.  On the one hand, the photographs of natural phenomena, such as the night sky picture taken from an aircraft over the Atlantic (in flight astro II, 2010) and a waterfall (Iguazu, 2010) with infinite frozen detail, were only realizable through the use of a digital camera. On the other hand pieces like Times Square LED, 2010 and TGV, 2010 featuring building size moving advertising displays and high-speed trains make new technological development their subject matter.  Combining these poignant fragments of his experience of the world, Tillmans creates a crystallized view of our multisided reality, achieving what can be described as an updated version of modernity.

“The art of Tillmans is multi-allusive, in both the extent of the subject matter and his treatment of photography as medium.  From astronomy to portraiture, to luxuriant yet minutely poised studies of light on photographic paper, he creates a cosmology of images, tirelessly refining – as artist, editor, installer and curator – the semiotic chemistry of their interrelationship to one another.  In this, Tillmans, locates the visual equivalent of Proust’s ‘mot juste’, identifying not simply the most eloquent images, in terms of colour, composition, mood, texture, light and emotional pulse, but those that appear to posses their own sentient meaning.  For Tillmans, one feels, the potentiality of the photographic image is intimately related, at a profound level of empathetic understanding and philosophical awareness, to the messy but complicated business of being alive.”

(Michael Bracewell.  “Everywhere, all the time and at once: the art of Wolfgang Tillmans” in Wolfgang Tillmans, published by Serpentine Gallery, London and Koenig Books, London, 2010)

Born in Remscheid Germany, Wolfgang Tillmans was the winner of the Turner prize in 2000.  Tillmans has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including the Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; PS1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA New York, NY; the Tate Britain, London, UK; Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK.  Tillmans was recently included in the 3^rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; the 53^rd Venice Biennial in 2009, Venice, Italy; ‘Holbein to Tillmans’ at the Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland; and Life on Mars: Carnegie International 2008 at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA.  In June, Hatje Cantz will release, for the first time in a single publication, a new monograph of the artist’s abstract photographs titled Abstract Pictures.  He lives and works in London and Berlin.

By   Mon, Mar 14, 2011

Roy Lichtenstein helped create the pop art style in the 1960s with paintings that adopted the techniques and look of cartoons and comic books. His bold, graphic imagery focuses on the complex interactions of mass culture, fine art, and everyday life. This exhibition features 60 works, created between 1973 and 1997, that show how he developed an idea from initial sketches and finished drawings through collages to the finished work.

By   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

A native of the oil-producing country of Venezuela, Soto-Díaz works through the modernist promise of abstraction, infusing it with a new set of meanings. The Utopian Tense of Green is a new series of paintings and drawings on linen, wood panels and Duralar in which Soto-Díaz explores the meaning of green from different angles: from Alexander von Humboldt's writings of his travels in the tropics to the island of Esmeralda (a mythic South American utopia), to the more evocative and poetic sense of the color. Each of the artist's series is based on one dominant color which the artist studies for years, producing a series of works that show an understanding of the depth of the color while challenging its boundaries. Based on preliminary sketches made on the computer, her process is enlivened by an organic sense of motion, broken symmetries and open fields. Soto-Díaz owes her love for color and hard-edge geometry to her graduate studies with West coast abstractionist Karl Benjamin as well as early exposure to Venezuelan colorists Cruz-Diez and Jesús Soto. She has an MFA from Claremont Graduate University and an MA from Cal Arts.

By   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

Six of Resgado's new works contain splatter gestures that he extracted from public sites in Mexico City; three are made from automotive exhaust and dirt that accumulated on a wall that was exposed to intense traffic; and one contains names that were scratched into the wall of a building in Havana.

Rasgado's work functions as an archive of contemporary human behavior. His process involves daylong wanderings in Mexico City and other urban centers where he searches for unusual occurrences within the metropolitan setting. When he finds something of interest, he seeks to record it, not in the typical manner of a photograph or other representation, but by extracting a subtle mark from the observed site. In so doing, he makes works that are at once poetic and visual as well as politically and socially relevant. Within his practice, he creates politically charged abstract paintings by using strappo , a Renaissance technique that enables him to extract painted/graffitied pictorial content from walls around the world. In so doing, he transforms political gestures into abstract paintings of transcendent beauty that make visible the paradox between a real event and the representation of it.

Born in 1984 in Zapopan (Jalisco, Mexico), Rasgado studied Visual Arts at the Autonomous University of Morelos State. He has received three grants from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and Arts. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City (2010); Stonehouse, Lagos (2010); Hessel Museum of Art & Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, (2010); Muca Roma, Mexico City (2009) and the National Museum of Prints, Mexico City (2006). He lives and works in Mexico City.

By   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

The San Francisco-based artist returns to Corey Helford Gallery to unveil his second solo show, featuring a dramatic new series of figurative oil paintings. Combining classical painting techniques with tattoo-influenced imagery, Lewis infuses his portraiture with loose expressive strokes and raw depth.

For “The Absence of Light”, Lewis’ new collection of works represents a catharsis for extraction and reflection based on his fixations from adolescence and family. A mirror of human emotions tied to memories of the present and past, Lewis draws from his personal experiences creating timeless narratives and mythological environments filled with heros, icons of beauty and historical artifacts. Lewis adds, “These self-made fantasy scenes, though dark at first glance, react with humor towards the past, free of apathy, and curiosity of the future.”

Open to the public, the reception for “The Absence of Light”, will take place on Saturday, March 19 from 7 to 10pm and will be in conjunction with “Dreamhome Heartaches”, a solo exhibition of new works by Adam Wallacavage. Both exhibitions will be on view until April 6.

Born in Pasadena, California in 1977, Henry Lewis moved to San Francisco in 2000 to pursue a career in tattooing, illustration, and painting. Lewis has worked as a tattooist for the past 14 years and is a featured artist at the world-renowned tattoo studio, Skull & Sword. He has exhibited at galleries nationwide, and for more information about the artist, please visit www.moremocking.com and www.theskullandsword.com.

By   Mon, Mar 14, 2011

Lowe’s signature approach to collage is presented with works fashioned from trade paperbacks from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Developed in these new collages are disjointed and nostalgic narratives of psychedelic Americana, hippie culture, B-movie icons, and the occult. Similar to his site-specific installations, these works create disordered yet idealized histories with a tinge of dark satiric humor.

In the second gallery, Lowe will exhibit large-scale, collaged and painted, inkjet prints on canvas. Culled from the same source material, he has enlarged and printed his collages on canvas, then painted and collaged on these prints, reprocessing his own work as seemingly found images.

Justin Lowe (b. 1976, Dayton, OH) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. He holds a BA from Hampshire College and MFA from Columbia University. Past solo exhibitions include Werewolf Karaoke, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Freedom Time is Here Little Kittens, Galerie Frederic Giroux, Paris; 45 on the 33, Galleria Cesare Manzo, Rome; and Helter Swelter, Oliver Kamm/5BE, New York, among others. Lowe’s work has been exhibited widely at galleries and institutions including Gagosian Gallery, New York; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Blancpain Art Contemporain, Geneva; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; Sculpture Center, Long Island City; QED Gallery, Los Angeles; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin; among others. His collaborations with Jonah Freeman include Bright White Underground at Country Club Projects, Los Angeles; Black Acid Co-op at Deitch Projects, New York; Hello Meth Lab in the Sun at Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX (with Alexandre Singh); and Hello Meth Lab with a View at The Station, Miami.

Images courtesy of the artist and Pepin Moore, Los Angeles
Justin Lowe, The End, 2010, acrylic, enamel, and paper on inkjet print on canvas, 71 1/2 x 141 1/2 inches