By   Mon, Mar 07, 2011

Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters 1985-2010” pays homage to James Lapides' extensive archive of international AIDS Awareness posters along with posters generously donated to Massachusetts College of Art and Design. This cohesive collection over 150 posters presents an compelling overview of diverse visual strategies created by many different artists working within their own distinct cultural and national perspectives on the subject of AIDS as a public health emergency.

The rampant spread of the HIV/AIDS virus over the past three decades has created the most significant global public health crisis in modern history. As the epidemic unfolded and propagated globally, the need to educate the world’s public about the devastating disease became critical. Moreover, with the disease’s association with sexuality and sexual behavior, communicators faced increased challenges around social and moral issues deeply rooted in various cultures and traditions. Within this context, the graphic poster became a vital tool in humanity’s battle against the spread of AIDS, despite the existence of more advanced communication technologies. In many countries, the poster as a medium of information was unknown before the emergence and identification of the HIV virus.

“Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters 1985-2010” demonstrates the wide range and tremendous impact of some of the most notable AIDS education posters. The designs and presentations feature a myriad of messages, visual metaphors, and strategies that tackle the epidemic across drastically different cultures and moral points of view. Countries located in Africa, Asia, Oceania, North America, South America, and Europe are represented.

“The AIDS epidemic spread devastation across all swaths of humanity, regardless of culture, tradition, or social perspectives,” noted Williamson Gallery director Stephen Nowlin. “This exhibition delivers a commanding representation of these messages. The posters are arresting and provocative, but the thread of compassion and human outreach that weaves through all of them will make gallery visitors hold their breath in contemplation,” he added.

The Graying of AIDS: Off The Wall

Coinciding with exhibition and beginning on April 11, 2011, the gallery will host an Art Center Illustration Department/Designmatters exhibition entitled “The Graying of AIDS Exhibition: Off The Wall.”  The exhibition showcases student work inspired by “The Graying of AIDS: Stories from an Aging Epidemic,” a multi-platform outreach campaign led by the New York-based team of Katja Heinemann and Naomi Schegloff, which aims to educate health care and social service professionals about the risks and realities of HIV/AIDS and older adults.   With studies projecting that more than half of all people living with HIV in the US will be over 50 by 2015, “The Graying of AIDS” was originally developed by Heinemann as a print feature for Time Magazine in 2006, and today is the first and only national education and prevention outreach campaign around AIDS that is geared towards seniors and their care providers.

“Graphic Intervention” was organized by Elizabeth Resnick and Javier Cortes in collaboration with James Lapides, International Poster Gallery, Boston, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston.  Williamson Gallery exhibitions are made possible in part by a grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance and the generosity of the Williamson Gallery Patrons.

The Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design is located at 1700 Lida Street in Pasadena; hours are noon to 5:00 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday and noon to 9:00 p.m., Friday; the gallery is closed Mondays and holidays. For more gallery information, call (626) 396-2446.

By   Sat, Mar 05, 2011

Referencing early Fleischer and Disney cartoons, Dargeresque disfunctional landscapes, and the cut up writings of William Burroughs, Garcia's drugged up wasteland fairy tale paintings are critical commentaries on the failures of capitalist utopias, blending nostalgic pop culture references with a satirical slant on modern society.

Her work has been displayed in museums and galleries in Spain, Germany, England, Japan, and Brazil, in addition to the US and has been featured in numerous magazines including Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone, and Modern Painter. In 2007, a retrospective of her work, entitled Tragic Kingdom, was on display at the San Jose Museum of Art, accompanied by a catalog of the same name. Her latest project, The Illustrated  Alice in Wonderland published by Harper Collins, was on the New York Times Bestseller list. Garcia's practice has been greatly informed by her move from Los Angeles to the redwood forests of northern California, as living deeply in nature has given her a deeper understanding of the destructive nature of modern civilization.

By   Sat, Mar 05, 2011

The desert is less “nature” than a concept, a place that swallows up boundaries. When the artist goes to the desert he enriches his absence and burns off the water on his brain… A consciousness of the desert operates between craving and satiety.     --Robert Smithson, excerpted from A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1968)

Fleming describes his process for Desert:

For one month in 2009 I lived twenty miles into Joshua Tree National Park. I stayed in a cabin down a dirt road, off the grid, with no means of communication.  Water was tanked in and power was limited to solar and battery.  I put together the shoot when I got there.  The idea was immersion and reaction – a documentation of myself in the desert and the record of that time. I would wake up at sunrise and begin filming.  The daily practice was based around a car, a camera pack, and a map. I would pick an area or direction and if it had an interesting feeling to it, hike from there.  Time was spent drifting, shooting, studying, and building on each preceding day. 

Desert (2011), was shot in California’s Joshua Tree National Park, 140 miles east of Los Angeles. The park is over 1200 square miles of high altitude desert with bizarre geological features. The edited footage captures the sublime cycles within the desert landscape – the shifting position of the sun, clouds, and the movement of the desert plants by the wind.  The hypnotic pace of the desert is interrupted by aerial shots of crop circle-like patterns in the flat valley. The patterns evoke Michael Heizer’s motorcycle markings, Circular Planar Displacement Drawing, where tire marks etched the sand to be erased by first rain. 

A selection of photographs from Desert will be exhibited along with photographs from the ethereal It series. It distills the content of Desert to shape, sound, light, color, and atmospheric perspective. The video It will also be shown along with sound component. Being influenced by the work of Michael Snow and Robert Irwin as well as science of brain entrainment and psychoacoustics, Fleming’s work incorporates visual and audio to construct an experiential journey.

Jesse Fleming (b. in 1977, Northern CA.) He received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, New Genres Dept. He has had solo exhibitions at The Company, LA, Night Gallery, LA and The Fireplace Project, East Hamptons, NY. He collaborated with Daniel Arsham on a video for the Merce Cunningham Dance Co., and has directed videos for MoMA, NY, Guggenheim, NY, and PERFORMA, including Sigur Ros, DFA, and The Doug Aiken Happening. He has worked as first camera assistant and operator for Matthew Barney’s films, and was director of photography to Francessco Vezzoli.  Fleming is currently director of photography on a Getty Museum documentary of Light and Space artists.  Residencies include Riverside Art Museum and Joshua Tree National Park Residency Program, Cuts and Burns Artist Fellowship, The Outpost, Brooklyn, NY, and The Old School for Social Sculpture, Catskills, NY. Jesse lives and works in Los Angeles.

By   Fri, Mar 04, 2011

The Mythology of Interiors is an original live video performance of short acts, written and directed by New York and Berlin based Artist, Nicole Cohen. The opening performance will take place on March 11, 2011, from 7-10pm. After the performance launch, a video installation will be exhibited at Mondrian Los Angeles through May 31, 2011. The video installation will be produced and fabricated from the site-specific live performance that was made at the boutique hotel in Los Angeles. The audience arrives, receives a program, will sit on pillows and watch the performances in the hotel setting. 

The Mythology of Interiors is a performance about interior design spaces, using the bodies of art world actors/ performers as screens. Video will be projected onto their white clothing and will follow their movements. All thirteen of the special guest performers represent the international art world. The performers are artists, curators, actors and museum professionals acting on a small outdoor white stage with white theater curtains at SKYBAR at Mondrian.

The short acts were written to describe historical interior spaces as they also are inspired and relate to mythology. There will be a detailed program, which will be online shortly for more specific information about the script.

The short acts include The Pomegranate Seeds, The Golden Fleece, The Seduction of Lo, Atlas, Mount Olympus, and The Underworld. These scenes all describe interior design in relation to mythology. The myths will be acted out and an emphasis will be placed on the space and the interior design where they are and how they relate to the environment.  In all acts, there will be humor and a twist of a myth about how historical spaces can relate to contemporary design and space.

This project is a site-specific performance made for Mondrian Los Angeles. Based on SKYBAR and the Mondrian being well known for their exquisite interiors, this project was formed and created to reference both the sky (mythology) and the interiors. The short plays show an energetic and lighthearted way of physically expressing design, space and mythological references, made with a contemporary twist. The outdoor entertainment will create an evening of intelligent writing and connections with how the body and new digital media can be used to describe interior design.

By invitation only rsvp: rsvpla@morganshotelgroup.com

Janet Levy is a curator and gallery founder/director born in Los Angeles, CA. She presented her first curatorial project in Luzern, Switzerland in 1990 and brings years of curatorial, gallery and marketing experience to her success in producing and promoting significant projects by prominent contemporary artists. Levy has demonstrated an extraordinarily intuitive ability for selecting talented visual artists and, in 2006, she founded See Line Gallery, an exhibition space dedicated to supporting the work of these exceptional contemporary artists.

Nicole Cohen, (b. 1970) in Falmouth, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, lives and works in New York and in Berlin, Germany. She received her BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and her MFA from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at the Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at different venues in Berlin, Germany; Bergen, Norway; Paris, France; Shanghai, China and Harajaku, Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo, Japan. From 2007-2009 she had a commissioned video solo exhibition at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. In January 2011, she had her third solo museum exhibition called< “Driving in Circles” at the American University Museum Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C.

By   Fri, Mar 04, 2011

Seltzer's images call to mind the “New Topographic” photography movement, pictures made to document a time and a place, static treatments of our everyday modern urban landscape in the vein of Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Henry Wessel Jr.

These anonymous, sometimes featureless structures and locations exclude people but at the same time show the effect human occupation and interaction. Like Baltz, Seltzer isolates his subjects, creating a head-on, cold and detached Kubrickian symmetry. Seltzer allows us to see beauty in the everyday and shows us order in the ordinary and mundane that we take the for granted.

Artist Statement:

My formal education is more about science - statistics, experimental design, and rhetorical theory. With statistical analysis, the goal is to sift through numbers and create a story true to the data – a story that can be understood and appreciated by a more general audience. In a similar way, I look through my camera’s viewfinder in attempt to reconcile the everyday “data” that surrounds us.

I find comfort and solace in this otherwise anxiety-producing world by creating a sense of harmony among the seemingly unrelated, mundane data around me. There are so many things I can't control; but what I can control is what I see through my camera and how I present it to the world through careful framing and composition. My interest is generally not with the subject itself, but with the challenge – almost need – of creating and restoring this sense of order (or harmony).

Jeff Seltzer is based in Los Angeles and was educated at San Diego State University, receiving a BA and an MA in Rhetorical Theory.

By   Fri, Mar 04, 2011

Humans have drawn an invisible curtain between themselves and the rest of the animal kingdom, an artificial boundary that has caused very real suffering: animals are controlled, contained and MUTED by us. Usborne's work exposes this silent but painful divide. On another level, his images are about how we often cut off from out true animal nature: our angers, fears and hopes. He brilliantly captures the pain and silence and fear of animals.

“I was once left in a car at a young age. I don't know when or where or for how long, possibly at the age of four, perhaps outside a supermarket, probably for fifteen minutes only. The Details don’t matter. The point is that I wondered if anyone would come back: in a child’s mind it is possible to be alone forever. Around the same age I developed a deep affinity with animals – in particular their plight at the hands of humans. I remember watching TV and seeing footage of a dog being put in a plastic bag and being kicked.  What appalled me most was that the dog could not speak back. Its muteness terrified me.  It is clear that both these experiences arose from the same place deep inside me: a fear of being alone and unheard. The images in this series explore that feeling, both in relation to myself and to the animals in general."

Usborne continues, "The camera is the perfect tool for capturing silence and longing: the shutter preserves the subject like a creature pickled behind glass. In this instance two layers of glass are placed between the viewer and the viewed: the glass of the lens and the glass of the car window. The dog is truly alone. When I started this project I knew the photos would be dark. What I didn’t expect was to see so many subtle reactions by the dogs” some sad, some expectant, some angry, some dejected. It was as if upon opening up a box of grey-colored pencils I was surprised to see so many shades inside. I hope that these pictures are engaging and perhaps a little amusing.  I want to show that there is life in the dark places within us. I will stop writing now and you can stop reading.  Words can only get us so far. After all, we are all animals.”

This is Usborne’s first show at Frank Pictures Gallery. He has previously shown at The Print Space Gallery, Royal Albert Hall, Candid Arts Centre, Hoxton Square Studios, Lauderdale House Gallery, AOP Gallery, and at East London Photo Month in London, and at Reginik Studio Gallery in Brazil. He was presented with the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize in 2009 for his photo Time For Tea. Much of Usborne’s work is concerned with animal welfare; 10% of profits from his print sales go to animal charities.

By   Fri, Mar 04, 2011

In GHOST SHIP RODEZ: The Momo Chronicles, Allen pursues a fictional investigation of what may have happened in the mind of 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.

While living in France, Artaud had obtained a walking stick that he considered was the staff of Jesus Christ handed down to St. George. In 1937, Artaud journeyed to Ireland to return the staff to its country of origin. However, while there, he experienced a series of extreme mental and emotional crises that culminated in a violent altercation with Dublin police. Artaud’s subsequent deportation to France was a grueling journey, spent straitjacketed and chained to a metal cot in the bowels of the ship.

Allen developed this visual and sound-based exhibition from his ideas and sets for a theatre piece, also titled Ghost Ship Rodez. The theatre work was first commissioned in 2005 by Les Subsistances Laboratoire International, Lyon, France and the Texas-French Alliance in Houston. It was further developed at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in 2008, and The Lensic Performing Art Center in association with SITE Santa Fe (where the L.A. Louver exhibition was previously shown) in Spring 2010. A live performance will not be seen in Los Angeles at this time. However, a 40-minute recording of the performance features in the installation that is presented in L.A. Louver’s south gallery. In this sound-based piece, acclaimed actress, writer and artist Jo Harvey Allen performs as the voice of “Daughter of the Heart,” a clairvoyant chameleon and multi-voiced narrator. (Artaud regarded all the important women in his life as his “Daughters of the Heart to be Born”.) GHOST SHIP RODEZ (A Radio Play) is also available on CD.

The exhibition will also feature two large-scale video/sculpture works: Ghost Ship, 2010, evokes the environment of the ship hold and the cot to which Artaud was laid captive, and includes screens with projected excerpts of films in which Artaud performed. The second, MOMO Lo Mismo, 2010, is a video-based multi-screened installation presented in marionette form, with projections of Jo Harvey Allen’s “Daughter of the Heart” performance.

Antonin Artaud
"Sunsets are beautiful because of all they make us lose."

Artaud spent much of his childhood in sanatoriums, and it was during one of his prolonged stays that he was prescribed
opiates, to which he became addicted throughout his life. Confined to bed for many years, Artaud absorbed himself in the study and appreciation of literature and art, with Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Poe important influences in his own development as a poet and artist. Artaud also became an actor, and he appeared in numerous films, including Abel Gance’s 1927 masterpiece Napoleon, and Carl Dryer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc. Artaud’s acting career helped subsidize his radical theatre ideas, for which he became renowned. His theories for a “Theatre of Cruelty” (also the title of an essay in his book The Theatre and Its Double) advocated a revolutionary theatre in which the audience was pushed to experience the world in shocking and destabilizing ways. Artaud’s theories continue to impact and inspire contemporary artists as diverse as Peter Brook, Nancy Spiro, Patti Smith and Sam Shepherd, among others.

Artaud called himself “Le Momo,” meaning a charmed idiot or a witch man, possessed. The clinical depression and severe emotional illness that Artaud suffered throughout his life led to his frequent confinement in mental institutions, one of which was Rodez, in southern France. Artaud died of cancer in 1948.

Terry Allen
Terry Allen is a visual artist, songwriter and musician, who has received numerous awards and honors, including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and induction into the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame. In 2009, Allen became a United States Artists Oliver Fellow. His art has been shown throughout the United States and Europe, and is represented in major private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

GHOST SHIP RODEZ: The Momo Chronicles marks the first time Allen’s work has been seen in Los Angeles since Spring 2004, with his presentation of DUGOUT I at L.A. Louver; a concurrent exhibition DUGOUT II (HOLD ON to the house) at Santa Monica Museum of Art; and performance piece DUGOUT III: WARBOY (and the backboard blues) with L.A. Theatre Works at the Skirball Cultural Center (later broadcast by KPCC 89.3 FM). Allen has recorded eleven albums of original music, including the classics Juarez, Lubbock (on everything) and Salivation.

He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, actress and writer Jo Harvey Allen.

By   Thu, Mar 03, 2011

The Frostig Center announces the unveiling of The Frostig Collection 2011 on Thursday, March 10, featuring four new limited-edition sculptures by four extraordinary artists:  David Buckingham, Chris Burden, Gwynn Murrill, and Chris Piazza. The 2011 Collection artists join Nancy Rubins, Ken Price, Frank Gehry, Ed Moses and many renowned artists who have created art works specifically for the Frostig Collection.

This year’s collection will make its public debut during a special reception held at the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica from 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet many of the artists. Chris Burden, the creator of “Urban Light,” the famous installation of 200 vintage Los Angeles lampposts located outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will be in attendance. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, a loyal supporter of the Frostig Center, will be speaking at the reception.  In addition to the new pieces, all prior years’ works will also be on view and available for sale.

The sculptures are being sold in limited quantities to raise funds for social skills programs for children with learning disabilities at the Frostig Center. The social skills program has been funded solely through the sale of the collections artworks since the first Frostig Collection premiered in 2005.

Admission is free. Wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served. For inquiries about the event or the Collection, please call Kate Stern at (626) 791-9163 or email at frostigcollection@frostig.org.

The Frostig Collection 2011 Reception
Thursday, March 10, 2011
6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave., E1
Santa Monica, CA 90404

For directions call:  (310) 453-0909

By   Fri, Mar 04, 2011

From blue collar to black tie, Larry Fink has photographed gatherings of every sort during his 40-year career. Keenly attuned to the emotional vibrations that animate social events, he deploys basic capacities of photography—framing, flash, depth of field—to show us gestures, textures, and fleeting expressions we would otherwise miss.

Fink is, among other things, a society photographer, but he doesn't flatter the elite. From 2000 to 2009, Fink documented Vanity Fair's annual Oscar-night party. The very presence of Fink—who is neither paparazzo nor photojournalist—indicates how the parties, and Hollywood culture, have evolved. Mainstream media coverage gives everyone a glimpse of glamour, but Fink provides a different kind of access. The revelation of Fink's society photographs is not that celebrities are superficial, but that their humanity is profound and complex.

By   Thu, Mar 03, 2011

Regarded internationally for his cumulative, research-based projects, Farmer creates context-specific sculptural works that grapple with his longstanding interest in the relationship between art objects and theories of drama and dramatization. In doing so, Farmer mines a diverse array of literary and artistic histories to reveal the pervasiveness of theatricality within cultural experience. Rather than adhere to the convention of exhibitions as static displays, Farmer reconstitutes the gallery space as a site for improvisation, movement, alteration and accumulation.

For this exhibition, Farmer transforms the Gallery at REDCAT into both studio workshop and theatrical space where an assembly of performers and mechanized objects act out a scripted narrative in the form of a sculptural tableau. Starting mid-February, Farmer is in residence to work on-site and create a new site-specific "sculpture play" titled Let's Make the Water Turn Black in response to the region's social history and Los Angeles' influence on the counter-cultural movement. The exhibition begins on February 18 with a series of discrete installations on an architectural façade built to separate the central gallery from the REDCAT lobby. These revolving installations act as a prelude to the first public presentation of Farmer's sculpture play on March 5, 2011, when visitors are invited to enter the central gallery space for the first time.

Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967) currently lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Walter Phillips Gallery, the Banff Centre; the Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; Witte de With, Rotterdam; the Drawing Room, London; and the Power Plant Gallery, Toronto. In 2008, a mid-career retrospective of Farmer's work was mounted at the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal. Notable group exhibitions include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; The World as a Stage at Tate Modern, London and the ICA Boston; as well as the 2008 Brussels Biennial and the 2008 Sydney Biennale. His first solo exhibition in the United States opens February 2011 at Casey Kaplan in New York. Farmer will also participate in this year's Istanbul Biennial and will have a major solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada in 2013.

By   Sat, Mar 05, 2011

Since its inception in 2003, Scion Installation has raised over $250,000 for art charities and non-profits. Building on the success of last year's tour, Installation 7 again focuses on the video medium, which emerged in the 1960s and has since expanded galleries into more experimental, kinetic and interactive spaces. Installation 7: Video challenged 10 artists to create non-narrative video installations that will eventually transform five unique exhibitions in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Wichita, Minneapolis and Austin. The featured artists are: Cheryl Dunn, David Choe, Cody Hudson & Jared Eberhardt, Franki Chan, Gluekit, Mackie Osborne, Matt Goldman, Souther Salazar, SSUR© and The London Police. (Video stills above)

Launched in 2003, Scion’s Installation is a revolutionary art tour affirming the brand’s ongoing commitment to support independent artistic expression. The tour has traveled to exhibit at galleries in various cities across the US and has raised over $250,000 for art-related charities and non-profits. Since it began, Scion Installation has featured the work of an unprecedented collective of contemporary artists, designers, photographers and filmmakers including: Andre from Paris, Gary Baseman, Peter Beste, Blek le Rat, Angela Boatwright, Kelsey Brookes, Mr. Cartoon, Crash, David Ellis, Ron English, Futura, Mike Giant, James Jean, Rammellzee, Retna, Kenny Scharf, Andrew Schoultz, Jeff Soto, and many others.

By   Fri, Mar 04, 2011

Rebecca Campbell’s new body of work is a meditation on extremes. Her subjects are drawn from both nature: the ephemeral light of rainbows and the radiance of young girls, and the man-made: the spectacular light of fireworks and the power of the atomic bomb. As Campbell states, “The paint needed to be fierce, lean and fresh. I try to understand the atomic blast through heat, light, obliteration and full spectrum doom. I try to understand the rainbow through the mud it arcs against, suspension of pigment in oil, and a utopia flickering in and out of cliché. I try to know a woman’s beauty as much from a window through her skin as from the shine of her mouth.”

Campbell captures the energy of her subjects using broad, sweeping brushstrokes, and a rich, varied palette, in over a dozen, smaller-scale paintings (no larger than 20 x 12 inches). These singular subjects, are accompanied by two large paintings (4 x 8 feet and 5 x 7 feet), each of which explores a complex psychological drama and extremes of sensory experience. In one, a young woman sits in a half-filled bathtub, fully clothed and holding a cake decorated with a spider’s web. She is attired in a silky dress of fiery hues that seems to melt in the water; her eyes are fixed on something unseen by the viewer; her expression is neutral. An open window shows a mountain on fire in the distance. Campbell states: “Perhaps it is precisely because the mountain is on fire that the charged water of the bath is such comfort. It is the expense of the dress that makes its ruin sweet dulce de leche. It is the reverie of looking away that allows one to absorb the gravity of the catastrophe.”

Rebecca Campbell was born and raised in Salt Lake City, the youngest of seven children in a strict Mormon family. By age twelve, Campbell was questioning the parameters of the church and the role it ascribed to her gender. Her critical eye infused her art, which she actively pursued from young adolescence, and that ranged from sculpture and installation, to painting and drawing. In 1990, Campbell left Utah to study at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon, where she earned her B.F.A. She returned to Salt Lake City in 1994, and for the next four years worked as an independent exhibition curator while continuing her art practice. In 1998, Campbell received a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and in 1999 moved to Los Angeles, where she earned her MFA from UCLA in 2001.

In addition to California, Campbell’s paintings have been exhibited across the United States, from New York, Vermont and Florida, to Ohio, Utah, Colorado and Oregon, and overseas in Madrid, Spain, and Basel, Switzerland. Upcoming, Campbell’s work will be seen in Broodwork at the Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, April 30-June 11, 2011. Her work will also feature in the two-person exhibition Rebecca Campbell and Angela Ellsworth; A Peculiar People, at the Phoenix Art Museum, September 3, 2011 – January 23, 2012, which will be accompanied by a catalogue.

By   Sat, Mar 05, 2011

Fluid and playful in her process, the artist allows her materials to inform her exploration. Rotstein adds and removes elements from her collages and paintings as they evolve beyond the state of initial conception into fully articulated pieces. Using shadow, light, and the residual image (both temporal and thematic), her forms burst organically through the geometric constraints of the picture plane.

The image of the monarch butterfly is the primary symbolic motif found throughout this body of work. Inspired by the Robert Graves poem “Flying Crooked,” Rotstein draws a parallel between their migratory journey and her own immigration from Israel. Her transformative art process echoes the metamorphosis of a skin-shedding caterpillar in the chrysalis to a fully formed monarch.

For Gali Rotstein, art making involves both sensuality and rationality. She is currently intrigued by classical Spanish still lives and is informed by serendipitous life events as she engages in her art making. Each work exudes the enthusiasm, research, and knowledge that this artist brings to her choice of materials and execution of the work. The result is a powerful display of emotion and skill evident in this collection of work.

By   Sat, Mar 05, 2011

Married with four children, Mrs. Nazarian immigrated to the United States from Iran with her family in 1978, in the midst of the Iranian revolution and fall of the Shah. The move forced the family to leave most of their most valued possessions, and rebuild their lives in Los Angeles – the city with the largest Iranian population outside Iran. The family has become an American success story, with Mrs. Nazarian as the matriarch and spiritual center.

Mrs. Nazarian is guided by the raw beauty of stone: its inherent shape, texture, grain, color and relative hardness. This is evident in her depictions of the human form and its parts; in bold interpretations of Jewish ritual objects; in works that refer specifically to the Nazarian family; and in non-objective works that appear to conform most closely to the innate properties and form of the stone. She also travels to the famed marble quarries of Pietrasanta, Italy each year to select her stone – and is one of the few women to do so.

Proceeds from the exhibition will benefit the Soraya Sarah Nazarian Artists Initiative, a program designed to assist artists with obtaining studio and exhibition space in the Los Angeles area.