May 11, 2013 – June 29, 2013
First Floor | Main Gallery
Lancaster Museum of Art & History

SuperCallaFragileMysticEcstasyDioecious highlights the work of four Los Angeles artists who synthesize concerns both artistic and ecological through the painting of flowers. Cole Case, Amir H. Fallah, Penelope Gottlieb and Roland Reiss bring disparate painting approaches and varying cultural associations together as an artistic response to the world’s concentrically dizzying spin.

“Whereas older traditions of botanical art and still life painting involved calm, studio-bound reflections of natural beauty and visual order, a new paradigm seems appropriate in the more fragile condition of the world in the early 21st century. We’re in a state of accelerated change, possibly teetering on some sort of apocalyptic brink.” -Penelope Gottlieb

PRESS for SuperCallaFragileMysticEcstacyDioesious on Cartwheelart.com – HERE

Western Project is proud to present, in the West Room, a new body of work by Joe Lloyd. Recently completing his MFA from Claremont Graduate School, the artist resides and works in Long Beach, California. His new paintings are observational records of his environment: geometric forms imposed on natural topography. Land, sky and water are pressed into mathematics. Using his computer to layer transparent abstract forms over succeeding layers, the works evolve both manually and digitally. Using one painting to create the next with his computer is a synthetic process yet more a drawing technique to multiply possibilities of combinations and forms. In lineage of historic painters such as Diebenkorn and Matisse, Lloyd’s practice looks at the natural world for clues of color and composition. As his predecessors, his work rests in geometric artifice, a cerebral vision of the tangible and ineffable.

Lloyd has shown at the Torrance Art Museum, California Srtate University Long Beach, and Den Contemporary in Los Angeles, California.

On view in the Main Room: NICOLAS SHAKE: Significance Swells: New Painting, Sculpture, Photography

Samantha Fields, Eugene 2 (DETAIL), 2013, acrylic on paper, 54 x 42 inches

COLA  2013

City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowships
Visual Arts Exhibition

Sunday, May 19, 2 to 5 p.m.
Opening Reception Hosted by the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Associates

Awarded each year by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), the C.O.L.A. Fellowships honor a spectrum of the City’s most exemplary mid-career artists and support the symbiotic relationship between LA, its artists, its history, and its identity as an international art capital. The 2013 C.O.L.A. award recipients in the visual arts are: Lisa Anne Auerbach, Krysten Cunningham, Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Samantha Fields, Judithe Hernández, Carole Kim, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Rebeca Méndez, and Rebecca Morris. For more information about the C.O.L.A. Exhibition and Performances, please visit culturela.org.

 Read more about the COLA 2013 recipients and exhibition: HERE

Samantha Fields, Stop, (DETAIL), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 28 x 34 inches

“Dangerous Beauties,” an exhibition of artwork and living plants exploring the theme of the danger of confusing “beauty” with “goodness,” opens with an artists reception at 4 p.m. Sunday, May 5, in the Sturt Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens. The public is invited. The show continues through July 31.

Nature doesn’t attach value judgments to its workings, but people do. Trees, flowers, foliage, entire landscapes are judged by people to be beautiful. The same holds true with works of art.

The goal of “Dangerous Beauties” is to present works of nature and works of art that are, in formal terms and on the surface, quite beautiful. But there is a twist: Behind their surface beauty, these plants and artwork reveal a darker side.

The exhibition will include artwork by: Daniel Beltrá, Fatemeh Burnes, Merion Estes, Samantha Fields, Mark Licari, Michael Light, Eve Luckring and Constance Mallinson. Artworks include paintings, photographs, prints and fabric collage.

The artworks will address views of the world seen from afar and from above, as well as close-up. Often resembling an abstract modern art masterpiece, the viewer may think they are just looking at an arresting pattern. But after learning what is depicted, these artworks reveal a second and more perilous or even haunting aspect of their beauty. The subjects are diverse, including oil spills, wildfires and other scenes of devastation.

The plant component of the exhibit addresses the poisonous, the invasive, the nettlesome, the offensive, the intoxicating, the painful and the outright carnivorous. This will be achieved using living terrariums and container gardens placed throughout the galleries. Among other plants included are Austrocylindropuntia (Eve’s needle), Euphorbia (crown of thorns), Sansevieria (African spear), Kalanchoe (Pencil milk bush), Ilex (Holly), Zamia, Floridana, Dracaena, Codieaum (Croton) and Pachypodium.

“Dangerous Beauties” reminds us that successful stewardship of the natural world requires our attention to details and a thoughtful reading of what is occurring around us. Beauty is only dangerous if we dwell on the surface of things, without fathoming its depths.

The Sturt Haaga Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Descanso Gardens is located at 1418 Descanso Drive, La Cañada Flintridge, CA 91011. Admission is $8 general, $6 seniors/students with I.D., $3 children 5 to 12; children 4 and younger free. Information: (818) 949-4200 or www.descansogardens.org

About Descanso Gardens:
Established as a public garden in 1953, Descanso Gardens is located at 1418 Descanso Drive, La Cañada Flintridge 91011. The Gardens are open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except Christmas Day. Descanso Gardens is accredited by the American Association of Museums.

Kris Chatterson is participating in:
OBJECT IMPLIED at Dorsch Gallery, Miami FL
May 17 – June 8, 2013
http://www.dorschgallery.com/exhibitions/184/object-implied/

Emerson Dorsch presents Object implied, a group exhibition of artists to include:

Kris Chatterson
Dave Hardy
Ryan Roa
April Street
Robert Thiele
Odalis Valdivieso

Image: Kris Chatterson, Untitled, 2012, acrylic and transfer on stretched reclaimed vinyl, 48×36 inches

Leading up to the exhibition, individual online chats between some of the artists in the exhibition and Alan Gutierrez will periodically be posted as they’re conducted.

April 18, 2013 – Chat with Odalis Valdivieso

April 19, 2013 – Chat with Kris Chatterson

NICOLAS SHAKE
SIGNIFICANCE SWELLS

Western Project May 11 – June 8, 2013
Reception: Saturday, May 11, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

Western Project is proud to present the first solo exhibition by Los Angles artist, Nicolas Shake. Significance Swells is comprised of new sculptures, photographs and large-scale oil paintings. Returning to his home in the high desert of Palmdale in 2008, at the apex of the economic downturn, the artist found sections of his neighborhood abandoned and piles of domestic rubble in the surrounding landscape; an environment rife with debris and evidence of massive change. Out of the rubble emerged a lexicon of materials and possibilities. As a kind of transformative archeology, the artist began arranging the debris into sculptures and to photograph them at night, lit by rudimentary lighting equipment from Home Depot and the headlights of his truck. The outdoor still-life structures were ephemeral works existing for a few hours and only to be recorded; nocturnal apparitions in a landscape, reabsorbed the next day into the landscape, all sculptural qualities obliterated by the daylight.

Shake describes his work as, “pastoral and post-apocalyptic with one foot firmly planted in historical painting and the other in traditional still-life, so it is entropic and sanguine, gleeful, despondent, and matter of fact…my work celebrates the pastoral’s everyday ordinariness, the capacity for the viewer to experience something wondrous amidst decline. I focus on the cast-off household and utilitarian items that show up in the desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The items I engage with could easily be categorized as rhopography, but it is this insignificance that gives them the ability to be reassigned a new aesthetic value, transforming the rubbish into something unexpected by capturing and conveying its uncanny power and peculiar beauty.”

As objects imply narrative and carry a history, the artist has cast some elements found in the desert into sculptures elegant and haunting. The works are built into forms with plastic, wood, bamboo and cement. Shake has woven the cast parts with hand-dyed nylon twine as a kind of drawing element, and formal unifying material. A cast shopping-cart is transformed into something reminiscent of an ancient Chinese junk, or odd marble sarcophagus. An element of this piece is a woven purple nylon basketball net, giving the work an idiosyncratic urban/organic tension.

Influenced by Mark Doty in “The Art of Description”:

“…memory edits its records of the past like a brilliant auteur-cutting, juxtaposing, creating a peace determined by the direction and emotion of a story. What is memory but a story about how we have lived? …it takes dozens of pages to render the inner lives of a group people sitting around a dinner table; later…decades pass in a few pages. The kind of shifting feels accurate because it replicates something of our internal sense of time, where the irrelevant portions blur while significant moments swell.”

Shake’s oil paintings do not rely on imagery so much as the touch of paint and the act of painting. They are records of activity, a period and field of movement. He is not interested in illusion as his sensibility is more in the tradition of Gordon Matta Clark and Andy Goldsworthy. His works use the ordinary, the discarded, and used up to point at a beauty in temporality, and the immediacy of life.

The artist was recently included in The 10th Circle, curated by David Pagel at Vast Space Projects in Henderson, Nevada and has shown at Jaus Gallery, Temple/Ad Hoc Gallery, Mark Moore Gallery and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, and Lancaster Museum of Art in Lancaster, California. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from Claremont Graduate School. He is currently an assistant of painting at Chapman University in Orange, California.

His newly completed book, The Rhythm Is Odd, is available at:
http://www.blurb.com/b/4034214-nicolas-shake-the-rhythm-is-odd

On view in the West Room: JOE LLOYD: New Paintings

SEE INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS HERE

Western Project is proud to present the second solo exhibition by Jason Adkins. Gods and Demons is a group of oil paintings, thematically a set of opposites, inspired by his recent residence in Las Vegas, Nevada. Moving beyond his minimal imagery of the past few years, the artist has merged land and atmosphere together, as a metaphor of visual and energetic fields. The contradictions of the work are complex; a slow/fast read, random/controlled brushwork, shallow/deep space, natural/artificial color. Using a cacophony of webbed line work against a variegated background, his images appear to float and bend simultaneously. The paintings writhe and twist as a net of spun color, each a seemingly continuous, orgiastic spray. The brushwork appears casual and wandering but is essentially a highly organized system; as webbed clouds, appearing both thin and endless, beautiful and acidic, hot in color.

Adkins’ formal all-over compositions mimic abstract expressionism from the 1950’s, yet bury any romantic nostalgia. Adkins sensibility is more like a muscle car careening over the Nevada desert leaving a cloud of dust. This is not Mark Tobey in the northwest, nor a Zen apocalypse of minimalism; Gods and Monsters are large and explosive works. The contradictions of nature and the culture of Nevada merge in a mass of undulating color; the opposites are turned up into an atmosphere thick and weightless; a sensation of everything and nothing.

Adkins has just finished a residency at the P3 Studio in Las Vegas, and will be included in the exhibition, New Again, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum at UNLV, Las Vegas, Nevada. He has shown at the Franklin Parrish Gallery in New York, Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana, Pepperdine University and the American Jewish University Los Angeles, California, and galleries across the US. He is in the collections of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection Chapman University, Orange, California and the Marjorie Barrick Museum at UNLV, Las Vegas, Nevada.

]]> http://www.western-project.com/2013/03/21/jason-adkins-gods-and-demons-new-paintings-and-works-on-paper/feed/ 0 http://www.western-project.com/2013/03/14/big-mess-margaret-griffith-kyla-hansen-christian-tedeschi/ http://www.western-project.com/2013/03/14/big-mess-margaret-griffith-kyla-hansen-christian-tedeschi/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:23:28 +0000 admin http://www.western-project.com/?p=1934 April 6 – May 4, 2013

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 6, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

Western Project is proud to present three sculptors from Los Angeles. BIG MESS is a tongue-in-cheek wrap around of works that are essentially untoward; objects entwined, piled, stitched, wrapped or encased in resin, with materials such as paper, blankets, toilet paper, X-mas tree lights, or broom bristles. A phoenix of debris, the exhibition pokes at suburban lifestyle aesthetics and ideals; handicrafts, patriotism, sports, architecture, privacy and clutter horror. Each artist investigates a personal narrative and process with materials.

Margaret Griffith uses the structures of gates and fences found in her community to create hand-cut paper sculptures, monuments to fragility and impermanence. She transforms the rigidity of steel structures into billowy forms; folded veils as sublime renderings of environmental boundaries, delicate reminders of the fiction of permanence. In the spirit of feminism and land art of the 1970s, Griffith’s work recalls the explorations of Jackie Ferrara, Alice Aycock, and Jackie Windsor.

Kyla Hansen creates textiles and uses found objects in a punked-up language from desert suburbia. She stacks stools, cast wood stumps, crocheted blankets and holiday lights into a ten foot construct of home-style liberty. Darkly giddy, her works dredge the family garage for elements such as golf clubs, old yarn and glitter to declare: USA (!) in a limp paper-mache curve; the kind of dysfunction all men dread. Her giant The End and Shit is reminiscent of traditional Gee’s Bend textiles, while echoing American survivalist fears of Judgment Day. Her work addresses domestic values similar to the late Mike Kelley, with a wink and sharpened utensil.

Christian Tedeschi’s work mines ideas about the human body, and male identity. Using socks, sports uniforms or hoodies, the artist twists and stretches them into resin-ed forms, part-time artifacts, or small monuments to unknown lives lived and games played. His 400 Years, a 48 inch diameter roll of toilet paper is also glazed with resin; a mock wheel of life and/or clock of bodily functions. Tedeschi stretches a Superman uniform around a steel rod thirteen feet high as a primary colored lingam and testament to heroics, a contrast to Brancusi’s Bird in Space, or Giacometti’s existential slender human figures of the early 20th century. The large Untitled sculpture made with thousands of plastic broom bristles is nearly anthropomorphic as a mass of black and yellow stands hovering over it’s own black pool on the ground. The piece is a hypnotic and visceral relative to 1960s and 70s string art, but now alarming and wet in appearance.

Each of the artists work is straight forward and obsessive, and sometimes expressionistic. In 1980, the punk band X proclaimed: The World’s A Mess It’s In My Kiss, a right-to-the-point declaration. In this exhibition the work mirrors a similar message using an everyday kind of vernacular; a sly hustle, conceptually rooted, alluring and slightly toxic.

Christian Tedeschi recently completed a solo exhibition, Throwing a Blanket Over the Invisible Man at the California Baptist University, Riverside, California, and as part of the art collective, Object Orange, was included in, Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good, U.S. Pavilion Venice Architecture Biennial 2012, Venice, Italy. His work has also been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, Woodbury University, San Diego, Occidental College, Los Angeles and the Torrance Art Museum, as well as in galleries in Germany and Australia. He is an MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art, and teaches sculpture at California State University Northridge, Northridge, California.

Kyla Hansen was recently included in The 10th Circle, curated by David Pagel at VAST Space Projects in Henderson, Nevada She has shown at the University of California, Long Beach, Raid Projects, Los Angeles, and the Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, and UCLA New Wight Gallery. She recently completed her MFA at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California.

Margaret Griffith has exhibited at the Torrance Art Museum, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Woodbury University, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, California, Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles, and the Museo Archeologico di Amelia, Amelia (TERNI), Italy, She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2001 and is represented by the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, California.

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