Throwback Thursday- Sam Falls at 303 Gallery NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Sep 142023
 

“Untitled”, 2020, glazed ceramic

“Midnight Garden (Jnana)”, 2020 Pigment on canvas

“Untitled”, 2020, glazed ceramic

The works above are from Sam Falls’ 2020 exhibition at 303 Gallery in NYC. For more on these works, check out the gallery’s press release.

He is currently showing his work at The Little House, located at 451 N. La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles, presented by Dries Van Noten.

From their press release-

On view will be a selection of recent work by Sam Falls which merges photography, painting, and installation which results in captivating pieces that invite viewers to explore the relationship between humans and the environment. The works in the exhibition offer a meditation on the sublime dichotomy of mortality, including ceramics combining fossilized images of nature and the human form, as well as found airbags from crashed cars that are embroidered with symbolic idioms on the transience of time and life quoted from ancient Greek and Roman sundials.

Falls’ artistic process explores the varying representations of nature and materials through the passage of time. Rain, sunlight, wind, and the gradual effects of weathering all contribute to the unique aesthetic of each piece, creating a dialogue between art and nature that captures the essence of life represented in time and space. By exposing his artwork to elements, he invites the environment to act as a collaborator in reinterpreting organic materials into new forms.

This exhibition will be on view until 9/30/23.

 

Flashback Friday- Bjorn Copeland and Black Dice at Various Small Fires in 2015

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Music, Mixed Media, Music, Musicians / Bands, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art
Jul 212023
 

“Precarious recline”, 2015, Found lawn chairs, strap, bottle

This sculpture, Precarious recline, is from Bjorn Copeland’s 2015 exhibition Over Easy at Various Small Fires Los Angeles. It was created using discarded furniture found around East Los Angeles.

The exhibition also included a sound sculpture, Scrambled Eggs, Mexican Radio Edit (2015).  It was made in collaboration with the artist’s Black Dice band mates Eric Copeland and Aaron Warren, and combined signals from multiple car radios in an unpredictable and erratic disharmony. The resulting composition was synthesized in real-time and constantly changing.

The video below is for White Sugar, from Black Dice’s 2021 album Mod Prog Sic.

Flashback Friday- Josh Kline at Various Small Fires in 2015

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 212023
 

“You’re Fired”, 2015, Concrete, grill, shredded office documents, charcoal

This sculpture by Josh Kline was located in the Various Small Fires Los Angeles courtyard in 2015.

From the press release-

In the warm breeze of Southern California’s endless summer, the 20th Century dream of life in the early evening after work: a large backyard covered in concrete and grass, a hammock or a lawn chair, cold beer, and a blazing grill. Ground meat sizzling above a glowing bed of charcoal soaked in lighter fluid. Underneath the avocado tree. Or the oak tree. Or the whatever tree. Putting the last 8-10 hours of your day out of your mind and enjoying your “free” time. A nuclear family fantasy repeated across hundreds of millions of suburban and semi-suburban homes and half a century of North American lives.

Pattern recognition is the primordial ooze from out of which living consciousness and intelligence crawled into the minds of animals. The ability to recognize repetitive relationships and recurring phenomena. The habits of food, the faces of your loved ones, and the sounds of human language. From automobile factory assembly line and the discount drug store cash register today to the taxi cab’s driver seat and patent lawyer’s office tomorrow: unconscious software is slowly and not-so- slowly aping the abilities of the living mind.

Reading without eyes. Recognizing without consciousness. The outsourcing of understanding. You’re Fired!

The first U.S. museum survey of his work, Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum in NYC.

 

NYC Art Shows-Throwback- Joey Terrill at Ortuzar Projects

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 222023
 

“When I Was Young”, 1995

“Here I Am/Estoy Aquí”, 2022

Two works from Joey Terrill: Cut and Paste, a solo exhibition at Ortuzar Projects in NYC this past February.

From the gallery’s press release-

Raised in Highland Park and East Los Angeles, Terrill was part of a small group of Chicano artists who in the 1970s and 80s created works that diverged from traditional Chicano-based imagery and subject matter to include visual representations reflecting his queer lived experiences. Utilizing the existing image culture that surrounded him, Terrill combines personal photographs, found pop cultural imagery, and reproductions of artworks by queer predecessors, including Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and Wilhelm von Gloeden, to conjure utopic spaces. Spanning from his earliest explorations to substantial new works, Cut and Paste reveals collage as a foundational element to Terrill’s expanded artistic practice.

Beginning with abstract collages and silkscreens made while Terrill was an undergraduate at Immaculate Heart College—an art department still heavily influenced by the graphic artist and activist Sister Corita Kent—the exhibition draws out the interconnectivity of illustration, collage, and printmaking in Terrill’s work and their influence upon the characteristically flat style of his early paintings. Like many artists who came of age in the wake of Pop, he found refuge within the fantasies of American image culture–his earliest artworks covering his bedroom walls, which he transformed with a mix of drawings, photographs, and clippings of comic books, film starlets, and music icons. His silkscreens from the mid-1970s–a medium central to the larger Chicano art movement–find him applying a graphic sensibility to not only representations of brown bodies, but queer desire, an impulse he would continue to explore in his episodic Homeboy Beautiful proto-zines from the end of the decade.

Terrill was selected to be one of the artists in Hammer Museum’s 2023 biennial, Made in L.A., which will open this October. He also has a work in the current exhibition at the museum- Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection running until 8/20/23.

NYC Art Shows- Stefan Kürten and Rita McBride at Alexander and Bonin

 Art, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 232023
 

Stefan Kürten, “We are all made of stars”, 2013

Stefan Kürten, “Running to Stand Still”, 2014

Stefan Kürten, “Running to Stand Still”, 2014 (detail)

Stefan Kürten, “Fine Wrinkles”, 2000

Rita McBride, “Mae West Mandala (Oaxaca), 2009 and “Color Test (Green Bar)”, 2009

Stefan Kürten’s paintings of houses and Rita McBride’s wall coverings (and other sculptures) work with each other to question the concept of home, as well as the objects you might find within one. The exhibition, titled I Continue To Live In My Glass House, is on view at Alexander and Bonin until 3/25/23.

From the press release-

Stefan Kürten is known for detailed depictions of homes. Although constructed from both found and invented imagery, his homes feel known or experienced. The slippage between archetypes, memories, and dreams are central to his compositions. Set in lush landscapes and mysteriously unpeopled, Kürten’s homes evoke modern art or design museums with iconic sculptures and furniture viewable inside and outside of their transparent walls.

Rita McBride’s work invites us to reconsider structures and design elements such as ductwork, awnings, wall coverings and other utilitarian objects. McBride represents a bentwood chair in Murano glass, fastened together by a material that evokes spun candy or plastic wrap. Chair (1999) comments on the life of a domestic object whose usage necessitates an inventive approach to repair or stabilization.
McBride is also showing Particulates, an art installation that combines lasers with ambient dust and water molecules, will be on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles starting 3/27/23.

 

William Monk at Kohn Gallery 2015

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Dec 022022
 

The Divided Cell (paravent), 2015, by William Monk, part of his exhibition, The Cloud is Growing in the Trees at Kohn Gallery in 2015. This was the artist’s first exhibition in California.

From the Kohn Gallery’s press release-

…This exhibition is the culmination of Monk’s practice over the last few years during which time he has created universes within his paintings that reflect on the relationship of the object and spectator.

In Monk’s paintings a sense of repetition breaks down the figuration, creating visual mantras in which the human scale of the work increases this subtlety rather than amplifying the model. This rhythm happens throughout Monk’s work, surrendering figurative logic to arrive at something stranger and more powerful. Beautifully atmospheric and energetic, these paintings invite a more direct physical connection, drawing in the space between our inner and outer realms of experience.

The artist’s unique relationship to image and paint lead him to enigmatic subject matter such as forests, galaxies, and the open road. The Cloud is Growing in the Trees underscores this mysterious, almost psychedelic relationship that invites the viewer in as an active participant.

Monk is now represented by Pace Gallery and will be part of their booth at Art Basel in Miami. You can find more of his work, including what is at Art Basel, on Instagram.

 

NYC Public Art- Hank Willis Thomas- “Unity” in Brooklyn (and artist talk at The Broad)

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Events, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Sep 182022
 

Unity, was created by Hank Willis Thomas in 2019 as part of the Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program. The 22.5 foot sculpture is a replica of NBA player Joel Embiid’s right arm.

From the artist on the work (via Downtown Brooklyn)-

“The sculpture is an homage to and celebration of the unique and multi-faceted character of the borough of Brooklyn. The spirit of Brooklyn has always been about upward mobility and connection to roots. The large-scale sculpture of a bronze arm pointing toward the sky is intended to convey to a wide audience a myriad of ideas about individual and collective identity, ambition, and perseverance”.

Thomas will be speaking with UCLA professor and author Robin D.G. Kelley today (9/18/22) at 2pm The Broad Museum about his art practice, his activism, and his piece in the museum’s current exhibition, This is Not America’s Flag.

The program will be live-streamed on The Broad’s website and their Facebook page.

Rona Pondick at Zevitas Marcus, 2019

 Art, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 012022
 

Magenta Swimming in Yellow, 2015-7, by Rona Pondick from her solo exhibition at Zevitas Marcus. The sculpture was created using pigmented resin and acrylic.

From the Zevitas Marcus press release–

In 2013, Pondick began an intensive period of experimentation with materials that were new to her practice: resins and acrylics. Over a period of five years, she developed complex methods of working with these materials and came to understand their sculptural potential. This exhibition is the first time this body of work has been seen on the West Coast.

Since her career began in 1984, Rona’s work has consistently referenced the body, in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Her sculptural practice has been no less defined by her ceaseless exploration of new materials and methods. Stainless-steel was Rona’s primary medium for the better part of a decade beginning in 1998. Her newest works are made from resins, acrylics and modeling compound.While thematically related to Rona’s earlier work, these new sculptures are notable for their extraordinary use of color and the way in which the artist’s hand is ever present, elements which heighten the sense of fragility and humanity that have always been achingly present in her work.

Also worth checking out- this ODDA magazine interview with the Pondrick from this year (2022) and her Instagram.

Kenturah Davis at Matthew Brown Los Angeles

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Public Art
Feb 172022
 

A Surreal Presence for Every Possible State, 2018 by Kenturah Davis from her 2019 exhibition, Blur in the Interest of Precision at Matthew Brown Los Angeles. The four panel work was created using oil paint applied with rubber stamp letters and graphite grid on embossed Mohachi paper.

From the press release-

Blur in the Interest of Precision is a search for parallel conditions between the poetics of our visual experience and the strangeness of our relationship to language. We often use language to carve out distinctions between one thing and another. Davis’ objective—to complicate ideas about meaning, representation and perception—have found refuge in blur and doubling. The new drawings are rendered with arrangements of text, but the words are virtually illegible. Many of the portraits pursue ideas the artist is working through via the writings of Fred Moten and Toni Morrison’s essay, Sites of Memory.

Davis’ work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. Using text as a point of departure, the artist explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in a variety of forms including drawings, photographs and performances.

Recently Davis was commissioned by LA Metro to create work for the future Inglewood Station, slated to open in November of 2022. The work, Sonder, depicts community members photographed at gatherings at the artist’s Inglewood art studio and made into large porcelain enamel steel panels.

From Metro’s site–

The photographs were hand painted with stamps incorporating letters that form the words defining the term “sonder.”

Davis was drawn to the term which alludes to the realization that every person has a unique and significant story. She hopes that the portraits inspire connections between strangers, even if only for a passing moment while waiting for the train.

(images below via LA Metro’s site)

For more images, information about the station, and a video of the artist discussing the work, check out Metro’s website.

 

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