To the Renaissance Fair

Over the Thanksgiving break, I visited an art gallery with a rather unassuming exterior. That was with the exception of a huge red flag hanging on the outside of it. It was very much a beacon for me because I would have ignored the gallery otherwise. The gallery is the Moryork Gallery on 4959 York Blvd. Before I talk about the exhibition that was on display at this time, I would like to take a little time to discuss the gallery itself. I had been there before about four years ago when there was an exhibit for an artist who worked with different depictions of grasshoppers at different sizes. I supposed I didn’t pay attention to the rest of the gallery when I visited because it is a work of art unto itself. On one side of the gallery, one is able to see a lounge chair made out of soda cans next to Buddhist statues.

Example of the Interior

When one looks across from this sight, one sees bones of various animals next to a statue of some important traditional Japanese figure. I should also mention the abundance of baby dolls littering the space. They are not always whole and not always found in unexpected places (the bathroom had a shrine to them). The experience of being in the gallery is surreal and added a welcome dimension while viewing the works of the artist on display, Jack Chipman.

An excerpt from the artist’s statement is an appropriate way to summarize my experience with the exhibition:

My mixed media collage and assemblage pieces are an attempt to transform an eclectic collection of found objects and ephemera into thought-provoking and/or humourous statements. It all began after a prolonged hiatus from my central painting pursuit.

This exhibition was definitely an experiment in post-modernism.

The Mask of Red Death

For example, The Mask of Red Death was a good example of the mixed media approach used to convey a perhaps paradoxical mood to the audience. One the one hand, the mask has a rather solemn look to it because of the rather minimal definition of shapes in the mask. However, then one considers that, in combination with the tail, the ears seem to signal that this is supposed to be a cat. When one goes further with his analysis, the mask becomes very comical because once can image the tail swinging with the eyes moving left to right as the seconds pass by on a clock. In addition, Chipman plays with the use of language in an interesting way. In the middle of the work is a strip from a Korean comic. The language proves to be but a minor barrier in understanding the work because of the over the top style of the drawing.

Kiss of Death

Another work that was very thought provoking was Kiss of Death. The composition seemed to be a postmodern commentary about the sanctity, or lack thereof, of the canvas. There seems to be a cork background with paint, paper cut-outs and stamps but it still remains decidedly two-dimensional. Chipman’s comment about moving away from painting towards a mixed media approach is exemplified in this work. He almost seems to be acknowledging the inability of painting to make a comment on its own. However, if most interest to me is the imagery that he chose. There is the kiss from the title but also the symbol of Mickey Mouse with the U.S. flag in the form of stamps on the top left. There is also a white shape, which could be just about anything. However, the message I got from this work is that spread—represented by the stamp and its associations with the sending of something—of American consumer culture—in the form of the ever recognizable Mickey Mouse logo of Disney—is something that means the death of something. Of what? Perhaps the kind of individuality that is expressed in Kiss of Death is what is dying.

Earthquakes and cars: Review #3

Not Los Angeles

http://notlosangeles.tumblr.com/

Los Angeles is a city that has struggled to find any kind of solid identity in large part because of its size. There are about four million inhabitants in the city of Los Angeles and about six million more in the county. The racial, economic, and religious diversity—among other categories—of the city makes it difficult to deal with artistic aesthetics without ignoring other important aspects of the city. Not Los Angeles tackles the city with a different focus (according to the website): “Not Los Angeles suggests a new way of thinking about the city…[by] focusing on the individual perspectives and intimate interactions that constitute this inhabited general space”. The intimate quality of the gallery space—even if the choice of the space was for lack of alternatives or financial concerns—furthers this focus on the individual in Los Angeles by creating a more one to one relationship between the viewer and the works of art. This is as opposed to a larger space where the message of the exhibition might get lost with more artists and works of art. Particularly illuminating was the presence of one of the artists whose work was on display, Joel Kyack.

Mr. Kyack certainly seemed to exude the kind of frenetic energy that may very be the end of the city of Los Angeles in the form of Earthquake. Kyack said that one of the most exhilarating experiences was being in an earthquake that one could feel. He seemed most interested in works that are on the edge between working and breaking. He incorporated this into his work on display in the gallery Errquake. He has a broken fan on top of come cement blocks with parts of the box holding some random dirt, rock, ball bearing combination that constantly shifts while the fan is on. In addition to all this, the electricity for the fan comes from a rather precarious looking set-up that comes from hole in the ceiling. There was plenty of duct tape and a sense that something could go wrong and just burst into flame. Perhaps that specific thought is not running through the minds of the viewers of the work but there is a patch work quality to the work that imbues it with a sense of uncertainty. When one watches the work in progress this uncertainty continues in the work itself. Kyack mentioned that sometimes the dirt combination would take the shape of California or it would not really form anything. He continued to say that sometimes the ball bearing would stay in one section and not move at all and sometimes it would end up just moving uncontrollably. There was another interesting aspect of his talk regarding his work because he talked about some of the jobs that he had been employed in over the years and mentioned that he had been a construction worker. He marveled at the process of making something and would find works of art in some of the construction pieces that he was only partially finished with. This anecdote highlights the continued shift in the “work” of an artist from merely a finished product—which in some ways Errquake is—to the process of the work and, in this case, the performative qualities of the work. It seemed like we were almost encouraged to possibly move the dirt around and see what that does to the design of dirt. Kyack seems most interested in making the average Angelino think about the “big one” that we are overdue for. Perhaps he is also pointing our thoughts towards thinking about how the people of Los Angeles mix within this shaking box that is Los Angeles.

The other work that I thought was interesting is Brian Boyer’s A New Atlas. The viewer is presented with a wall sized map of Los Angeles and a series of different colored lines with various names listed by them in an accompanying guide. This is a reimagining of Los Angeles via various bike routes. What was particularly sad—at least for this native New Yorker—was the small area that the bike routes covered. It almost makes it seem impossible to undo the hold that the individual car has on the city. This seems to be less a series of recommendations for inhabitants of Los Angeles that happen to be bikers than an indictment of the smog-causing car culture that has a hold on all of us.

Roaming in Highland Park

During Fall Break, I,and my class mate Nelson, took a trip through the Highland Park contemporary art scene and was surprised to find the level of artistic output present in the area where I live. First on the trip was the studio of Susan Moss, who is a self-cured Breast cancer survivor and owned a studio across the street from my apartment building. Her work is one of the many that I encountered that opted for more abstract forms of expression over figurative works. I asked her who, if any, artists served as her inspirations and she mentioned Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. It was immediately apparent where their works figured into her work. Rothko’s influence can be felt in the experimentation with color. She layers color and places them on top of one another in a way that might be seen as an evolution of Rothko’s work. Rather than have blocks of color on top of one another, she has these “swooshes” of color that imbue the work with a sense of abstract movement very reminiscent of her other inspiration, Jackson Pollock.

Example of Susan Moss' work

After a job offer and a story involving a shot gun, we continued into Highland Park and discovered Outpost for Contemporary Art. From their website:

Outpost for Contemporary Art promotes cross-cultural exchange by developing international artistic projects that stimulate social interaction and emphasize process over end result.

Devoted to bridging the local and the global, Outpost creates networks of art, artists and art audiences that span continents while connecting local communities.

From the description above and the pieces of information we received from the receptionist, this was less a gallery than a medium for artistic expression. She mentioned how they have a project that is ongoing at the location where artists could use the shop front of the outpost to create works of art that have a message. Currently, there are five pictures and each of them contain the buttons of a vcr or dvd player (play, fast forward, rewind, pause, and stop).

Storefront art of the Outpost for Contemporary Art

I did not really understand how this work was supposed to speak for itself and impart a message onto the viewer and thought of this as an example of improper context being provided for this artwork. However, I did receive information about an exhibition, of sorts, taking place on November 8th at the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock. It seemed to me that this exhibition was a perfect example of what the Outpost does. It is to have about one hundred artists all drawing (and perhaps painting) continuously in one hour shifts for the duration of the exhibition. Afterwards, the works of art are to be sold to the public at large. From what I understood, not only would the artists be working but it would have some sort of interactive section for the public. Another interesting piece was a Highland Park flag with two Chihuahuas, a taco truck and some strange chicken-headed man. This was perhaps an attempt to connect some of the local community’s flavor with the artistic practice of the area.

Highland Park Flag

Entrance to the Hummingbird Collective

From here, we travelled to a place that one would not immediately travel to for artwork: the Hummingbird Collective. This place is first and foremost a medical marijuana dispensary, but houses a surprising amount of artwork. Unfortunately, we did not get the names of most of the amateur artwork in the collective but there was one series of artwork by an artist identified only as ‘Drew’. The first in the series is called ‘A celebrity’s diet’ and is an image of a woman making herself vomit. The pop-cultural implication of this work should be apparent to those of us alive during the age where celebrity is worshipped as a religion. In an age where TMZ, Perez, Oh no they didn’t, US, People, and others are obsessed over by millions daily, everyone takes for granted that the cost of celebrity is one’s health. Drew presents the viewer with an image that most avoid and forces one to come to grips with one’s role in the culture of thinness. Two other of his works—‘The surgeon general’s wife’ and ‘I am still beautiful’—continue to force the viewer to look at things that we ignore or, in the worst case, believe never happen. For example, the image of a pregnant woman smoking is something that we hope never happens in real life, but, in reality, it happens all the time and has disastrous consequences. In addition, we know that amputees are alive and well in the world but the times are few and far between when we actually have to deal with them face to face and force ourselves to move past any possible disgust and acknowledge them as human beings.

A celebrity’s diet

The surgeon general’s wife

I am still beautiful

Claremont MFA Exhibition

Of Looking by Jessamyn Lynn

Along with my fellow classmates, I made a trip to Claremont for an exhibition of the works of MFA students and found an assortment of work—painting, sculpture, video and live art in the form of haircutting—that seem to indicate that the path of contemporary art seems to be moving back to the past in its forms and ideas. I would argue that these artworks signal a return to the work of the abstract expressionists because of the imprint of the artist that is found in the work. It seems that much of the work in painting and sculpture of the 1970s and 1980s was conceived with a specific emphasis on distancing oneself from one’s work so that it stood on its own. Video art is an example where the artist’s hand seems to be more evident because of the actual presence of the artist himself in the work. However, movements such as minimalism—by making the art look almost machine made—stood in direct contrast to abstract expressionism. There was a effort to distance art from this period of celebrity artists such as Pollock who could not be separated from the works that they created. In fact, it was their very personality as brooding, cigarette smoking, blue-jean wearing artists that caused their works to achieve the levels of popularity that they did. The art of the 80s and 90s did exhibit a return towards exhibiting the hand of the artist, acknowledging their role in their own works and returning to familiar forms such as the human body, but—as far as I observed—they don’t have the same emotion visible in the works of these MFA students. They seem to harness the ability to tie their brushwork to their feelings at the time of the creation.

Blue Boy by Justin Bower

One of my favorite paintings in the exhibition was the work Blue Boy by Justin Bower. There seems to be an almost emotional quality in his brushwork. Every stroke is on display and as a result, it seems like we are looking at the very matter that comprises a face—i.e. the muscle tissue. He seems to be dealing with questions of identity in his work. The multiple faces that are to be found in his single face seem to suggest an identity composed of many different facets, yet this work does not get mired in what could be a decidedly more depressing emotional themes. It is difficult to situate oneself in the middle of the work because of the calculated, frenzied quality of the work. There are eyes here and there and suggestions of mouths and noses but there seems to be no anchor outside of the recognizable shape of the face. This work almost seems to revel in its multi-faced existence, which seems to be best conveyed through the bright, vibrant color scheme that is used throughout the work.

Printing Mom by Steve Kim

Mark Rothko, Subway Scene

Steve Kim’s Printing Mom is another work that seems to be influence by the Abstract expressionists, specifically Mark Rothko. In this work, we see some recognizable shapes such as two heads and some arms, but the viewer is left struggling to find some place to situate these figures because of the lack of any discernable place markers. It almost looks like an old computer model that doesn’t have the textures filled in. Of importance in this painting is the coloring. Rather than call attention to the work through the use of intricate and detailed figure work, Kim highlights the importance segments of his painting through the use of color in his painting. There is the placement of a block of red that seems to contrast against everything else in the painting. Red is the dominant shape, so to counter that most aspects of the rest of the painting seem to have some kind of blue/green tint to it that further calls attention to this block red. Rothko’s Subway Scene(1938) is an example of what Kim seems to be doing. There are figures in the painting and there is a scene going on in the painting but—perhaps foreshadowing his later work—the most important section of the painting are the four blue columns and everything seems be subordinate to that despite the fact that the columns are stationary and the rest of the painting’s figures are in motion of some sort.

Ren by Mark H. Wagner

Unfortunately, some of the more interesting pieces will not be featured in this entry because of the problem I had with a lack of charged battery for my camera, but perhaps more interesting than the actual exhibition was the tour we received of the studios on the upper level. It was here that the creative process was on display and it was interesting to see the various creative processes on display because of the variety of approaches to creating art. Also, I have to say that the beer selection was quite exquisite with Fat Tire, Dos Equis and Red Stripe as options. Class like that has to be admired.

Source of Subway Scene: http://getdagoss.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/subway-scene-1938-mark-rothko.jpg

Murakami and fame

Admittedly, this is a late post to an otherwise bland blog, but a post is a post. I am across this article earlier in the day: Amid the Bust, the Boom Boom and I couldn't help but wonder about the state of the contemporary artist. In the article, Guy Trebay goes on and on about the place that a pre-gallery opening party takes place, those in attendance, and what they say to one of the seemingly uninitiated. To quote from the article: '“Do you know who you are talking to?” a Murakami acolyte will ask you in a tone that is equal parts astonishment and horror.' The fact that there is an art opening for Murakami's work is irrelevant to those almost cultish fans. He has been elevated to iconic status and has been subsumed into the consumerist, paparazzi glitz that has gobbled up the best of celebrities (I am still not convinced that Britney Spears isn't a crazy bitch that just happened to get picked out of a crowd at walmart). Contemporary Art at its heart is about subverting the expected, the understood, and the proper. This subversion seems to be at its purist when it takes places in the underground, away from the prying eyes of those who simply cannot comprehend "it". Despite his fame, it does seem a little counter-cultural to make a statue in the anime style of this: