JMOCA Copenhagen: Talented Young People

JMOCA Copenhagen: Talented Young People

September 7 – October 6 2007
Opening Friday September 7 at 5-8
Thu.-Sat. 12-5

Co-Lab.
Nørre Søgade 17, kld.tv.
1370 København K

Press release 1:
Los Angeles is oozing with artists. Produced from the MFA program apparatus or mere transplants, if you look out the window of your car while driving down the 10, you are bound to see one. The other part of the world took notice of this because of Mike Kelly, Paul McCarthy and that’s really about all. Now there’s 234,221 of them here panning away in their studios or at the Mandrake. We are five of them.

Press release 2:
JMOCA is a museum in the hills of Los Angeles that occasionally doubles as a compound for the exchange of ideas between artists and for the fabrication of the art that goes into the museum. There is a short but strong tradition of criticizing other art and drinking that has burgeoned here. Each artist included in this exhibition is a crucial component of this organization of friendship and desperation. Here we will display our own work separately.

Press release 3:
JMOCA is a museum in the hills of Los Angeles. The exhibitions that take place there are unusual in that the work for them is often made no sooner than 48 hours prior to the openings. This is not always the case, but often it is. This act of making in the eleventh hour is the art. The physical results, although usually quite astonishing, function more as a catalogue describing the system of their making. The roles of director, curator, artist, assistant and preparator are entirely decomposed and it is difficult and entirely irrelevant to realize or declare who made what or who decided what. Except for Justin, because it is his house.

Press release 4:
The five artists in this exhibit have often collaborated on the exhibitions that take place at JMOCA. JMOCA is a museum in the hills of Los Angeles that occasionally doubles as a residence for Justin Hansch and his lovely daughter, Melody.
Through working together, we’ve had the rare opportunity as adults to share each other’s thought processes and practices while making art outside of a traditional institutional setting. This experience and intimate history has created a relationship that can’t be divided into artistic and intellectual categories. We all make very different work, individually. We work together because we are friends and because we trust each other as artists. The work itself is too wonderful to insult with brief description.

Press release 5:
Justin Hansch is, technically, the founder of JMOCA (Justin’s Museum of Contemporary Art). JMOCA is a museum in the hills of Los Angeles. There have been times that artist’s have shown work from their private practice there. There have been times when many of us threw a lot of older work from previous shows at JMOCA together and attributed the results to a dead German. Once, a friendly drunk arrived from Chicago carrying a suitcase filled with little bits of trash, which we pinned all around the walls for an audience of five goats that were brought into town specifically to see the opening. JMOCA is a place of spontaneous and frugal magic in a town of billion dollar card tricks. Please buy our art.

Press release 6:
The five artists in this exhibit often work together on projects at JMOCA (Justin’s Museum of Contemporary Art). JMOCA is a museum in the hills of Los Angeles.
Justin Hansch, as well as owning a museum, makes paintings. His paintings combine aspects of populist art strategies with modernist aesthetics to create bodies of work that justify themselves through their continuation and the pleasure with which they appear to be made. The exchange between the quotidian sources he draws from, random news clippings that strike his fancy, and the references to his education in art creates enough of a critical pause for him to make the next painting.
John Knuth’s boyish charm and developing, sociopathic undercurrents produce mesmerizing and somewhat disturbingly beautiful results that come from trashy and sometimes repulsive materials such as fly vomit, cat food or rotten house paint. If your child’s favorite imaginary friend came over to your house and shit on the floor, would you still be angry when you saw that it glowed magenta?
James Krone’s paintings overlap the fantasies of the pastoral and the apocalyptic. They draw from historical fragments, personal and collective, as a subjective database. Time becomes an anthropomorphized host, exhausting and regenerating its guests. The grist is to create a kind of loving magic out of the impossibility of a final understanding.
Kiersten Puusemp’s work describes what documented history has been applied to avoid. With flawless formal precision she temporarily locates elsewhere. Unlike much work about ephemeral notions that rely on the idea of loss, Kiersten’s work suggests what we have sensed but have never actually possessed.
Jason Starr is a beautiful parasite. By aping collective tendencies of artists and painters, Starr manages to expose much of the absurdity that is inherent in art or in attempting to define it. There is a certain creature that eats the tongue of a certain fish and then acts as that fishes tongue, for the rest of their lives. Is it not a tongue then? What looks like a bone is in fact a scalpel.