Tag: Los Angeles

Chad Person // Surviving the End of Your World

Chad-Person

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce the first Los Angeles solo exhibition for contemporary artist, Chad Person.

In his newest body of work, Person utilizes his trademark fascination with the confluence of economy and societal power structures through innovative installation, sculpture and performance. Surviving the End of Your World will feature several collages from the artist’s “TaxCut” series, and the debut of “Thirst” – a fifteen-foot inflatable sculpture depicting the Mobil Oil Pegasus lying in a glossy black acrylic pool of its own crude. Person’s use of iconographic signifiers related to American capitalism and consumerism are juxtaposed with notions of sheer Darwinist survival featured in his “RECESS” project, which will be featured in the gallery’s Project Room. In addition to a live video feed of the artist’s performance in his self-made “apocalypse bunker” in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “RECESS” includes functioning installation works to spotlight cultural intervention, critique of corporate enterprise and the myth of self-reliance in the face of essential conservation.

“New Mexico-based multimedia artist Chad Person creates beautifully crafted, ironic indictments on society’s most dangerous flaws.” – Shana Nys Dambrot, Flavorpill (2010)

Chad Person (born 1978, Marinette, WI) received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. His work is included in the public collections of The West Collection (PA), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation Collection (CA) and The University of New Mexico Art Museum (NM). He has had solo exhibitions in Albuquerque, Marfa and River Falls, and been featured in PULSE Miami Contemporary Art Fair.

Mark Moore Gallery

Everlasting Gobstopper

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Michael Benevento is pleased to announce Everlasting Gobstopper, a group show with Spartacus Chetwynd, Hélio Oiticica, Lil Picard, Pipilotti Rist, Eva Rothschild, Cindy Sherman, and Michael E. Smith. The exhibition brings together seven artists working in video, painting, photography, sculpture, and installation that are conceptually united by mutual investments in vernaculars of trauma, psychology, appropriation, gender and sexuality. These works transform the white cube gallery into a site of possibility: an abstracted aftermath of a pagan celebration, a visceral and ritualized situation.

Amping up the scene, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’ Almeida’s Cosmococa (1973) photographs conflate and collapse the historical relationship between cocaine, Coca-Cola, and the star-making machine, opening multiple dynamics between The Americas and capitalism though popular signifiers that threaten to erase all cultural difference. The CC5 Hendrix War photographs lace the cover image of Hendrix’s posthumous album War Heroes with lines of cocaine and a matchbook bearing the Coca-Cola brand name, while the CC3 Maileryn photographs modify images taken from Norman Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe.

Offering the promise of extreme pleasure and wired through a wall of television monitors, Spartacus Chetwynd’s Hermito’s Children (2008) parodies and complicates the television melodrama while dealing with issues of transgender identity in a confrontational fictitious space laced with camp and dark humor. Not to be left behind in the headlong rush towards ecstasy, Pipilotti Rist’s Sexy Sad I (1987) blends text and and varied versions of The Beatles’ Sexy Sadie with video of a nude male body — looped to imply that his sexualized, yet helpless, body will run through this unspecified surreal forest for eternity.

Residing in the psychic space of aftermath and abandon, the sculptures and works on paper by Eva Rothschild underscore issues of landscape with alienation and melancholy. In Black Psycore (1999), a poster of a wolf is altered with black gouache, Rothschild creates a dark silhouette that is mirrored in the slick, sleek surfaces of her Black Mountainside (2001) sculpture. Melancholia, in turn, informs gestures of vulnerability with Michael E. Smith’s paintings and sculptures. Embedding paint, oil and/or resin on everyday materials including clothes and industrial foam to produce scarred or birthmark like surfaces. Smith’s work often attempts to calcify components of the remains of working-class American life into starkly emotive objects.

A documentation of the leftover is central to both Cindy Sherman’s Untitled (1987) and Lil Picard’s Burnt Ties (1968), which complete the exhibition, almost serving as aesthetic bookends to envelop the diversely dark and Dionysian environment. Displaying a wig, autumn leaves, pinecones and a pair of blood stained panties and a singed burnt bow tie respectively, Sherman’s photograph and Picard’s sculpture propels the legibility of the show, suggesting different (if implausible) relations within the current environment and the works displayed therein.

Michael Benevento

RICHARD COLMAN

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LOS ANGELES – Opening May 22, New Image Art Gallery presents “Keep Out the Light,” a solo exhibition that features new paintings, sculpture and site-specific installations by Richard Colman. “Keep Out the Light” marks Colman’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 2007.

In this most recent body of work, Colman shows the struggles of the architect working “behind the scenes” of the elaborate; both beautiful and claustrophobic among landscapes and artifacts. Richard’s work demonstrates a unique language drawing on the intricacies of an Indian Miniature, to the antiquity of the more abstract and symbolic nature of Byzantine art. Colman’s patterns have the repetition and geometry associated with Islamic tiles and mosaics. Narratives depict day-glo orgies, fusing the sinister with the comical. A pantheon of internalized imagery and shared iconography comes into play in the shape of occult symbols, silhouettes, and rainbow sprays of color, piles of viscera, in a concoction of violence and ecstasy.

The subjects of his paintings-from headless bears to naked men-are presented in a theatrical way, like actors in a play, standing in formation. The work captures the feeling of being frozen on stage, anticipating what will come next and never quite finding out.

The title of the show, “Keep Out the Light,” references the density of Colman’s work, as well as his obsessive work habits, serving as a sort of escape for the artist. The works in this new exhibition exhibit the strength of obsessive patterning and imagery to drive away the delusions of everyday life.

Colman will be constructing a space within the gallery that will both highlight the work and invite viewers to step into the art and explore and experience the landscape of “Keep Out the Light”.

About Richard Colman
Colman was born in 1976 and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Colman graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, in 2002. He has exhibited extensively throughout the world in solo and group exhibitions including Krets, Malmo Sweeden, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, Union Gallery, London, UK and ARKEN Museum Of Modern Art, Denmark.  In 2006, Gingko Press released a book cataloging his work titled “I Was Just Leaving.” Colman currently lives and works in San Francisco, California. www.richardcolmanart.com

About New Image Art Gallery
Marsea Goldberg, founder and director of New Image Art, started the gallery in 1994 in her 10 by 10 design studio. Since then, the gallery has grown to attract a global cult following, grabbing the interest of art lovers and collectors worldwide. Renowned for her discriminating eye and solid curatorial skills, New Image Art Gallery continues to show the works of established and emerging artists coming out of the street, skate, fine art and surf scenes. Over the years, the gallery has launched or mobilized the careers of Shepard Fairey, Ed Templeton, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Rich Jacobs, Rebecca Westcott, Neckface, Cleon Peterson, Megan Whitmarsh, Faile, Tauba Auerbach, Matt Leines, the Date Farmers, Judith Supine, and Bäst, just to name a few.

Richard Colman

New Image Art Gallery

Dorothy Iannone

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Javier Peres is very pleased to present the first Los Angeles solo exhibition by American artist Dorothy Iannone (b. Boston, 1933, lives/works Berlin).

Known for her continuous challenges to contemporary culture and a practice that opens the borders between her art and life, Iannone uses a stylized approach to document the female sexual experience from a singular perspective. The confrontational, open nature of her work accompanies its formal richness and conceptual sophistication in a discomposed alliance that borders on the uncanny. Continuing the retrospective theme of her recent New Museum retrospective, the artist has chosen to exhibit work from the 1960’s to the present, including her signature early paintings, drawings, sculptures and an important video box.

Iannone began painting in 1959 and since then has been featured in numerous exhibitions, throughout Europe. Her solo shows include “Lioness,” New Museum, New York (2009), “Dorothy Iannone,” Anton Kern, New York (2009), “Follow me,” September, Berlin (2008), “She’s a freedom fighter,” Air de Paris, Paris (2007), “Seek the Extremes…,” Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006), and “Dorothy lannone,” The Wrong Gallery at Tate Modern, London (2005). Recent group exhibitions include “Bodypoliticx,” Witte de With, Rotterdam (2007), “Domino,” Air de Paris, Paris (2006), “Day For Night,” Whitney Biennial, New York (2006), Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2005), and “Dieter Roth & Dorothy Iannone,” Sprengel Museum, Hanover (2005).
Peres Projects

MILLER UPDEGRAFF

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Novels are not about “teaching people how to live but about showing the
possibility of what it is like to be someone else.”  – Brian Finney

Michael Benevento is pleased to present the West-Coast solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Miller Updegraff.
Based on a selection of images from the 1930s, the subjects of Updegraff’s eleven paintings on unprimed canvas speak
less to an objectivity linked to representation and instead prioritize an ethnographic ambiguity allowing for profound discourses of desire.

Reconceptualizing the gazing between a group of tribesmen and contemporaries – D.H. Lawrence, Humphrey Spender, and
Evelyn Waugh – Updegraff’s paintings engage the viewer in a visual exchange that is not ironic, wholly honorific or whimsical,
but rather opens up a discourse on what can happen when externalized photographs of a group who problematized binary sexualities
interface with a practice that questions notions of critical distance.

Using a subdued palette, the paintings evoke the nostalgia of the black and white photographs used as source references.
To read Updegraff’s paintings is not simply to identify with the subjects on the canvas, but instead to question the varied forms
of mediated representation with an understanding that stand-ins can be far more complex, if not enticing, than the “real” thing.

By exploring the strategies of power negotiations, however subtle, between men – either between subjects or in the artist’s relation to
the subjects – Updegraff abuts the implausibility of anthropologic “participant/observation” with Lacanian constructions of fantasy to produce
irresolvable responses to the enigmatic desire of the other.

Miller Updegraff earned his M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 2008. A Georgia native, Updegraff lives and works in Los Angeles.

Michael Benevento