Le Vent d’Est: New work by Stephen Lapthisophon
 
Tautology at Actual Size
Opening Reception: Friday, June 14, 2013 7-10 PM
 
Aroma at Elephant
Opening Reception: Sunday, June 16, 2013 4-7 PM
Inline image 3
 
Actual Size is pleased to present Tautology, an exhibition of new work by Dallas-based artist Stephen Lapthisophon, organized by Vincent Ramos. Tautology is part of a dual venue exhibition, Le Vent d’ Est. Stephen Lapthisophon’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles will document his first impressions of the city as well as record his responses to the gallery spaces at Actual Size in Chinatown and Elephant in Glassel Park.
 
Stephen Lapthisophon works in a realm where process-driven gestures, clues leading to nowhere, and fragmented layers of meaning are forced to co-exist. Legally blind since 1994, he relies heavily on his other senses to initiate ideas that disrupt notions of cultural memory. His site-specific installations employ a range of materials and approaches that include drawing, text, found objects, coffee and salt.
 
On Thursday, June, 20, 2013 at 8:00pm Actual Size will host Dark Warehouse, a lecture and screening of videos by Stephen Lapthisophon. Lapthisophon will screen a selection of his own time-based works, as well as clips culled from YouTube that inform his practice and his understanding of Los Angeles.
 
Stephen Lapthisophon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. Recent solo exhibitions include Isolation, A Slender Gamut, New York, NY (2012), The Construction of a National Identity, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2011), Las Palabras en la Sombra de Esta Fecha, El Escaparate, Barcelona, Spain (2009), and DESIGN, Zagreus Projekt, Berlin, Germany (2008). Recent group exhibitions include, Variations on Theme: Contemporary Art 1950’s-Present, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2012), The Café, SHOW Studio, London, UK (2011), and Archival Impulse, Gallery 400, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL (2011). His work has been reviewed in ARTFORUM, Frieze, Art in America, Art News, New Art Examiner, and ART LIES. A collection of his essays entitled, Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010 was recently published by Green Lantern Press. He is currently a senior lecturer in art and art history at The University of Texas at Arlington.
 
Vincent Ramos is an artist from Los Angeles. He received his MFA from CalArts in 2007 and his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002. Recent exhibitions include Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum and LAXART (2012), Pachuco Cadaver or There Are No Heavies in America, Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles (2011), and Outsider Art: Others from Elsewhere Doing Something Altogether Different…Sort Of, 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica (2011). Curatorial projects include, After The Gold Rush: Reflections and Postscripts on the National Chicano Moratorium of August 29, 1970, Vincent Price Art Museum, ELAC, Los Angeles (2011), River, Elephant, Los Angeles (2011), Chasing Shadows, The Onion (The Church of the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society), North Hills (2010), The Sharon Show & 1969, Dan Graham, Los Angeles (2009), and Call Me Lightning: An Evening of Performance-Based Work, FOCA, Los Angeles (2008)
 
Special thanks to Max Presneill and the Torrance Art Museum, Chloë Flores and GuestHaus, Irene Tsatsos, Natilee Harren, John Berdel, Aaron Wrinkle, and the directors of Elephant for their support in bringing Stephen to Los Angeles.
 
***
Gallery Hours: Saturdays 12:00-5:00pm, and by appointment.
 
Follow Actual Size Los Angeles on Twitter and Facebook for event details.
 
—
Actual Size Los Angeles
741 New High Street
Los Angeles CA 90012
actualsizela.com
1.213.290.5458

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Wassup Painters, a group show organized by Pavan Segal featuring work by Kerstin Brätsch, Paul Cowan, Cynthia Daignault, Liam Everett, Henrik Olai Kaarstein, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. The show will open on June 8, and will be on view until July 20. A reception will be held at the gallery on Saturday, June 8 from 6-9pm, at 2660 La Cienega Blvd in Culver City.
 
Wassup Painters brings together contemporary artists who approach painting through the use of nontraditional materials and innovative processes as a way of exploring new conceptual ground. Painting as a medium has a long and rich history and recent trends have focused on exploring and reinterpreting what has come before. In some contrast to this, Wassup Painters highlights artistic practices that push the possibilities of the medium into unexpected realms, blurring the boundaries between painting and other forms of object making.
 
The exhibition title references Larry Clark’s 2005 film Wassup Rockers, which features a group of Latino teenagers searching for identity in the racially diverse and ever changing South Central neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In the film, the teens are often mislabeled as “rockers” due to their long hair and black clothes even though they primarily self-identify as “skaters,” making them feel misunderstood in their own community. While many of the works in Wassup Painters have leanings toward painting, they could easily be perceived or labeled as other forms entirely, such as glasswork, photography, signage, deconstructed material, collage, sculpture, and fabric art. This show offers the opportunity to view works that have direct points of intersection with these forms of object making as a way of contemplating what comprises and defines painting, while asking what role context, intention, and expectation play in this process.

Armory Center for the Arts presents a temporary, site-specific installation by Los Angeles-based artist Nate Page in its central stairwell through June 2013.
Page’s newest work, entitled Instituted Angles of Path and Display, challenges the ultra-functional design of the Armory’s main stairwell. Page has removed one of the stairwell’s two large metal handrails, turned it 90 degrees, and mounted it in the middle of the space on a pedestal-like structure that follows the crooked trajectory of the stairs and the landing. This simple gesture both highlights and alters the existing framework and prescriptive design of the space, which remains fully functional although visually distorted. Central to Page’s practice is an interest in engaging elements of perceived and given space in built environments, often through objects dismissed as peripheral or incidental.
Page acknowledges that railings generally can serve two functions: one for handrail support, and the other as a boundary. By turning a railing on its side and using it to bisect the Armory stairwell, Page shifts our point of view what a handrail is for. Page has created a topography of the climber's passage and an opportunity for visitors to become aware of their physical and psychological relationships to the architecture by negotiating passage (stair) vs. path (boundary railing). Familiar visual and spatial rhythms are interrupted, inviting the viewer to reconsider the function of the space – and possibly, the artist hopes, to find more potential than what it is programmed for.
Nate Page lives in Los Angeles. His work has been seen at Lothringer Dreizehn Space for Contemporary Art in Munich, Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg Austria, Warsaw Academy of the Arts, Warsaw, John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts in Sheboygan, WI, No Name Exhibitions @ The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, and at Cooper Union and Jen Bekman Gallery, both in New York. Page has produced many environments with Machine Project in Los Angeles including A Field Guide to LACMA at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has shown nationally including Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery, Institute of Visual Arts at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. From 2001-2004, Page co-directed an experimental artist collaborative and exhibition space in Milwaukee called the Rust Spot. He received a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and attended the Warsaw Academy of Art in Warsaw, Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg Austria, and the New York Studio Program and the Summer Residency at The Cooper Union, both in New York City.

Santa Monica, March 2013 – Christopher Grimes Gallery is very pleased announce an exhibition of new work by Lucia Koch. This will be Koch’s first solo exhibition in the United States and her first with the gallery. Koch uses interventions, installations, videos and photographs to explore the means for effecting change in one’s experience of the environment. She often covers the façades, skylights and windows with translucent materials, filters, or laser-cut panels of patterned wood or metal, creating new layers between inside and outside. Her interest lies in generating altered states of place, where invisibility and interruption short circuit perception.
 
In imagining the opportunities architecture presents for art, Koch will build a site-specific installation, transforming the anatomy of the main gallery. Here, “architecture” is less the construction of an object than a strategy for occupying space. Also on view will be a video work and large-scale photographs of the interior of cardboard boxes, installed as virtual extensions of the environment. This series represents Koch’s ongoing engagement with understanding how a space is converted into place.
 
Koch (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1966) lives and works in São Paulo. She has participated in the 11th Biennale de Lyon, France (2011), the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2006), the 2nd, 5th and 8th editions of the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (1999, 2005 and 2011), and the 8th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2003). Her work has been included in such exhibitions as, Another Place, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil (2011), and When Lives Become Form, Yerba Buena Center for Arts, San Francisco, CA (2009) which was also on view at Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2008). Her work is in the collections of such institutions as Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil, among others.

Couturier Gallery welcomes, with great pleasure, Susana Espinosa and Toni Hambleton, the two doyennes of contemporary Puerto Rican ceramics in their duo exhibition Encuentro (Meeting). The exhibition will include recent hand-built figurative and architectural clay sculptures which when seen together may represent entire communities. The exhibition will take place from June 1 through July 13, 2013. The opening reception will be Saturday, June 1, 6-8pm.
 
Susana Espinosa and Toni Hambleton have had a significant role in Puerto Rican ceramics, a tradition that existed long before their arrival on the island but never consolidated into an identifiable movement nor did there exist a learning center dedicated to ceramics. Toni Hambleton (b. Mexico City, 1934) studied fashion design at the School of Design and Decoration in her native Mexico City (1956-59). It was only when she moved to Puerto Rico in 1963 she began studying and working with clay in the very late ‘60s. Susana Espinosa (b. Buenos Aires, 1933) arrived in Puerto Rico five years later, in 1968, already an accomplished ceramist. These two expats subsequently met and in 1980, recognizing the dearth of studios or training opportunities on the island, co-founded (together with Jaime Suarez, another important figure in Puerto Rican ceramic history) Casa Candina, a ceramic school and gallery. The influence of these two women on contemporary ceramics in Puerto Rico is reflected in the move away from the functional vessel forms that prevailed in large part to satisfy the commercial tourist trade and traditional throwing techniques that were predominant up to that time. Their encuentro, or meeting, resulted in a small revolution of form and idea in Puerto Rican ceramic history.
 
Susana Espinosa’s hand-built sculptures are typically figural- male and female, full length, elongated figures, or robust busts, with their inscribed, worked and crusty surfaces, some cloaked literally and figuratively with mysterious auras and secrets lurking underneath their surfaces, figures that at once are in and part of their own landscape. Espinosa’s use of glazes is spare preferring to use it only as accent, instead allowing the fire and oxides to give the monochromatic hues to her work. Her “École Française,” a new work to be shown in this exhibition, consists of seven women: two matronly figures, the other five more demure, all cloaked in large skirts and all but the largest of them (Mme. La Maitresse, perhaps) clasping their bodies in typically female guarded fashion. They are the embodiment of worldly schools, bringing with them knowledge of the depths of the oceans and the heavens as represented by the sgraffito sea life and celestial heavens inscribed in the clay forming their dresses. Each has her own story, and collectively they represent a community.
 
In contrast to Espinosa’s figures, Toni Hambleton’s elegant and rhythmic architectonic forms reflect the structures of her environment: the buildings, walls, network of pathways that make up a pueblo, village or city be it from the memory of her native Mexico or wanderings throughout the island of Puerto Rico. Her slab-built sculptures may be pierced like windows of a house or doors in a wall providing a look inside though the contents are left to speculation. Hambleton prefers not to adorn her sculptures with the polychrome of glazes, not unlike Espinosa, instead allowing the fire of the kiln and oxides to provide coloring and shading. Her forms may be the very environments which Espinosa’s figures inhabit. The sculptures of these two artists together combine remarkably to form very diverse and elegant clay communities.
 
Susana Espinosa’s and Toni Hambleton’s work may be found in numerous private and public collections worldwide. Public collections in which Susana Espinosa’s work may be found include: Art & Handicraft Center, Porvoo, Finland; Colección Casa Candina, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Compañía de Turismo de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museo de Arte de Ponce, PR; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Museo della Ceramica D’arte de Faenza, Italy; Museo de la Cerámica, Ichon, Korea; Museo de la Cerámica: Mimara, Zagreb, Yugoslavia.
 
Public collections holding Toni Hambleton’s ceramic sculptures include: Centro de Arte de Maracaibo: Lía Bermúdez, Maracaibo, Venezuela; Colección Casa Candina, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Colección Compañía de Turismo, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Colección Instituto Statale D’Arte, Teramo, Casteli, Italy; International Keramike Studio, Kecksmet, Hungary; Museo Ariadna, Geneva, Switzerland; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico; Museo de Cerámica, Ichón, Korea; Museo de Cerámica, Mino, Japan; Museo de la Ceramica, Zagreb, Yugoslavia; Museum of Ceramics, Brisbane, Australia; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA
 
For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery at cg@couturiergallery.com or 323-933-5557.

Diane Rosenstein Fine Art is pleased to announce an Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture and Photographs — a group show to celebrate our First Anniversary. This exhibition will present new work along with important highlights from previous shows, including Louise Nevelson (The Black Mirror), Thomas Downing (The Washington School) and Alexandra Hedison (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere).
 
Our First Anniversary will also present new work from Arnold Helbling (drawings), Sarah Awad (paintings), and Carmen Argote (sculpture) — three artists who are exhibiting at the gallery for the first time. Mr. Helbling, who lives and works in New York, will return to DRFA in September with a solo survey exhibition of his abstract paintings and drawings (2002 – 2013). Sarah Awad will then show in mid-October, which is her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. This summer, Miss Awad is also included in “Rogue Wave 2013” at L.A. Louver, Venice, opening July 18th.
 
The Anniversary Exhibition spans forty-two years, from Thomas Downing’s Grid 29 (1971) to Sarah Awad’s new figurative oil paintings of seated women. Its material scope includes Carman Argote’s Mascara, a painted and flocked tumbleweed, and Eben Goff’s aluminum, pigment and beeswax Channel Slope. John Sisley’s Water Drops are photographic records of works on paper, while Marco Breuer’s burned, scraped and folded cameraless photographs transcend convention.
 
Two artists offer botanical abstractions that explore largeness and smallness of scale. John Adelman’s 76,277 (Parts of a Tree), 2012 is an epic 12-foot long drawing of a dismantled and reassembled severed tree branch; Charles Fine’s mixed-media paintings depict cosmic flora realized in an intimate and enchanting form.
 
The exhibition includes work by fourteen artists: John Adelman, Carmen Argote, Sarah Awad, Marco Breuer, Thomas Downing, Charles Fine, Eben Goff, Cleve Gray, Alexandra Hedison, Arnold Helbling, John M. Miller, Louise Nevelson, Jose Alvaro Perdices, and John Sisley.
 
In our first year, DRFA held nine exhibitions, and presented the work of thirty-one artists. In April 2012 we opened a project space in Beverly Hills with a solo survey of abstract expressionist Cleve Gray (The Connecticut Paintings); followed by The Washington School: a group show of color field paintings by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Thomas Downing. Last fall, we hosted two solo exhibitions – a survey of conceptual drawings by Texas artist John Adelman and new photographs of Malibu by Alexandra Hedison, who is based in Los Angeles. The Black Mirror (co-curated by James Welling and Diane Rosenstein) inaugurated our new gallery, a 4,300 square foot space on Highland Avenue in Hollywood. This spring, we hosted three solo exhibitions: John M. Miller (painting), Eben Goff (sculpture) and an acclaimed mid-career survey of experimental photographs by Marco Breuer.
 
The exhibition program includes solo exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists, along with thematic group shows and historical exhibitions. The gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Alexandra Hedison, Eben Goff, and Sarah Awad.
 
The First Anniversary Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture and Photographs opens on Saturday, June 15th with a reception for the artists from 6 - 8pm.
The exhibition will be on view from June 15 – August 3, 2103.
Hours are 10am – 6pm, Tues – Sat.
 
For further information, please contact whitney@dianerosenstein.com

Greene Exhibitions presents The In Between, a two-person exhibition establishing a dialogue between the totemic sculptures of New York-based Amy Brener and the abstracted formal paintings of San Francisco-based Facundo Argañaraz. While exploring different mediums, Brener and Argañaraz’s mark making techniques and layered processes mirror each other. Separately exploring the recurring theme of excavation, both artists utilize ready-made objects and found imagery to push the boundaries of contemporary aesthetics.
 
Positioned somewhere between geologic and futuristic, Brener’s recent resin sculptures bring to mind chiseled artifacts, perhaps found somewhere deep underground. With a strong relationship to color, light and space, the sculptures’ complex strata of poured colored resin, concrete, and embedded materials attempt to foretell an imagined future. Argañaraz collects images of Modernist relics while also pulling inspiration from his surrounding landscape in San Francisco, creating paintings that are collage-like in their execution. By extracting historical objects and imagery from a variety of sources, Argañaraz creates compilations reflecting the past while engaging his own contemporary aesthetic. The conversation created between Argañaraz‘s paintings and Brener’s sculptures explores the historical while experiencing the present and reaching ever forward.

GUSFORD | los angeles is pleased to present Burdens of Excess, an installation by Swiss-born sculptor Andrea Hasler. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Hasler will transform the entire space into a chic, glittery boutique, filled with works from her Desire series. Through her deconstruction of high-end designer items, Hasler’s wax sculptures transform consumeristic ‘must-haves’ into organic, fetishistic objects.
 
Hasler’s work focuses on constructions of identity and collective desires, and is characterized by a tension between attraction and repulsion. The works in the Desire series, in particular, focus on the obsession of projections of affluence and glamor. Reworking designer bags, shoes, and accessories into organ-resemblant sculptures, Hasler’s works engage with the psychological aspects of consumerism, blurring the lines between what you are and what you must have.
 
Through the transformation of GUSFORD’s Melrose Avenue gallery space into an indulgent, glamorous shop, Hasler’s installation embodies the epitome of luxurious excess, and looks to a dystopic future, where organs may one day be the ultimate fashion accessory.
 
Andrea Hasler was born in 1975 in Zürich, Switzerland, and currently lives and works in London, UK. She holds an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design, and her work was recently exhibited at the 1st Santorini Biennale of Arts in Greece, 2012. Her recent solo exhibition Irreducible Complexity will be featured in the upcoming documentary Snapshots of Shoreditch, looking at the people, culture and underground scene in the East End of London. Hasler also chairs artist talks at Next Level Projects and regularly lectures on contemporary art, with a focus on women and the body, at various institutions including the Sotheby's Institute of Art, London. 
 
For further information, images or interview requests, please contact michelle@gusfordgallery.com
 
Opening Reception | Thursday, June 6, 6-9pm, RSVP to rsvp@gusfordgallery.com
The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday, 11am-6pm

Here is Elsewhere Gallery and Grégory Bernard are pleased to present Write a Book about WHAT?, the first exhibition in the US by Barzolff. The French-born artist, based in Los Angeles, works in a range of mediums including graffiti, 3D animation, video installation, drawing, and painting. The exhibition will introduce his latest large-scale paintings, stereoscopy, video installations, and drawings sold by the gram.
 
Barzolff started out as Numéro 6, a groundbreaking graffiti artist in the Parisian street art scene who emerged as one of the most distinctive voices of the genre. According to Paris Tonkar magazine, Barzolff is “a masterful illustrator and an iconic figure, who transformed the standardized imagery used in French graffiti in the second half of the 90s.”
 
After obtaining his BA in Visual Arts, Barzolff went on to study film animation at the Gobelins l‘école de l’Image in Paris. While most alumni of the prestigious program became recruits for Disney and other major American animation studios, Barzolff was compulsively spraying walls. His apt portrayal of the street culture he was heir to resulted in two series that aired on the iconic Canal+ television station in Europe: the cult animated series Les Lascars (The Rascals), lauded for capturing the zeitgeist of that era, and more recently the disturbingly absurd The World According To F. R. Jeansac.
 
For a few “lost years” (in his own words), Barzolff worked in the advertising and music video industry, gaining recognition and winning many prestigious awards in the field including the well-known People‘s Choice Imagina Award and Best Music Video Award in Annecy, France. He also won the famed D&AD Award in the UK for his seminal work. In 2010, he turned his back on the “soul-sucking” advertising machine to live as a recluse in Burgundy and devote himself to blazing new trails in the fine arts. Now ensconced in Beachwood Canyon, he’s creating his most powerful pieces to date.
 
Monstrous, stunning and often baroque in their style, the subjects of his paintings feature arresting characters which elicit both disgust and compassion. Fascinated by the lesser albeit universal human trait of stupidity, he glorifies its aesthetic to the point of beauty. Reinventing the craft and form he devoted his childhood and adolescence to mastering, his pieces could be summed up by the Baudelaire quote: “I only ask of every man that he show me what remains of Life.” Flesh, folds, and meat are at the forefront of his opus. To quote Deleuze on Francis Bacon, it's the “logic of sensation” which consumes him. “Every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and beast, their zone of indiscernibility.” Ultimately, these works are radically new in contemporary art, a unique mix of fin-de-siècle aesthetic with 21st century street art and new media style.
 
A fruitful anachronism lies at the base of another distinctive new body of work: his stereoscopes. Stereoscopy creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth from given two-dimensional images viewed through a stereoscope. With this archaic medium, Barzolff invites the viewer to travel into his digital universe as he poetically mixes new technology with a late 1800s aesthetic, utilizing an optic tool that was once used for filmmaking in Hollywood. The exhibition also includes an installation in a 1950s television featuring a selection of videos from his fake UFO hoax project which received over 20 million views on YouTube. He therefore creates a “retrocipation,” to quote critic Arnaud Pierre, “conjugating in the past future visions of a now obsolete future.”
 
Beyond his experimental mind, humor and irony are integral to Barzolff’s style. His work transports the viewer to the point where the absurd becomes sublime, while revealing the non-sense of consumerism and its impact on our everyday life. With his Art by the Gram, art becomes a commodity: 15 years of Barzolff’s small drawings, sketches, restaurant napkins & phone doodles are cut up, weighed, and packaged in plastic baggies that individuals can buy by the gram, like in a grocery store. “First and foremost art’s purpose is to feed the artist,” says Barzolff. The same sarcastic wit imbues the animated music videos that he recently did in Los Angeles, for musicians such as Flying Lotus, Boys Noize and Mr. Oizo.
 
Here is Elsewhere Gallery is dedicated to exploring the hidden history that links artists from here (Southern California) with artists from elsewhere (the rest of the world). Created in 2010 by its director, Yann Perreau, Here is Elsewhere has exhibited artists such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Larry Bell and Henry Taylor, among others.
 
For additional images and information, please contact the gallery at info@hereiselsewhere.com or 310-904-8966.

gallery km is proud to present The Conversation, our first solo show of work by Los Angeles-based artist Christine Frerichs. The
exhibition is presented in two distinct but related series in the west and east galleries, one featuring a series of ten sequentially
grouped mid-sized mixed-media paintings on canvas, and the second featuring one large and several small paired canvases. The
exhibition will take place from June 15 through July 27, 2013, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, June 15th, from
6-8pm.
In The Conversation, Frerichs presents work that integrates abstract and representational references to tell the story of reconciling and
expressing various sides of the self, and the interplay between passion, vulnerability and control. Through the use of densely textured
layers of interlocking paint, and the complex interplay between color and pattern, Frerichs creates abstract portraits in which colors
become stand-ins for people or places, transforming the pieces themselves into abstract diagrams of relationships, senses, events,
and the physical body. Each painting begins with a layer of textured paint forming a radiating figure”8” pattern, with the measurements
of the figure eight based upon Frerichs own body—the top loop corresponding to her eye level, and the base loop to her navel—and
with the form itself made by carving grooves into a thick layer of modeling paste. Superimposed on these textured foundations are
imagery and mark-making that oscillate between eruptions of color, light and form that read as spontaneous, to very controlled lines
and patterns, speaking to the range of emotional experience that Frerichs describes as moving from “explosively exaggerated
performance” to “a restrained seizing of the body”.
In these paintings, the physical body (as paint on canvas) receives, reflects and reveals, but also very definitely acts and projects. The
emotional content of past memory and the transformational potential of present experience abut and challenge one another, and often
do so with a powerful sense of play. Frerichs expects these conversations to provide a cacophony of possible dialogue, with actors
including body and mind, past and present, internasl and external, self and other, artist and audience, all available and collapsed into
fleshy, uncomfortable, beautiful, intelligent, messy and yet highly choreographed compositions. The titling of the pieces as
“conversations” invokes the social structure of interaction—the rules and conduct governing how we connect to each other—and the
constant tug of war between the desire to connect and the need for self/society-protective guidelines, as well as the tension between
controlled narrative and disruptive emotion.
The self, as represented in both physical and ephemeral form in Frerichs’ canvases, becomes memory’s receptacle and its visible
interpreter as it moves through the present. In the smaller series of paired paintings, each piece is formed by two canvases placed
next to one another, with a pattern similar to the figure eight but split and reoriented so that each half of the under-pattern faces
outward (instead of forming an internally complete whole). The paintings in this series more clearly invoke landscape as referent, but
they too remain a kind of portraiture, with the remembered or imagined landscape acting out the interplay between self and other, and
between self and self. Though doubling is present in both series through the underpainted texture and often through surface content,
Frerichs presents not duality but dialogue, opening space for multiple voices and levels of experience.
Christine Frerichs lives and works in Los Angeles, has exhibited at ACME, CB1 Gallery, Kaycee Olsen Gallery, and Young Art in Los
Angeles, Duchess Presents in Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, among others, and was recently featured in a
solo exhibition of work with gallery km at VOLTA NY, New York. Her work has been reviewed by ArtForum and The Los Angeles Times,
and published in New American Paintings. She received her M.F.A. from U.C. Riverside in 2009, has taught at U.C. Riverside and U.C.
Irvine, and is currently Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design and Adjunct Faculty at East Los Angeles College.

LOS ANGELES, CA (March 15th, 2013) - LA Artcore is pleased to present a tandem-solo show with two artists whose contrasting cultural perspectives enliven reflection upon our cultural histories as they transform the contemporary moment.
As one-half of this exhibition, multimedia artist Kathie Foley-Meyer will present “When Little Tokyo Went Bronze, ” and will exhibit a series of sculptures combining various media. The central work in the exhibition is both informational and abstract evoking both the connection between history and memory as well as visuality itself. Using elements of glass, cast resin hands in various sign-language gesture (consequently spelling out “Bronzeville”), neon lighting and text, Foley-Meyer pieces together these different modes of communication suggesting a language we may not speak or a history we do not recognize or remember. Etched into the frosted glass coverings are inscriptions of businesses and community members that provide moments of transparency into the worlds circulating around Bronzeville. In doing so, Foley-Meyer explores gaps between the present and the past, history and memory, lived experience and personal mythology. The following is an excerpt from Foley-Meyer:
 
In February of 1942 Franklin D Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans for the duration of World War II. For the section of Los Angeles known as Little Tokyo, the removal of its Japanese American residents created a ghost town of empty houses and businesses. The abandoned neighborhood soon became a source of opportunity for the influx of southern African American citizens that were migrating to LA, who, like the Japanese, were barred from living anywhere west of Central Avenue by the city’s racially restrictive housing covenants. As thousands of African American families moved into homes and retail spaces vacated by Japanese Americans, the Little Tokyo neighborhood became known as “Bronzeville”.
 
Few remnants remain of the time when the streets of Little Tokyo became Bronzeville and were known for the jazz and “breakfast clubs” that operated until the wee hours, and leading citizens such as Leonard Christmas who organized the Bronzeville Chamber of Commerce. A long-time fascination with the period led artist Kathie Foley-Meyer to create Project Bronzeville, a combination of fine art, theater, a panel discussion and music coming together to commemorate this brief but vibrant part of LA history
 
*The art exhibition and symposium are both free events. For information regarding tickets to the play, please visit robeytheatrecompany.com. For information regarding the jazz concert, please visit bluewhalemusic.com.
For the most up-to-date information about dates, locations, and tickets, visit www.projectbronzeville.com.
 
Los Angeles artist and curator Shizuko Greenblatt combines Japanese characters and fusion ikebana with Western expressionistic sensibilities in her mixed-media sculptures and paintings. The artist‘s joining of elements of Eastern and Western cultures, revels here, in the aesthetic possibilities of the shared moment between cultural perspectives as it produces something new, propelled by vibrantly-orchestrated compositions and arrangements.
 
An uncanny sense of design and vision pervades all of Greenblatt’s works: Controlled elements of gradated color or a Japanese character give way to the natural flow of an ascending tree branch or gestural brushwork. Indeed, balance is a fundamental quest in Greenblatt‘s approach. Her desire is to communicate a positive and inspiring message through not only through the use of balanced elements — the weight of a line, the thickness of paint or the proportions between natural and plastic elements— but of the characters themselves which carry such associations as “Passion for Life”, “Go Forward” and “Infinite Growth”. Greenblatt comments that these messages underlie all of her works if not explicitly, then implicitly. But after all, Greenblatt’s objective is to create: Whatever character or material she uses is only a beginning point to modification or alteration in order to take it somewhere unexplored.
 
Artist Reception:
Sunday, June 2nd, 2013
3pm – 5pm
Conversation with the artist: 4pm
 
LA Artcore at Union Center for the Arts
120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Gallery hours: 12-5pm, Wed-Sun.
 
# # #
 
ABOUT LA ARTCORE:
LA Artcore helps develop the careers of visual artists of diverse cultural backgrounds, bringing innovative contemporary art to the public, and provides educational programs by professional artists for people of all ages. For more information visit www.laartcore.org.

Lora Schlesinger is pleased to announce Adonna Khare’s fourth solo-exhibition with the gallery. In the Clouds features new drawings by the artist. The exhibition opens with the artist’s reception on Saturday, June 8 from 5 to 7 pm and is on view through July 20, 2013.
 
Adonna Khare’s new drawings are whimsical, meticulous, solemn, playful, and humorous. Filled with an array of complex narratives, Khare’s drawings make it easy to abandon the world around you and delve into her mystifying world of Bears, Antelopes, Chimp, Bunnies and Butterflies. Backgrounds filled with tornadoes, whirlpools, waterfalls and storm clouds represent life’s unpredictability, ever-evolving change, and the unknown. All of Khare’s animals caught in the foreground of a storm brewing behind them, a storm of change and uncertainty; once it arrives you don’t know whether there will be severe damage or you’ll come out unscathed and better off.
 
This past fall Khare won the Public Award at ArtPrize 2012, the largest art competition in the world, which consisted of 1,619 works of art by artists from 56 countries. With over 400,000 attendees Adonna Khare took home the first prize. In the Clouds is Khare’s response to the changes in her life that have past and the changes that are yet to come since winning the award.
 
Adonna Khare received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach. Her drawings were selected for the Surrealism Today exhibition at the Nassau County Museum in Roslyn NY. She was included in the Long Beach Museum of Art’s “Sweet Subversives, Contemporary California Drawing 2009-2010” and was given a one-person show in 2010 titled “The World of Adonna Khare: Beasts, Backpacks and Curious Creatures”, at the William D. Cannon Art Gallery in Carslbad, California.

The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), and the LAMAG Associates are pleased to announce the City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellowships Visual Arts Exhibition on view at LAMAG from May 19 to July 7, 2013. Awarded each year by 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 C.O.L.A. Performances will be held on June 28, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. at Grand Performances. For more information about the C.O.L.A. Exhibition and Performances, please visit culturela.org.
 
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. The 2013 C.O.L.A. award recipients in the performing arts are: Malathi Iyengar and Michael White. Admission is free. The C.O.L.A. Exhibition showcases new work by each artist created with the aid of the $10,000 award from DCA.

Resurrected Pictures: from Piss Christ to Pussy Riot explores the relationship between three moments of heightened cultural anxiety: the Culture Wars, Second Wave Feminism and the present. The exhibition is anchored in the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and David Wojnarowicz, whose funding and subsequent defunding by the National Endowment of the Arts infamously sparked controversy at the height of the Culture Wars and AIDS crisis. Resurrected Pictures locates precursors and predecessors similarly critiquing nationalism, religion and sexual norms. This exhibition argues that the narrative of the Culture Wars should include less notoriously censored but equally provocative works by feminist artists such as Judith Bernstein, Tee Corrine, Eunice Golden, Holly Hughes, Jacqueline Livingston, Paulette Nenner, Esther Parada, Faith Ringgold, Connie Samaras, Carolee Schneeman, Clarissa Sligh and Nancy Spero. And, presses on to chart this genealogy to the present through the digitally circulated works of Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei.

Marine Contemporary is delighted to present, Unfinished Business, littlewhitehead’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. After their successful U.S. solo debut in 2011, the Glasgow based duo are back for what they see as an opportunity to resolve and build on ideas that were born out of their first trip to Los Angeles and the unresolved nature of some of their most recent works. This exhibition focuses on new sculptures and a series of prints made from found photographs. This is littlewhitehead’s first exhibition where they‘ve made their work in what they consider to be "a proper studio” and feel that it has affected the way they produce their work. Unfinished Business broadly explores the ideas of failure and ambition, which could be interpreted as commenting on the process of being an artist, but also just as much on being a human being.
 
’Failure‘ is a combination of all of littlewhitehead’s failed sculptures over the last few years. A comic boulder of epic proportions, littlewhitehead explain, “it’s as much a monument to our persistence as it is to our shortcomings. Some of the items in the boulder have been exhibited before. But sometimes we only realize a work’s failure once you see it in a show. Recycling our failed work is something we’ve always done. Initially it was a financial thing, but now it just seems more cathartic. One of the reasons the elements of “Failure” failed, is because we tried too hard to make them”. The duo find the idea of leftovers interesting. To them the detritus of creative ideas is essential to taking the work where they want it to go: “Debris can also be more interesting than the finished work. But it’s also about honesty. Understanding why something failed, is very important in avoiding its reoccurrence.”
 
littlewhitehead have always worked with found photographs as source material, with many found images filling the walls of their studio. The prints in this exhibition are all images from a British man’s holiday to the US in the late 1970’s. They are snapshots of everyday Americana that felt completely foreign to his eyes. Much like the taker of these photographs, the social and cultural landscape of America still feels foreign to the artists and they were intrigued by the idea of selling a foreign America back to Americans.
 
Sigmund Freud defined the concept of the uncanny, or ’unheimlich‘, in an essay in 1919. He was describing the sensation of discomfort or displacement when familiar objects are made unfamiliar and emerge in forms that horrify and create a sense of profound unease. Uncanny objects make us aware of our repressed hidden selves. It is the sensation that can accompany dolls, puppets, mannequins, waxworks, robots, and even figurative sculpture in its widest sense. Things that are human and inhuman, dead and alive. Things that express collective anxiety. littlewhitehead’s work fits perfectly into a vein of art that addresses the uncanny - artists like Mike Kelley, Hans Bellmer, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Cindy Sherman. The duo trained and are based in Glasgow but have an immediacy that is very different from the drier aesthetic approaches of the city. They strive and succeed to make work with an immediacy to it that functions alongside and before theory. These are artworks that move into an instinctive place first, touching on the darker (and darkly humorous) parts of our psyche.
 
littlewhitehead is Craig Little (b. 1980, Glasgow, Scotland) and Blake Whitehead (b.1985, Lanark, Scotland). littlewhitehead are children of the 80s: brought up on a diet of video nasties, computer games and the post-industrial landscape of socialist Glasgow. Their sculptures and drawings are the product of a very idiosyncratic and private dialogue. As a result, all of their work is steeped in their very own brand of humor. It is through such humor they manage to negate any particular ideological position, and instead try to foster reflection on many ontological and ideological absurdities. Past shows include Newspeak: British Art Now at Saatchi Gallery, London and a solo show at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland. Recent shows include, Constructions at Helene Bailly, Paris, The Cyclic Gate at Sumarria Lunn, London, How Art Things at Nest Gallery, The Hague, Netherlands. littlewhitehead were included in the book “100 New Artists” by U.K. critic Francesca Gavin. “100 New Artists” highlights new themes, media, imagery, and ideas emerging in contemporary art practice. littlewhitehead currently live and work in Glasgow.