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.

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.

JOHN BALDESSARI: CROWDS
ForYourArt is pleased to host an exhibition presented by Mixografia entitled “John Baldessari: Crowds,” featuring new work by artist John Baldessari, as well as a selection of works from the 20 year collaboration between the artist and the printmaking studio. The show will run from May 18th until June 16th, 2013. An opening reception for the artist will take place at ForYourArt, 6020 Wilshire Boulevard, on Saturday, May 18th, from 5-7pm.
John Baldessari’s latest collaboration with Mixografia, Crowds with Shape of Reason Missing: Examples 1-6, 2012, examines the idea of removing the predominant subject of an image and replacing it with an abstracted white mass. Baldessari chose vintage movie stills that seem recognizable and yet unfamiliar. The classic cinematographic images that once informed a clear storyline now raise more questions than they answer. The artwork depicts individuals gathered in formation or haphazardly while captivated by the unknown. Soldiers, harem girls and a wide assortment of onlookers become participants in an event that, though once defined, is now unclear. The lack of closure in these reinvented images creates a tension that entices the viewer to project ideas and possibilities of what the amorphous white shapes may embody.
 
About Mixografia’s Collaborations with John Baldessari
 
Over the past 20 years, Baldessari has utilized the Mixografia printing technique to explore notions of texture, volume and subject. From the paradoxically flat-yet-three-dimensional Table Lamp and Its Shadow (1994), to the tangible picture plane variation of Stonehenge (With Two Persons) (2005), Baldessari has taken particular advantage of the possibilities that the Mixografia process offers. Sailboat, completed in 2008, emphasized the possibilities of volume through paper sculpture. Baldessari’s A B C Art (Low Relief), Part II:PMBWFDLJ (Pangram), 2009, embraced the model of high and low relief, generating depictions of food, body-parts, toys and sly popular culture references. Altogether, he has created a singular body of prints that are compelling, playful, and beautiful.
 
About ForYourArt
ForYourArt produces and hosts activities to promote engagement with art, Los Angeles, and the Miracle Mile as part of its broad mission to create content to frame and support the activities of artists, curators, and organizations. Other ForYourArt projects with John Baldessari include the Arts Matter collaborations Learn To Dream and Aprende A Soñar — bus and billboard designs that are currently on view throughout Los Angeles. In Still Life 2001-2010, an interactive free artwork that is available online and through iTunes, was released in 2010. #ArtsMatter, www.in-still-life.com, www.foryourart.com.
 
Reception for the Artist – Saturday, May 18th, 5 – 7 PM
 
John Baldessari: Crowds, May 18 – June 16th, 2013
ForYourArt
6020 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, and by appointment.

Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar – but no dog – the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.(...)
 
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

 
Club Mood Swing
STEPHEN ALDAHL
June 15 - July 13, 2013
 
Young Art is pleased to announce Club Mood Swing, a solo exhibition by Stephen Aldahl. The opening reception will be held Saturday June 15th from 7-10pm and the show will remain on view through July 13, 2013.
 
For Club Mood Swing, Aldahl presents a group of new paintings on door-shaped canvases accompanied by an installation.
 
The door, a practical structure designed for a body to enter or exit while also possessing the symbolic weight of a passageway between worlds, in this case imposes an immediate obstruction as the images portrayed in Aldahl‘s paintings seem to extend horizontally beyond the confines of the canvas. Amorphous forms of subdued color create scenes of disorienting pastoral landscapes, bodies colliding, and architectural structures against uncertain surroundings. Most traces of painterly expression have been suppressed and while these surreal pictorial compositions move toward representation, their final image remains suspended. Vaguely alluding to larger narratives the way a mural would illustrate great histories or epic sagas the paintings fail to intimate any story.
 
For the installation, Aldahl has modified the gallery by concealing it’s distinguishing characteristics (the floor, windows and wooden pillars) with white masonite panels taped at the seams. Economical and ambient, the technique is reminiscent of art fair booths and other temporary exhibition spaces. Aldahl's gesture results in an improvised sensory environment which induces the experience of viewing the paintings while simultaneously asserting the frivolity of the act itself.
 
The formal conflicts in the paintings and contradicting effects of the installation only intensify the transformational quality of the work.
 
Young Art is located in Chinatown at 418 Bamboo Lane Unit B, Los Angeles, CA 90012.
For more images or information, please contact info@youngartgallery.com.

 
Opening reception: Saturday, April 20, 6–9pm
 
Conceived as notes toward the making of a future film, a new project by London-based collective The Otolith Group treats the format of an exhibition as an exercise in writing, and attempts to give preparatory notes, archival materials and preliminary sketches shape as a form of speculative screenplay or notebook-film. For their first work produced within the U.S., Neophyte is an inquiry into the gradual spiritualization of Capitalism, and the state of California as a test-ground for both the importation of Hindu guru culture and the ideology of post-war production in the 1960s and ’70s. The Otolith Group’s investigation into the cybernetic subcultures, musical presences and sentient entities distributed throughout the spiritual landscapes and industrial parks of Los Angeles and San Francisco proposes a possible future, envisioned through an improbable present. Hypothetically titled Neophyte, the project is the materialization of a cinema that documents its own quest for places, spaces and subjectivities yet to be defined.
 
Gallery hours:
Tues–Sun, 12–6pm or Intermission
Admission is free to the public
 
For more info, visit:
www.redcat.org/exhibition/otolith-group