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.
 
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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.