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.

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.

Mark Moore Gallery and guest curator Caryn Coleman present Empty Distances, a group exhibition featuring works by James Aldridge, Darren Banks, Sean Higgins, Deborah Stratman, Alan Warburton, and a selection of episodes from “The Twilight Zone.” Playing on Eugene Thacker‘s idea of horror as the “paradoxical thought of the unthinkable,” Coleman has meticulously composed a show that illustrates the visualization and simultaneous abstraction of the unknown. Through an assortment of drawings, paintings, photographs, and videos, the artists in Empty Distances delve into creative perceptions of “the void” – a nebulous space that can refer to post-apocalyptic, pre-civilization, or even psychological vacuity.
 
Says the curator:
This exhibition stems from early 20th century theologian Rudolph Otto’s phrase “empty distances,” and his notion that the very act of depicting the void in pictures establishes darkness and silence as subject itself. The artists in Empty Distances vary in how they depict emptiness, but all evoke an imagining of this post-human existence. Black metal, horror films, science fiction, scientific research, and magical realism are all influences; pulling the viewer into a speculative new world.
 
These physical and mental chasms are astutely manifested in James Aldridge‘s (UK) Black Metal Theory-infused paintings and works on paper – which contend with our societal reliance on images to determine the natural world – as well as Darren Banks’ (UK) ink on paper “Blobs,” which act as tropes for the all-consuming fear of the unknown. Similarly, Sean Higgins‘ (CA) manipulated photographs assume intervening roles in the creation of landscape and cosmic imagery, while Deborah Stratman’s (IL) black and white film, “…These Blazeing Starrs!” (2011) depicts the macabre struggle for power between mortality and catastrophe. In using technology to visualize a true “world-without-us,” Alan Warburton (UK) animates the ghostly aesthetics of vacancy, using z-depth images to reference our cultural shortsightedness. Finally, Coleman will present several episodes from the classic sci-fi television series, “The Twilight Zone” (1959 – 1964) – created by Rod Serling. As an overarching depiction of fear and the unknown, the featured episodes in Empty Distances best exemplify Serling‘s cautionary narratives, which often oscillate between the horrific and fantastic. Despite being depicted as thrilling events in a parallel universe, Serling’s tales ultimately become allegorical omens for our own impending realities; perils for which we are often to blame.
 
Caryn Coleman (b. 1977, Tampa) received her MFA in Curating – with distinction - from Goldsmiths College (UK). She focuses on the intersection of cinema and visual art with a focus on horror film’s influence on contemporary artists. She currently works in the Programming Department at Nitehawk Cinema and is the co-editor of the philosophy journal Incognitum Hactenus. She is the 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Initiative grant, and has curated exhibitions throughout the United States. Coleman lives and works in New York.

Nye+Brown is pleased to announce Off and On, a solo exhibition with Johannes Girardoni. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition opens with a private preview on Tuesday, May 21st and a public reception on Saturday, May 25th from 6-9 pm.
 
Our eyes, consisting of rod and cone cells in the retina allow conscious light perception and vision including color differentiation and the perception of depth. The human eye can distinguish about ten million colors. This seems impressive until you consider raptors, such as hawks and eagles that have the equivalent of night vision seeking the heat of their prey, who’s eyes are far superior to the human's in every way.
 
The Perceptualists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Doug Wheeler have, for five decades created art that tests the eye’s limitations, strengthening our resolve to an 11th million spectrum of color and spacial perception. They have acted as a stern wrap on the knuckles like a strict schoolmaster trying to rally a student’s wandering focus.
 
Girardoni takes a more sympathetic approach, through the transformation of light waves into sound waves in his light installations; turning the viewer’s ears into eyes, essentially augmenting the deficient human eye with a new partner.
 
The show will consist of two interactive light and sound installations, inhabiting the east and west gallery spaces. Having developed a proprietary process of sonification in which he translates light into sound, Girardoni uses this technology to radically divergent ends. Dispersed throughout the daylit east gallery, Chromasonic Field-Blue/Green is a series of semi-translucent cast resin beams. They are illuminated from within by high frequency LED’s, projecting artificial light as well as allowing the surrounding natural light to pass through. The installation is outfitted with sensors calibrated to measure the specific color frequency emanating from the resin as well as the ambient light. The sensors drive a tone generator, which converts the light information to sound, essentially making light audible. These sensors also register the presence of the viewer moving through the space, which further modulates the sound. The boundaries between natural and digital phenomena are blurred in a field of luminous sound.
 
In the west gallery, Metaspace V2 is a monumental sculpture in which visitors are invited to enter and participate in an immersive color-soundscape based on the frequencies captured by embedded sensors. As in Chromasonic Field-Blue/Green, the sensors respond to the presence of bodies, creating a feedback loop between visitor and work as the environment continually evolves. A raw aluminum shell provides the framework for the sculpture’s seamless interior, the curvilinear form scattering the colored light inside. Girardoni’s Spectro-Sonic Refrequencers convert the light waves provided by a lens at the top of the sculpture into sound vibrations that shift as the light conditions change, which is also effected by movement within the space. Metaspace V2 is a space about space. It challenges our understanding of space and perception, questioning the border between the organic and the artificial in our increasingly technologically dominated existence.
 
Girardoni was driven to rigorously investigate these ideas in his work after traveling to West Africa. The following is an excerpt from the artist’s essay in a forthcoming publication Time Space Existence, from GAAP/Cornerhouse Books.
 
Coming back from Mali, I was continually reminded how our culture is saturated by digital systems. We use our phone’s intelligence to get us to the right place. That alone, has shifted how we understand and read our environment. The algorithm behind Google searches detects behavioral patterns, the sum of which yields a digital identity that knows more about us than our friends; or worse, more than we know about ourselves. We make decisions based on information provided by algorithms. My focus on the interaction of light and material brought me to the idea of reality augmentation in art. With the use of sensors and tone generators, I could use an algorithm to make light audible and push the whole paradigm of phenomenological art into the current context. If we are experiencing a work by James Turrell or Robert Irwin, for example, we encounter perception in its purest form. We experience ourselves sensing. Even now, artists like Olafur Eliasson work with perception as the medium itself. The whole history of art culminates there. As with the “death of painting,” however, there is no end. The evolution, and this is where we break with history, is that we are now occupying a cultural condition in which we are not the only ones sensing. Artificial perception extends our own sensory apparatus at large and creates a new reality. An environment that we sense while it also senses us, and then changes as a result, heralds the end of the supremacy of our perception. This is the new now.
 
Johannes Girardoni was born in Austria in 1967 and emigrated to Southern California in 1982. He received a B.A. from Bowdoin College in History and Art. He also studied at MIT as an invited guest artist at MIT Media Lab. His work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. In 2011, Girardoni’s light and sound installation The (Dis)appearance of Everything was included in the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy. Other selected exhibitions include Personal Structures at the Ludwig Museum, Germany, 30 Years of Contemporary Art at the California Center for Contemporary Art and Creative Migration at The Austrian Cultural Forum, New York. His works are represented in public and private collections, such as the Harvard Art Museum, The Progressive Collection and The Margulies Collection.

When it comes to a personal demonology, the darkness that lurks inside does not necessarily wear horns, nor the troubles and traumas be even all that recognizable or locatable. In an age where media and the politics of blame provides us with a ready template of constantly shifting bogeymen to work as surrogate icons for our collective dread, the disconnect within individuals is more often at a loss when it comes to putting face or form to what truly ails us. Erik Foss understands the internalized space of pain and punishment, and produces with his latest body of work “Exorcism” those psychic topographies of desire, fetish, fear and frustration as idiosyncratic abstracts, twists and perversions that take place in the mind and soul rather than subjects of external forces. His paintings- be they seductive layers of fishnet stocking imprints, disposable lighter burns that inevitably come out like scarred smiley faces, stencils of plastic six-pack can holders constructed into cruciform shapes, or assemblages of brightly dyed wet toilet paper projectiles hurled at the canvas as if by aesthetic delinquents- trace the patterns of his life, loves and heartaches like the residue of personal history we can all understand if not always recognize.
- Carlo McCormick

Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce Michael Dopp’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Various Positions represents a complex and variegated approach to painting in which the artist makes the gestures themselves the subjects of the work. The paintings in this exhibition plot points along a timeline, whereas the viewer’s vision takes in a chronology of making simultaneously. The title also conjures up something playful and corporeal, though the work references the body only by suggestion. Layers of process are exposed yet the methods are obscured. Paint is applied to raw canvases by in turn being sprayed, poured and brushed, with each layer acting as a distinct filter, with the material and the image pivoting around each other. The geometric shapes pulse on the canvas. Absorption and resistance become means of conveying Dopp’s intent.
 
Michael Dopp’s working process is an intense investigation; he manipulates shapes and forms, insisting that distinct images exist both on their own and as cogent contributions to a complete body. The subtle material shifts in the paintings, moving in turn from translucence to opacity, are flattened, unified by the mono- and bichromatic matte surfaces. His essentialized and sometimes simplified gestures, which merge form and content without privileging one over the other, allow each to inform and expand the work while suggesting new and alternate relationships.
 
Michael Dopp earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recently received his MFA from UCLA. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton, International Art Objects and Night Gallery, among others, and has been reviewed by Artforum, ArtSlant and other publications. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Samuel Freeman presents Steven Bankhead, Britton Tolliver, and Torbjörn Vejvi, an exhibition of new painting and sculpture by 3 Los Angeles-based artists. The exhibition includes works in various forms of abstraction that allude to a seemingly light and vividly hued spirit of springtime.
 
Steven Bankhead embraces an archaeological approach to explore pop-cultural and art-historical milestones. In the two series of paintings jointly presented here, Bankhead draws from opposing moments in the history of painting: the 19th century picnic, exemplified at its climax by Seurat or Manet; and Lucio Fontana’s dismissal of the easel painting through his violent ruptures to the canvas. Both new series by Bankhead use rudimentary printing implements in support of these conceptual underpinnings: in his Picnic paintings, objects and natural materials – including Igloo coolers, tree bark and a pig’s head – are paint-stamped onto clean white ground to literally re-present themselves. In the Bleeds, punctured and slit Fontana-like canvases are essentially turned into stencils for the aerographic dispersion of brightly hued, bleeding paint. As a result, two disparate moments in art history are tied together with a new aesthetic resonance.
 
Britton Tolliver’s suite of large-scale paintings is a complex, playfully abstract conversation between foreground, background, intentionality, and chance. Using a self-imposed set of rules, Tolliver serially moves between gestural painting and the superimposed grid, a mediation that enables both aesthetic choice and obliteration of the image, and opens the pictorial space to dynamic – while disorienting – new layers. At the intersection of these layers is a simple poetic meditation on color and the passing of time.
 
Torbjörn Vejvi creates sculptures that explore subtle existential relationships between form and memory, introspection, and everyday life. With both coyness and sincerity, Vejvi’s exuberant abstract constructions combine formal references from the history of modern art with the psychological and social tensions inherent in 3-dimensional space. In his pointedly handmade painted sculptures installed throughout this exhibition, Vejvi turns a bookshelf, a pair of open-faced boxes and a tabletop surface into playfully mysterious tableaux, where cigarette-encrusted books, tea sets made from paper, and silhouettes of tree-lined promenades become entry points to a daydream space of subtly shifting dimensions.
 
Through diverse media including painting, installation, and performative event, Steven Bankhead (b.1971, August, Ga.) has probed subjects as wide-ranging as punk culture, communal traditions around barbecue and meat, propagandist war painting, and the nuanced artifacts of urbanity. He holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and BFA from Auburn University. Selected solo exhibitions and projects include 18th Brumaire, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2013); 18th Brumaire, Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2011); Sex: A Monument to Malcolm McLaren, Emma Gray HQ, Los Angeles (2011); Location, Location, Location, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles (2009); and Pretty Vacant, Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich, Germany (2009). Bankhead lives and works in Inglewood, California.
 
Britton Tolliver (b.1976, Kingsport, Tenn.) has presented his paintings in numerous group exhibitions including The Golden Ass, Annie Wharton Los Angeles (2011); Chain Letter, Shoshana Wayne Gallery (2011); and Baker’s Dozen, Torrance Art Museum (2011). Solo exhibitions include Fixed Illusion at Golden in Chicago (2010) and The Search for the Sky Underneath the Dirt at Kinkead Contemporary in Los Angeles (2010). His work can also be seen in Painting in Place, the current exhibition at LAND, Los Angeles curated by Shamim Momin. Tolliver holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and BFA from East Tennessee State University. He lives and works in Cypress Park, Los Angeles.
 
Torbjörn Vejvi (b.1972, Växjö, Sweden) has exhibited widely both locally and internationally. Select solo exhibitions include The object without is the object within, Glendale Community College Art Gallery, Glendale, CA (2013); Matter Matter Physically Dead, Raucci/Santamaria Gallery, Naples, Italy (2011); and Present/Future, Artissima 15, Turin, Italy (2008). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at Las Cienegas Projects, Cherry and Martin, China Art Objects, and Anna Helwing Gallery in Los Angeles; and Leo Koenig, Inc. in New York. Vejvi holds an MFA from the Malmö Academy of Fine Arts, Malmö, Sweden (of which two years were spent at UCLA). He lives and works in Highland Park, Los Angeles.