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.

In the Project Room, Mark Moore Gallery proudly presents Untitled #160 (Balcombe) (2011-2013),
the latest video by gallery artist Josh Azzarella. Known for work that explores the power of context
in the authorship of memory, Azzarella oftentimes utilizes seminal moments in pop culture and
news media to create accessible confrontations with historiography. From his videos and
photographs, Azzarella meticulously extracts characters, shadows, and audio from each frame of a well known event or film. The resulting visuals consist of altered background scenes haunted by the absense of familiar narrative, and pose provoking questions about the disturbingly similar
dissemination of fact and fiction.
 
In Azzarella‘s newest project, F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist classic “Nosferatu”
undergoes a comprehensive transformation. Adapted from Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel “Dracula
(1897),” Nosferatu is considered a silent masterpiece of psychological terror. Over the course of two years, the artist has painstakingly erased all evidence of the characters - including their
reflections and shadows - from the original footage, along with the film’s infamous soundtrack and
expository intertitles. Azzarella has re-built the vacant space left by his extractions pixel by pixel,
constructing an alternative rendition of the film that exemplifies his mastery of digital construction
through perfectly accurate imitation and craft. Added to each panorama is a reconstructed version
of the original Erdmann scores and ambient noises that reflect the atmosphere of the original film.
The outcome is an uncanny 90-minute portrayal of the original classic that identically matches
Murnau‘s lighting, film quality, and resolution, but abolishes its pioneering storyline and figures.
Despite the absence of these key elements, the film’s eerie and dark nature is practically amplified
through Azzarella's manipulations—doors open mysteriously, curtains sway, and dawn breaks to
ominous music, heightening the tension of implied action. The viewer watches each scene with the
feeling of anticipation, the desire to see something spectacular occur without the gratification. With
Count Orlok absent, the Gothic architecture and gloomy backdrops assume a characterization of
their own, unsettled in much the same way as the viewer—waiting for the film’s antagonist to
emerge yet unable to coax him into existence. Viewing the video, one gets a sense of how
existential characters, Vladimir and Estragon must have felt as they waited for Godot.
 
Azzarella (b. 1978, Ohio) was the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award and related solo
exhibition from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT). He has previously shown at the
California Museum of Photography (CA), University Art Museum, Long Beach (CA), Vancouver Art
Gallery (Canada), Kavi Gupta Gallery (IL), Academie der Kunste (Berlin), Sean Kelly Gallery (NY),
Catharine Clark Gallery (CA) and DCKT Gallery (NY). His work is included in the permanent
collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), The Los Angeles County Museum of
Art (CA), and Western Bridge (WA). He lives and works in Easton, PA.

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

PRISM is pleased to announce Air to Surface, an exhibition of new work by Parker Ito and Helen Johnson. An opening reception will be held at the gallery from 7-9pm on Friday, May 24 and the exhibition will run through to July 6.
 
Both Ito and Johnson push against questions of gesture and transmission, aesthetic theatricality, myths surrounding meaning, image as artifact, the efficacy of expression through media and how painting navigates technology. While the artists produced these series of paintings independently of each other, their presentation within the exhibition is interspersed, to encourage a concurrent reading of their work. Within this congress, the artists impress questions upon each other, so that mutual impulses and conflicts are extracted through proximity within the space of the exhibition.
 
Ito’s paintings in Air to Surface approximate the method of operation of an inkjet printer, covering a surface in dots of color that overlap to produce an image. He sites pointillism and pixels as aesthetic prompts, but unlike pixels and the marks made to produce pointillist paintings, Ito’s single dots do not aggregate to form a figurative subject. The image he produces is ultimately an abstract, continuous image spread across multiple works. As in his previous exhibitions, the flows and fissions of information and representation induced by the asymmetry of the Internet remain crucial, but the model of an inkjet printer allows a more extensive history of reproduction and display to be acknowledged.
 
Johnson’s works are built from layers of abstraction, figuration, language and glyphs. Each has a catalytic piece of information or phenomenon as a starting point, which she elaborates into a pictorial space. In the initial painting of this series, Johnson lays emoticons over sweeping, gestural strokes of paint. This synergy, between digital glyphs used to consolidate emotions and the expressive potency of abstraction, forms a thesis about the reification of thought and feeling across various visual techniques, whether on the surface of a painting or the touch-screen of a phone.
 
Parker Ito (b. 1986) lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. He earned his BFA from California College of the Arts in 2010 and has since exhibited extensively through the United States and Europe, with recent solo exhibitions at IMO (Copenhagen), Steve Turner (Los Angeles) and Stadium (New York). Ito is acknowledged as one of the most significant artists to emerge from his generation and he is a critical participant in the discourse and practice of post-Internet culture.
 
Helen Johnson (b. 1979) lives and works in Melbourne, Australia, where she is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University. Her work has been consistently included in exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia and has been collected by individuals and institutions internationally. She has had solo exhibitions in London, Melbourne, Turin and Dortmund.

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.

Catharine Ahearn, Joshua Callaghan, Andrew Cannon, Sara Clendening, Liz Craft, Michael Decker, Rob Doran, Mari Eastman, Marten Elder + Heather Cleary, Cayetano Ferrer, James Herman, Roger Herman, Michelle Kim, Claire Kohne, David Korty, Maxwell Krivitzky, Chris Lipomi, Calvin Marcus, Yunhee Min, Pentti Monkkonen, Donald Morgan, Davida Nemeroo, Mark Rodriguez, Justin Thomas Schaefer, Cole Sayer, Nancy Stella Soto, JPW3 and Eric Wesley
 
Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present The Object Salon, a group show composed of Los Angles-based artists working across a variety of media.
 
The Project Room at Roberts & Tilton is being utilized as a frame to contain all of the individual objects as one piece, creating a collaborative work of art by an entire community of artists.
 
The Object Salon is part of a continuous thread of themed shows begun in 2011, curated and hosted by Calvin Marcus in the Cypress Park neighborhood of Northeast Los Angeles. The curatorial premise of the two previous shows, The Cactus Painting Show and Nudes, was that each participant was invited to contribute a work that fit the set theme. The Object Salon re-imagines this idea through scale constraints.
 
Michael Dopp and Calvin Marcus are good friends and collaborators and are pleased to present this exhibition and bring this gathering of artists to Roberts & Tilton. Calvin Marcus was born in San Francisco and lives and works in Los Angeles. He is currently an MFA candidate at UCLA.

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.

Controlled Chaos, Peter Kempson
 
Known for his photo-realistic acrylic L.A.andscapes, Peter Kempson has been exploring a wide-range of subjects and new media for a little over a year. His new works include a portrait of Steven Spielberg rendered as a montage of scenes from his movies, and “20th Century Modern,” a large piece celebrating modernist architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry. There are also color studies, an ode to the film industry, entitled “Cinemetropolis,” (which imagines an entire city devoted to film history, production and Hollywood ephemera like Angelyne’s billboards) and a tongue-in-cheek piece called “Abstract Painting Hung on an Inappropriate Wall.” Like a modern-day Hieronimous Bosch, Kempson renders these diverse subjects with meticulous attention to detail, employing photo-montage and painting together with a dose of social satire.
 
Spliced, Patricia Doede Klowden
 
Klowden’s current series, Sliced, continues her examination of the figure in ceramic and bronze, with representational forms as well as abstractions that invoke the figure without full representation, and ceramic vessels that approach the physical body from a more intuitive perspective. Each of the ceramics has been sliced into horizontal bands that are then re-pieced together to form the whole. Heads, torsos, vessels and abstracts, all sliced and re-made, with a resulting repetition of horizontal line that breaks the vertical pieces into complex compositions, and offers a sense of play mixed with dynamism. Klowden finds fascination in the resulting reconstructed forms, and the way in which the edges refuse to be re-pieced as they once were. The eye of the viewer then has the opportunity to conceive of the original form, and to make its own connections. The bronze figures, remaining whole and un-sliced, stand as a counterpoint and reminder of the unaltered physical body, while the multiple glazes Klowden uses on the surface of the ceramics in blues, greens, purples and golds offer luminous cool depths, with moments of warmth pulling us back in to a feeling of flesh.
 
The Food Series Continues, Gary Polonsky
 
In his latest exhibition, artist Gary Polonsky further explores large-scale food studies, focusing his most recent work on classic American confections. Working from real food while using non-traditional canvases of balsawood, styrofoam, and wire mesh, Polonsky’s three-dimensional works break the surface and effectively blur the line between painting and sculpture. “Each piece in this series attempts to advance my ability to describe, recreate, and emphasize the beauty and wonder that can be found in almost any object,” says Polonsky. Magnifying his subjects’ detail, Polonsky’s wall-based constructions echo themes of nostalgia while beckoning viewers to take a closer look at an array of tantalizing salty and sugary treats - just short of taking an indulgent bite.
 
Download press images here: Include cl.ly/1u2t3o0u2Z2T (pdf/Cloud) link

WEEKEND is pleased to present 9 Photographs, a solo exhibition of large-scale color photographs by Los Angeles based artist, Greg Curtis. In this new body of work, Curtis enlisted commercial cinematographer Adam Michael Becker to create a series of abstract photographs wherein the mechanics of the camera lens itself are the sole object. With the camera pointed at a blank wall in the artist‘s studio, commercial lights were directed into various lenses to produce lens flares, a phenomenon that occurs when non-image forming light enters and refracts within the glass components of the lens before reaching the camera’s film or digital sensor. The resulting images are at once diminutive and expansive: portraits of the camera‘s own machinations presented as vast extraterrestrial events. The works in 9 Photographs are self-reflexive experiments made with equipment and skilled labor from the entertainment industry, isolating and foregrounding what is usually considered at best an aesthetic flourish, and at worst an error on the part of the photographer.
 
Greg Curtis’ works in photography, video, installation, and sound engage notions of erasure, absence, and alienation embedded within the consumption and dissemination of photographic images. He has exhibited and performed at Elephant, Cirrus Gallery, Land of Tomorrow, Dan Graham, Blythe Projects, Fellows of Contemporary Art and Sea and Space Explorations, among others. His work has been reviewed or featured in Flaunt, art ltd. and Artillery. He received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.

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.