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.

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

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.

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.

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.

 
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