Le Vent d’Est: New work by Stephen Lapthisophon
 
Tautology at Actual Size
Opening Reception: Friday, June 14, 2013 7-10 PM
 
Aroma at Elephant
Opening Reception: Sunday, June 16, 2013 4-7 PM
Inline image 3
 
Actual Size is pleased to present Tautology, an exhibition of new work by Dallas-based artist Stephen Lapthisophon, organized by Vincent Ramos. Tautology is part of a dual venue exhibition, Le Vent d’ Est. Stephen Lapthisophon’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles will document his first impressions of the city as well as record his responses to the gallery spaces at Actual Size in Chinatown and Elephant in Glassel Park.
 
Stephen Lapthisophon works in a realm where process-driven gestures, clues leading to nowhere, and fragmented layers of meaning are forced to co-exist. Legally blind since 1994, he relies heavily on his other senses to initiate ideas that disrupt notions of cultural memory. His site-specific installations employ a range of materials and approaches that include drawing, text, found objects, coffee and salt.
 
On Thursday, June, 20, 2013 at 8:00pm Actual Size will host Dark Warehouse, a lecture and screening of videos by Stephen Lapthisophon. Lapthisophon will screen a selection of his own time-based works, as well as clips culled from YouTube that inform his practice and his understanding of Los Angeles.
 
Stephen Lapthisophon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. Recent solo exhibitions include Isolation, A Slender Gamut, New York, NY (2012), The Construction of a National Identity, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2011), Las Palabras en la Sombra de Esta Fecha, El Escaparate, Barcelona, Spain (2009), and DESIGN, Zagreus Projekt, Berlin, Germany (2008). Recent group exhibitions include, Variations on Theme: Contemporary Art 1950’s-Present, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2012), The Café, SHOW Studio, London, UK (2011), and Archival Impulse, Gallery 400, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL (2011). His work has been reviewed in ARTFORUM, Frieze, Art in America, Art News, New Art Examiner, and ART LIES. A collection of his essays entitled, Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010 was recently published by Green Lantern Press. He is currently a senior lecturer in art and art history at The University of Texas at Arlington.
 
Vincent Ramos is an artist from Los Angeles. He received his MFA from CalArts in 2007 and his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002. Recent exhibitions include Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum and LAXART (2012), Pachuco Cadaver or There Are No Heavies in America, Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles (2011), and Outsider Art: Others from Elsewhere Doing Something Altogether Different…Sort Of, 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica (2011). Curatorial projects include, After The Gold Rush: Reflections and Postscripts on the National Chicano Moratorium of August 29, 1970, Vincent Price Art Museum, ELAC, Los Angeles (2011), River, Elephant, Los Angeles (2011), Chasing Shadows, The Onion (The Church of the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society), North Hills (2010), The Sharon Show & 1969, Dan Graham, Los Angeles (2009), and Call Me Lightning: An Evening of Performance-Based Work, FOCA, Los Angeles (2008)
 
Special thanks to Max Presneill and the Torrance Art Museum, Chloë Flores and GuestHaus, Irene Tsatsos, Natilee Harren, John Berdel, Aaron Wrinkle, and the directors of Elephant for their support in bringing Stephen to Los Angeles.
 
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Gallery Hours: Saturdays 12:00-5:00pm, and by appointment.
 
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Actual Size Los Angeles
741 New High Street
Los Angeles CA 90012
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Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Wassup Painters, a group show organized by Pavan Segal featuring work by Kerstin Brätsch, Paul Cowan, Cynthia Daignault, Liam Everett, Henrik Olai Kaarstein, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. The show will open on June 8, and will be on view until July 20. A reception will be held at the gallery on Saturday, June 8 from 6-9pm, at 2660 La Cienega Blvd in Culver City.
 
Wassup Painters brings together contemporary artists who approach painting through the use of nontraditional materials and innovative processes as a way of exploring new conceptual ground. Painting as a medium has a long and rich history and recent trends have focused on exploring and reinterpreting what has come before. In some contrast to this, Wassup Painters highlights artistic practices that push the possibilities of the medium into unexpected realms, blurring the boundaries between painting and other forms of object making.
 
The exhibition title references Larry Clark’s 2005 film Wassup Rockers, which features a group of Latino teenagers searching for identity in the racially diverse and ever changing South Central neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In the film, the teens are often mislabeled as “rockers” due to their long hair and black clothes even though they primarily self-identify as “skaters,” making them feel misunderstood in their own community. While many of the works in Wassup Painters have leanings toward painting, they could easily be perceived or labeled as other forms entirely, such as glasswork, photography, signage, deconstructed material, collage, sculpture, and fabric art. This show offers the opportunity to view works that have direct points of intersection with these forms of object making as a way of contemplating what comprises and defines painting, while asking what role context, intention, and expectation play in this process.

Armory Center for the Arts presents a temporary, site-specific installation by Los Angeles-based artist Nate Page in its central stairwell through June 2013.
Page’s newest work, entitled Instituted Angles of Path and Display, challenges the ultra-functional design of the Armory’s main stairwell. Page has removed one of the stairwell’s two large metal handrails, turned it 90 degrees, and mounted it in the middle of the space on a pedestal-like structure that follows the crooked trajectory of the stairs and the landing. This simple gesture both highlights and alters the existing framework and prescriptive design of the space, which remains fully functional although visually distorted. Central to Page’s practice is an interest in engaging elements of perceived and given space in built environments, often through objects dismissed as peripheral or incidental.
Page acknowledges that railings generally can serve two functions: one for handrail support, and the other as a boundary. By turning a railing on its side and using it to bisect the Armory stairwell, Page shifts our point of view what a handrail is for. Page has created a topography of the climber's passage and an opportunity for visitors to become aware of their physical and psychological relationships to the architecture by negotiating passage (stair) vs. path (boundary railing). Familiar visual and spatial rhythms are interrupted, inviting the viewer to reconsider the function of the space – and possibly, the artist hopes, to find more potential than what it is programmed for.
Nate Page lives in Los Angeles. His work has been seen at Lothringer Dreizehn Space for Contemporary Art in Munich, Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg Austria, Warsaw Academy of the Arts, Warsaw, John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts in Sheboygan, WI, No Name Exhibitions @ The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, and at Cooper Union and Jen Bekman Gallery, both in New York. Page has produced many environments with Machine Project in Los Angeles including A Field Guide to LACMA at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has shown nationally including Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery, Institute of Visual Arts at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. From 2001-2004, Page co-directed an experimental artist collaborative and exhibition space in Milwaukee called the Rust Spot. He received a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and attended the Warsaw Academy of Art in Warsaw, Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg Austria, and the New York Studio Program and the Summer Residency at The Cooper Union, both in New York City.

Santa Monica, March 2013 – Christopher Grimes Gallery is very pleased announce an exhibition of new work by Lucia Koch. This will be Koch’s first solo exhibition in the United States and her first with the gallery. Koch uses interventions, installations, videos and photographs to explore the means for effecting change in one’s experience of the environment. She often covers the façades, skylights and windows with translucent materials, filters, or laser-cut panels of patterned wood or metal, creating new layers between inside and outside. Her interest lies in generating altered states of place, where invisibility and interruption short circuit perception.
 
In imagining the opportunities architecture presents for art, Koch will build a site-specific installation, transforming the anatomy of the main gallery. Here, “architecture” is less the construction of an object than a strategy for occupying space. Also on view will be a video work and large-scale photographs of the interior of cardboard boxes, installed as virtual extensions of the environment. This series represents Koch’s ongoing engagement with understanding how a space is converted into place.
 
Koch (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1966) lives and works in São Paulo. She has participated in the 11th Biennale de Lyon, France (2011), the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2006), the 2nd, 5th and 8th editions of the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (1999, 2005 and 2011), and the 8th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2003). Her work has been included in such exhibitions as, Another Place, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil (2011), and When Lives Become Form, Yerba Buena Center for Arts, San Francisco, CA (2009) which was also on view at Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2008). Her work is in the collections of such institutions as Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil, among others.

Couturier Gallery welcomes, with great pleasure, Susana Espinosa and Toni Hambleton, the two doyennes of contemporary Puerto Rican ceramics in their duo exhibition Encuentro (Meeting). The exhibition will include recent hand-built figurative and architectural clay sculptures which when seen together may represent entire communities. The exhibition will take place from June 1 through July 13, 2013. The opening reception will be Saturday, June 1, 6-8pm.
 
Susana Espinosa and Toni Hambleton have had a significant role in Puerto Rican ceramics, a tradition that existed long before their arrival on the island but never consolidated into an identifiable movement nor did there exist a learning center dedicated to ceramics. Toni Hambleton (b. Mexico City, 1934) studied fashion design at the School of Design and Decoration in her native Mexico City (1956-59). It was only when she moved to Puerto Rico in 1963 she began studying and working with clay in the very late ‘60s. Susana Espinosa (b. Buenos Aires, 1933) arrived in Puerto Rico five years later, in 1968, already an accomplished ceramist. These two expats subsequently met and in 1980, recognizing the dearth of studios or training opportunities on the island, co-founded (together with Jaime Suarez, another important figure in Puerto Rican ceramic history) Casa Candina, a ceramic school and gallery. The influence of these two women on contemporary ceramics in Puerto Rico is reflected in the move away from the functional vessel forms that prevailed in large part to satisfy the commercial tourist trade and traditional throwing techniques that were predominant up to that time. Their encuentro, or meeting, resulted in a small revolution of form and idea in Puerto Rican ceramic history.
 
Susana Espinosa’s hand-built sculptures are typically figural- male and female, full length, elongated figures, or robust busts, with their inscribed, worked and crusty surfaces, some cloaked literally and figuratively with mysterious auras and secrets lurking underneath their surfaces, figures that at once are in and part of their own landscape. Espinosa’s use of glazes is spare preferring to use it only as accent, instead allowing the fire and oxides to give the monochromatic hues to her work. Her “École Française,” a new work to be shown in this exhibition, consists of seven women: two matronly figures, the other five more demure, all cloaked in large skirts and all but the largest of them (Mme. La Maitresse, perhaps) clasping their bodies in typically female guarded fashion. They are the embodiment of worldly schools, bringing with them knowledge of the depths of the oceans and the heavens as represented by the sgraffito sea life and celestial heavens inscribed in the clay forming their dresses. Each has her own story, and collectively they represent a community.
 
In contrast to Espinosa’s figures, Toni Hambleton’s elegant and rhythmic architectonic forms reflect the structures of her environment: the buildings, walls, network of pathways that make up a pueblo, village or city be it from the memory of her native Mexico or wanderings throughout the island of Puerto Rico. Her slab-built sculptures may be pierced like windows of a house or doors in a wall providing a look inside though the contents are left to speculation. Hambleton prefers not to adorn her sculptures with the polychrome of glazes, not unlike Espinosa, instead allowing the fire of the kiln and oxides to provide coloring and shading. Her forms may be the very environments which Espinosa’s figures inhabit. The sculptures of these two artists together combine remarkably to form very diverse and elegant clay communities.
 
Susana Espinosa’s and Toni Hambleton’s work may be found in numerous private and public collections worldwide. Public collections in which Susana Espinosa’s work may be found include: Art & Handicraft Center, Porvoo, Finland; Colección Casa Candina, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Compañía de Turismo de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museo de Arte de Ponce, PR; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Museo della Ceramica D’arte de Faenza, Italy; Museo de la Cerámica, Ichon, Korea; Museo de la Cerámica: Mimara, Zagreb, Yugoslavia.
 
Public collections holding Toni Hambleton’s ceramic sculptures include: Centro de Arte de Maracaibo: Lía Bermúdez, Maracaibo, Venezuela; Colección Casa Candina, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Colección Compañía de Turismo, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Colección Instituto Statale D’Arte, Teramo, Casteli, Italy; International Keramike Studio, Kecksmet, Hungary; Museo Ariadna, Geneva, Switzerland; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico; Museo de Cerámica, Ichón, Korea; Museo de Cerámica, Mino, Japan; Museo de la Ceramica, Zagreb, Yugoslavia; Museum of Ceramics, Brisbane, Australia; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA
 
For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery at cg@couturiergallery.com or 323-933-5557.

Diane Rosenstein Fine Art is pleased to announce an Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture and Photographs — a group show to celebrate our First Anniversary. This exhibition will present new work along with important highlights from previous shows, including Louise Nevelson (The Black Mirror), Thomas Downing (The Washington School) and Alexandra Hedison (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere).
 
Our First Anniversary will also present new work from Arnold Helbling (drawings), Sarah Awad (paintings), and Carmen Argote (sculpture) — three artists who are exhibiting at the gallery for the first time. Mr. Helbling, who lives and works in New York, will return to DRFA in September with a solo survey exhibition of his abstract paintings and drawings (2002 – 2013). Sarah Awad will then show in mid-October, which is her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. This summer, Miss Awad is also included in “Rogue Wave 2013” at L.A. Louver, Venice, opening July 18th.
 
The Anniversary Exhibition spans forty-two years, from Thomas Downing’s Grid 29 (1971) to Sarah Awad’s new figurative oil paintings of seated women. Its material scope includes Carman Argote’s Mascara, a painted and flocked tumbleweed, and Eben Goff’s aluminum, pigment and beeswax Channel Slope. John Sisley’s Water Drops are photographic records of works on paper, while Marco Breuer’s burned, scraped and folded cameraless photographs transcend convention.
 
Two artists offer botanical abstractions that explore largeness and smallness of scale. John Adelman’s 76,277 (Parts of a Tree), 2012 is an epic 12-foot long drawing of a dismantled and reassembled severed tree branch; Charles Fine’s mixed-media paintings depict cosmic flora realized in an intimate and enchanting form.
 
The exhibition includes work by fourteen artists: John Adelman, Carmen Argote, Sarah Awad, Marco Breuer, Thomas Downing, Charles Fine, Eben Goff, Cleve Gray, Alexandra Hedison, Arnold Helbling, John M. Miller, Louise Nevelson, Jose Alvaro Perdices, and John Sisley.
 
In our first year, DRFA held nine exhibitions, and presented the work of thirty-one artists. In April 2012 we opened a project space in Beverly Hills with a solo survey of abstract expressionist Cleve Gray (The Connecticut Paintings); followed by The Washington School: a group show of color field paintings by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Thomas Downing. Last fall, we hosted two solo exhibitions – a survey of conceptual drawings by Texas artist John Adelman and new photographs of Malibu by Alexandra Hedison, who is based in Los Angeles. The Black Mirror (co-curated by James Welling and Diane Rosenstein) inaugurated our new gallery, a 4,300 square foot space on Highland Avenue in Hollywood. This spring, we hosted three solo exhibitions: John M. Miller (painting), Eben Goff (sculpture) and an acclaimed mid-career survey of experimental photographs by Marco Breuer.
 
The exhibition program includes solo exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists, along with thematic group shows and historical exhibitions. The gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Alexandra Hedison, Eben Goff, and Sarah Awad.
 
The First Anniversary Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture and Photographs opens on Saturday, June 15th with a reception for the artists from 6 - 8pm.
The exhibition will be on view from June 15 – August 3, 2103.
Hours are 10am – 6pm, Tues – Sat.
 
For further information, please contact whitney@dianerosenstein.com