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.

 
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

Here is Elsewhere Gallery and Grégory Bernard are pleased to present Write a Book about WHAT?, the first exhibition in the US by Barzolff. The French-born artist, based in Los Angeles, works in a range of mediums including graffiti, 3D animation, video installation, drawing, and painting. The exhibition will introduce his latest large-scale paintings, stereoscopy, video installations, and drawings sold by the gram.
 
Barzolff started out as Numéro 6, a groundbreaking graffiti artist in the Parisian street art scene who emerged as one of the most distinctive voices of the genre. According to Paris Tonkar magazine, Barzolff is “a masterful illustrator and an iconic figure, who transformed the standardized imagery used in French graffiti in the second half of the 90s.”
 
After obtaining his BA in Visual Arts, Barzolff went on to study film animation at the Gobelins l‘école de l’Image in Paris. While most alumni of the prestigious program became recruits for Disney and other major American animation studios, Barzolff was compulsively spraying walls. His apt portrayal of the street culture he was heir to resulted in two series that aired on the iconic Canal+ television station in Europe: the cult animated series Les Lascars (The Rascals), lauded for capturing the zeitgeist of that era, and more recently the disturbingly absurd The World According To F. R. Jeansac.
 
For a few “lost years” (in his own words), Barzolff worked in the advertising and music video industry, gaining recognition and winning many prestigious awards in the field including the well-known People‘s Choice Imagina Award and Best Music Video Award in Annecy, France. He also won the famed D&AD Award in the UK for his seminal work. In 2010, he turned his back on the “soul-sucking” advertising machine to live as a recluse in Burgundy and devote himself to blazing new trails in the fine arts. Now ensconced in Beachwood Canyon, he’s creating his most powerful pieces to date.
 
Monstrous, stunning and often baroque in their style, the subjects of his paintings feature arresting characters which elicit both disgust and compassion. Fascinated by the lesser albeit universal human trait of stupidity, he glorifies its aesthetic to the point of beauty. Reinventing the craft and form he devoted his childhood and adolescence to mastering, his pieces could be summed up by the Baudelaire quote: “I only ask of every man that he show me what remains of Life.” Flesh, folds, and meat are at the forefront of his opus. To quote Deleuze on Francis Bacon, it's the “logic of sensation” which consumes him. “Every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and beast, their zone of indiscernibility.” Ultimately, these works are radically new in contemporary art, a unique mix of fin-de-siècle aesthetic with 21st century street art and new media style.
 
A fruitful anachronism lies at the base of another distinctive new body of work: his stereoscopes. Stereoscopy creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth from given two-dimensional images viewed through a stereoscope. With this archaic medium, Barzolff invites the viewer to travel into his digital universe as he poetically mixes new technology with a late 1800s aesthetic, utilizing an optic tool that was once used for filmmaking in Hollywood. The exhibition also includes an installation in a 1950s television featuring a selection of videos from his fake UFO hoax project which received over 20 million views on YouTube. He therefore creates a “retrocipation,” to quote critic Arnaud Pierre, “conjugating in the past future visions of a now obsolete future.”
 
Beyond his experimental mind, humor and irony are integral to Barzolff’s style. His work transports the viewer to the point where the absurd becomes sublime, while revealing the non-sense of consumerism and its impact on our everyday life. With his Art by the Gram, art becomes a commodity: 15 years of Barzolff’s small drawings, sketches, restaurant napkins & phone doodles are cut up, weighed, and packaged in plastic baggies that individuals can buy by the gram, like in a grocery store. “First and foremost art’s purpose is to feed the artist,” says Barzolff. The same sarcastic wit imbues the animated music videos that he recently did in Los Angeles, for musicians such as Flying Lotus, Boys Noize and Mr. Oizo.
 
Here is Elsewhere Gallery is dedicated to exploring the hidden history that links artists from here (Southern California) with artists from elsewhere (the rest of the world). Created in 2010 by its director, Yann Perreau, Here is Elsewhere has exhibited artists such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Larry Bell and Henry Taylor, among others.
 
For additional images and information, please contact the gallery at info@hereiselsewhere.com or 310-904-8966.

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.

Marine Contemporary is delighted to present, Unfinished Business, littlewhitehead’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. After their successful U.S. solo debut in 2011, the Glasgow based duo are back for what they see as an opportunity to resolve and build on ideas that were born out of their first trip to Los Angeles and the unresolved nature of some of their most recent works. This exhibition focuses on new sculptures and a series of prints made from found photographs. This is littlewhitehead’s first exhibition where they‘ve made their work in what they consider to be "a proper studio” and feel that it has affected the way they produce their work. Unfinished Business broadly explores the ideas of failure and ambition, which could be interpreted as commenting on the process of being an artist, but also just as much on being a human being.
 
’Failure‘ is a combination of all of littlewhitehead’s failed sculptures over the last few years. A comic boulder of epic proportions, littlewhitehead explain, “it’s as much a monument to our persistence as it is to our shortcomings. Some of the items in the boulder have been exhibited before. But sometimes we only realize a work’s failure once you see it in a show. Recycling our failed work is something we’ve always done. Initially it was a financial thing, but now it just seems more cathartic. One of the reasons the elements of “Failure” failed, is because we tried too hard to make them”. The duo find the idea of leftovers interesting. To them the detritus of creative ideas is essential to taking the work where they want it to go: “Debris can also be more interesting than the finished work. But it’s also about honesty. Understanding why something failed, is very important in avoiding its reoccurrence.”
 
littlewhitehead have always worked with found photographs as source material, with many found images filling the walls of their studio. The prints in this exhibition are all images from a British man’s holiday to the US in the late 1970’s. They are snapshots of everyday Americana that felt completely foreign to his eyes. Much like the taker of these photographs, the social and cultural landscape of America still feels foreign to the artists and they were intrigued by the idea of selling a foreign America back to Americans.
 
Sigmund Freud defined the concept of the uncanny, or ’unheimlich‘, in an essay in 1919. He was describing the sensation of discomfort or displacement when familiar objects are made unfamiliar and emerge in forms that horrify and create a sense of profound unease. Uncanny objects make us aware of our repressed hidden selves. It is the sensation that can accompany dolls, puppets, mannequins, waxworks, robots, and even figurative sculpture in its widest sense. Things that are human and inhuman, dead and alive. Things that express collective anxiety. littlewhitehead’s work fits perfectly into a vein of art that addresses the uncanny - artists like Mike Kelley, Hans Bellmer, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Cindy Sherman. The duo trained and are based in Glasgow but have an immediacy that is very different from the drier aesthetic approaches of the city. They strive and succeed to make work with an immediacy to it that functions alongside and before theory. These are artworks that move into an instinctive place first, touching on the darker (and darkly humorous) parts of our psyche.
 
littlewhitehead is Craig Little (b. 1980, Glasgow, Scotland) and Blake Whitehead (b.1985, Lanark, Scotland). littlewhitehead are children of the 80s: brought up on a diet of video nasties, computer games and the post-industrial landscape of socialist Glasgow. Their sculptures and drawings are the product of a very idiosyncratic and private dialogue. As a result, all of their work is steeped in their very own brand of humor. It is through such humor they manage to negate any particular ideological position, and instead try to foster reflection on many ontological and ideological absurdities. Past shows include Newspeak: British Art Now at Saatchi Gallery, London and a solo show at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland. Recent shows include, Constructions at Helene Bailly, Paris, The Cyclic Gate at Sumarria Lunn, London, How Art Things at Nest Gallery, The Hague, Netherlands. littlewhitehead were included in the book “100 New Artists” by U.K. critic Francesca Gavin. “100 New Artists” highlights new themes, media, imagery, and ideas emerging in contemporary art practice. littlewhitehead currently live and work in Glasgow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LOS ANGELES, CA (March 15th, 2013) - LA Artcore is pleased to present a tandem-solo show with two artists whose contrasting cultural perspectives enliven reflection upon our cultural histories as they transform the contemporary moment.
As one-half of this exhibition, multimedia artist Kathie Foley-Meyer will present “When Little Tokyo Went Bronze, ” and will exhibit a series of sculptures combining various media. The central work in the exhibition is both informational and abstract evoking both the connection between history and memory as well as visuality itself. Using elements of glass, cast resin hands in various sign-language gesture (consequently spelling out “Bronzeville”), neon lighting and text, Foley-Meyer pieces together these different modes of communication suggesting a language we may not speak or a history we do not recognize or remember. Etched into the frosted glass coverings are inscriptions of businesses and community members that provide moments of transparency into the worlds circulating around Bronzeville. In doing so, Foley-Meyer explores gaps between the present and the past, history and memory, lived experience and personal mythology. The following is an excerpt from Foley-Meyer:
 
In February of 1942 Franklin D Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans for the duration of World War II. For the section of Los Angeles known as Little Tokyo, the removal of its Japanese American residents created a ghost town of empty houses and businesses. The abandoned neighborhood soon became a source of opportunity for the influx of southern African American citizens that were migrating to LA, who, like the Japanese, were barred from living anywhere west of Central Avenue by the city’s racially restrictive housing covenants. As thousands of African American families moved into homes and retail spaces vacated by Japanese Americans, the Little Tokyo neighborhood became known as “Bronzeville”.
 
Few remnants remain of the time when the streets of Little Tokyo became Bronzeville and were known for the jazz and “breakfast clubs” that operated until the wee hours, and leading citizens such as Leonard Christmas who organized the Bronzeville Chamber of Commerce. A long-time fascination with the period led artist Kathie Foley-Meyer to create Project Bronzeville, a combination of fine art, theater, a panel discussion and music coming together to commemorate this brief but vibrant part of LA history
 
*The art exhibition and symposium are both free events. For information regarding tickets to the play, please visit robeytheatrecompany.com. For information regarding the jazz concert, please visit bluewhalemusic.com.
For the most up-to-date information about dates, locations, and tickets, visit www.projectbronzeville.com.
 
Los Angeles artist and curator Shizuko Greenblatt combines Japanese characters and fusion ikebana with Western expressionistic sensibilities in her mixed-media sculptures and paintings. The artist‘s joining of elements of Eastern and Western cultures, revels here, in the aesthetic possibilities of the shared moment between cultural perspectives as it produces something new, propelled by vibrantly-orchestrated compositions and arrangements.
 
An uncanny sense of design and vision pervades all of Greenblatt’s works: Controlled elements of gradated color or a Japanese character give way to the natural flow of an ascending tree branch or gestural brushwork. Indeed, balance is a fundamental quest in Greenblatt‘s approach. Her desire is to communicate a positive and inspiring message through not only through the use of balanced elements — the weight of a line, the thickness of paint or the proportions between natural and plastic elements— but of the characters themselves which carry such associations as “Passion for Life”, “Go Forward” and “Infinite Growth”. Greenblatt comments that these messages underlie all of her works if not explicitly, then implicitly. But after all, Greenblatt’s objective is to create: Whatever character or material she uses is only a beginning point to modification or alteration in order to take it somewhere unexplored.
 
Artist Reception:
Sunday, June 2nd, 2013
3pm – 5pm
Conversation with the artist: 4pm
 
LA Artcore at Union Center for the Arts
120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Gallery hours: 12-5pm, Wed-Sun.
 
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ABOUT LA ARTCORE:
LA Artcore helps develop the careers of visual artists of diverse cultural backgrounds, bringing innovative contemporary art to the public, and provides educational programs by professional artists for people of all ages. For more information visit www.laartcore.org.

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.

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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