Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, On Art
 
I can’t believe it. No, I will not lie, I can easily conceive of it.
- Samuel Beckett, Molloy
 
If I do everything in my own interest, it is because the interest I have in myself comes before everything else.
– Seneca, On Benefits
 
This exhibition focuses on the evolution of certain forms of production that are realized by the dismantling of external elements and uniting them into an internalized and intentionally conflicted whole. This activity is inherently schizophrenic and therefore results in a multifarious yet not unresolved output.
 
The title roughly translates to “before returning home you must burn down the house” – which could mean, among other things, that engaging with oneself one requires continual processes of disassembly in an effort to form a united, cohesive self. The linguistic shift in the exhibition’s title is representative of the passage from one state of being to another, with inevitable (and intentional) slippages in implication. Also at play are fractured, interrupted systems: disassembly/assembly, self/duality, subjectivity/influence, privacy/publicity, singularity/multiplicity. The exhibition seeks to locate itself in the fold between these states, in moments of transition and contradiction.

Deedee Cheriel: Epidsodes in the Abundant Oasis
Femke Hiemstra: Fiebertraum
Mel Kadel: Carry Your Weight

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

Press Release
 
Offramp Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of collages by San Francisco area artist, Edith Hillinger, Fusion: A Collision of Cultures from June 23 - July 28, 2013. There will be an opening reception on Sunday, June 23 from 2-5pm and a closing reception on Sunday, July 28 from 2-5pm, with an artist‘s talk at 3pm. Fusion is Hillinger’s first solo exhibition at Offramp Gallery.
 
Edith Hillinger was born in Germany. When she was only three years old, her family was forced to flee the Nazis, making their way to Istanbul where her father, an architect, found work with Bruno Taut. Hillinger grew up in Istanbul and later, at the age of sixteen, immigrated with her mother to New York City. She studied at Cooper Union School of Art in New York, earning a four-year certificate in painting. She got her B.A. from New York University. She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.
 
Artist Statement
 
The living room of the old wooden house on the outskirts of Istanbul was a time capsule of our past and current life and it was the incubator of the artist I was to become. Sitting on the newly acquired, richly patterned Turkish carpets, I was surrounded by the spare Bauhaus furniture from the land we had just fled. The glass front book case housed the inherited Japanese treasures; paper fans with gold decorations, lacquer boxes, opium pipes with tortoise stems, paper toys. On the wall hung a Japanese scroll depicting bamboo and a bird.
 
I was attracted by these objects and spent a lot of my time playing in the living room. I did not know it at the time, but seeing the spare, geometric forms of the Bauhaus furniture and weavings against the calligraphic and tribal forms was building my vocabulary as an artist.
 
What brought this all back for me in a way that I could then work with, was a very small photograph I took of a high window in the Alhambra, in Spain. The window was pierced and ornate in the style of Moorish architecture. I drew these patterns with a Japanese brush pen on Gampi paper. The pattern was that of a pierced window, but it also reminded me of the weave of a burka and the lattice covered windows of the women’s quarters I saw as a child in Istanbul.
 
As I draw, and later as I cut the drawings apart and reassemble them, one pattern meanders into the next and memories rise to the surface again: I remember sitting next to my father, an architect, as he drew the plans for buildings in strong black India ink lines. When I was a little older, I was given a pen and tried my hand at drawing straight black lines in ink. My drawings now incorporate architectural notations for stairs, bricks, flooring materials etc. expressing my love for the small visual notations in architectural dictionaries.
 
Blank Gampi paper is set off against line drawings, brush paintings, oil stick and acrylic. The patina of age and decay rubs up against the new, not yet embellished, and barely envisioned - as Berlin contrasted with Istanbul in the 1930’s.
 
In my mid-teens we left Istanbul and moved to New York. Daily life unfolded once again in an unfamiliar environment. The work brings together all I have gathered from these very different cultures and the circumstances of my personal life and restores once severed connections.
 
Edith Hillinger
March, 2013

CalArts online magazine East of Borneo presents SUMMER ISSUES COOPERATIVE at Greene Exhibitions, June 29 – July 13, 2013
 
Two-week pop-up newsstand in Culver City will distribute free art magazines contributed by over 20 local and international publishers.
 
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 29, 6–9 pm
BBQ + Wikipedia Editathon: Saturday, July 13, 12-5 pm
 
East of Borneo presents SUMMER ISSUES COOPERATIVE, a two-week exhibition in the form of a pop-up newsstand at Greene Exhibitions in Culver City. The generosity-based event will distribute current and archival art magazines contributed by over 20 nonprofit publishers from Los Angeles, New York, London, and Vancouver, all of which will be made available to take home free of charge. Visitors are also encouraged to bring in their own magazines to trade or donate, creating an exhibition will expand and contract each day as publications are removed the newsstand and others are placed back into circulation.
 
Participating publishers include: Afterall, BOMB, Cabinet, Concord, East of Borneo, Esopus, Fillip, Insert Blanc Press, Los Angeles Review of Books, Material, Native Strategies, Night Papers, Paper Monument, Pep Talk, Public Fiction, Triple Canopy, X-TRA, and more.
 
The event will culminate on July 13 with a BBQ + Wikipedia Editathon focused at “unforgetting” Los Angeles artists and unrepresented aspects of the city‘s cultural history. For details, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/LA/EOB. You can also follow/participate on Twitter at #UnforgettingLA / @eastofborneo
 
East of Borneo is an online magazine published by the California Institute of the Arts. The exhibition and related events are curated by Stacey Allan and Gladys-Katherina Hernando, with exhibition design by Lauren Kima Graycar.
 
East of Borneo is an online magazine of contemporary art, and its history, as considered from Los Angeles. Since its launch in October 2010, East of Borneo has been lauded in The Huffington Post as “a new model for online magazines,” celebrated in art & design publications including Artforum.com, Art in America, Flavorpill, KCET’s Artbound, and Design Observer, and nominated “Best Arts & Culture Site” finalist by the readers of the LA Weekly for their 2012 Web Awards.
 
CalArts was ranked America’s number one college for students in the arts by Newsweek/The Daily Beast. With its six related schools: Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music and Theater, CalArts is unique in its multidisciplinary approach to studying the arts and is one of the first schools in the country to offer World Music for performance. CalArts encourages students to recognize and explore the complexity of the aesthetic, social and political aspects of the arts. It is supported by its distinguished faculty of practicing artists and provides its BFA, MFA and DMA students with both the hands-on training and the engagement with the cultural community necessary for artists’ growth. CalArts was founded in 1961—and opened in 1969—as the first institution of higher learning in the U.S. specifically for students interested in pursuing degrees in the visual and performing arts.

Santa Monica, May 2013 – Christopher Grimes Gallery is very pleased present an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Joshua Podoll. In his previous body of work Podoll introduced gestural brushstrokes that expressed honesty through imperfection. With these new paintings Podoll places greater emphasis on drawing – marks are built up layer upon layer from a white ground: blurry airbrush lines, transparent washy brushstrokes and heavy impasto piles all interweave to create a tapestry of mark-making. Within this densely layered space Podoll paints austere floating objects that act as portals and serve to create tension between themselves and the layers of marks. The paintings become energized through the bravado and angularity of brushwork and intensity of color and contrast.
 
Podoll (Seattle, WA, 1972) lives and works in San Francisco. His work has been included in exhibitions at Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2010); You Can Heal Your Life!, curated by Emma Gray at Circus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2010); Without Sun, curated by Carole Ann Klonarides at Christopher Grimes Gallery (2007); Headlands Center for the Arts, Fort Barry, CA (2003); and University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA (2002).
 
The South Gallery will feature new paintings by Carlos Bunga, made as a part of a dialogue with his recent site-specific installation at the gallery. Photographs of this work, Future Anterior, were printed and used as a foundation on which to make the paintings. The paintings act as a more permanent reference to the structure which was by nature ephemeral. The manner in which paint was applied to the exterior of the original installation is maintained in these works, providing continuity and shared formal sensibility.
 
Bunga (Porto, Portugal, 1976) lives and works in Barcelona. After studying Fine Arts at the Escola Superior de Arte e Design in Caldas da Rainha in Portugal, Bunga first attracted international attention with his work at the contemporary art biennial Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain (2004). Since then, has had solo shows of his work at Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2011); Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL (2009); and Museo de Arte Contemporanéa de Vigo, Spain (2009). His work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal; and Museo d'art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain.

drkrm is pleased to announce Common Ground: New American Street Photography. and will feature the work of 5 contemporary American photographers that are changing the nature of street photography and giving us yet another way to view the world.
 
The exhibition will be on view from July 6 through July 27, 2013 with an opening reception on Saturday, July 6th from 7-10pm. Regular hours are Wednesday through Saturday 12-6 pm, Sundays 12-4 pm and by appointment.
 
Common Ground: New American Street Photography, is curated by Stephen McLaren, who recently co-wrote Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson, 2010); The exhibition will feature photography by highly-accomplished American street photographers Jack Simon, Bryan Formahls, Chuck Patch, Blake Andrews and Richard Bram. Each of these photographers is currently working at a highly-creative level in cities as diverse as San Francisco, New York, Eugene, Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans. The impressive bodies of work they are accumulating shows that street photography, as an energetic and highly- adaptable, photographic genre, remains an integral force in American photographic culture.
 
Street Photography‘s “common ground” is the century-old tradition of using one’s natural inquisitiveness and camera skills to show us new facets of life and reveal poetry within the world around us. Each of the featured photographers eschew models, props and exotic locations and instead rely on their speed of thought and their ability to arrange fragments of time and space into beguiling images. The images featured in the exhibition demonstrate a wide range of styles and camera formats, but it is each photographer‘s highly-individual way of seeing the world and recording it which exemplifies how creative street photography can be when pursued by dedicated photographers.
 
Bryan Formhals
Although a native of Minnesota, Bryan’s work in the exhibition is from his Los Angeles project, Genesse Street where he lived until a couple of years ago. He founded the influential photography blog LPV (La Pura Vida) which showcases new and exciting documentary photography from around the world. Bryan is a regular writer on issues relating to the direction of photography and new media and is linchpin in the American street photography world. He has recently turned to medium- form film for his photography and his new work can be seen at bryanformhalsphotography.com
 
Richard Bram
Has been a photographer since the early 1980s when he lived in Louisville, Kentucky and worked in public relations and portraiture. In later years he moved to London, England, and then New York City where he shoots almost every day on the streets with his beloved Leica rangefinders. He is a member of the In-Public street photography collective and regularly teaches street photography workshops around the world. Although all his work shown in this exhibition is in color, Richard is widely-known for his black and white street photography more of which can be seen at www.richardbram.com
 
Chuck Patch
Has been shooting on the street since the early 1970s in Madison, Wisconsin. He has a large and very impressive archive of black and white imagery from the 70s and 80s but like many photographers he has moved on to color in recent years. He has shot extensively in New Orleans where he worked in a museum for many years and in recent years has re-discovered photography and become a major figure in flick‘s burgeoning street photography scene. He now lives and photographs in Baltimore, Maryland. More of Chuck’s photography can be found at flickr.com/photos/chuckp
 
Jack Simon
Lives in Palo Alto, San Francisco, but much of his street photography takes place in San Francisco. He has won several street photograph competitions including the 2011 Street Photography Now award which was tied to the book of the same name. Jack was a psychiatrist by profession and the images in this exhibition show his keen interest in human nature. His fashion photography blog with his daughter, Your Style Nation, is a recent departure into more controlled photography but his improvised and witty street work can be found at jacksimonphotography.com
 
Blake Andrews
Lives and works in the Pacific North East and shoots mainly in Eugene and Portland, Oregon. Blake is largely committed to black and white analog photography and he develops and prints his own work . In 2007 he founded the blog B, which has quickly become one of the internet's premier destination for witty and preceptive thoughts on street photography, and photography in general. He is a member of the international street photography collective, In-Public, and a portfolio of his street work can be seen on their website, In-Public.com

Color and Line, Christo Brock
 
Using his camera as a means of communication, artist Christo Brock’s compositions emerge from detailed observations of often ordinary objects. “I embrace color as a gateway to feeling and intuitive perception,” says Brock. After capturing the images, Brock digitally processes his photographs before printing them on metallic surfaces - further enhancing the intense color and luminosity within his work to physically reflect light. “Often through the processing of these images - images freed from their original, earthbound origins - new pictures are born,” says Brock. Numerous compositions focus on the intersection of man and nature, and how the two environments both collide and interact with the other. Whether through a building’s reflection or the rough texture of a painted tree root, Brock’s images consistently remind the viewer of this insightful interplay between these two worlds.
 
Pushing Color, Alison Lowe Platt
 
In her current exhibition, artist Alison Lowe Platt focuses on the psychology of color and its emotive properties. Working in the spirit of the post-impressionists, Platt’s high contrast palette brings forth vivid abstractions of natural forms. “When I’m working directly from life, I not only paint what I see, but hope to describe the essence and feeling of that life force,” says Platt. Stepping away from conventional Plein-Air painting techniques, Platt’s organic brushwork brings forth boldly illuminated forests and seascapes that balance high chroma intensity with muted tones to create atmospheric landscapes. Dramatic exaggerations of jagged rocks and shadowed forest floors are further enhanced by Platt’s evocative use of highlights to communicate her own adoration of the natural environment.
 
Rhinos, Anne Ramis
 
Diverging from her previous body of work exploring digital painting techniques, artist Anne Ramis’ current exhibition experiments with a broad spectrum of media. Painting, sculpture, mixed media and assemblage comprise her current show, which pays homage to the on-going rhino poaching crisis in Africa. Even while working with a specific subject, Ramis takes a spontaneous approach to her artwork. “I actually don’t have an end image in mind. I trust that I can get to a point where I’m satisfied,” says Ramis. In the spirit of her current work, Ramis will dedicate eighty percent of her show proceeds to supporting Save the Rhino International.