Traumatic Materiality: Painting Inelegance
March 11, 2012
Traumatic Materiality: Painting Inelegance brings together a diverse group of Los Angeles-based painters in order to examine and question the role that the extreme usage of material plays within contemporary painting. This exhibition draws together eight painters working with extremely different aesthetics, who nonetheless exhibit solidarity as they all counsel/consol a “traumatic” material. While the included artists certainly may not identify directly with the terms “Trauma” and/or “(In)elegance” in efforts to describe their own works or practice, the paintings included within Traumatic Materiality insist on a specific aesthetic identity by way of an over-identification with its own materiality, resulting in exaggerated spills, swaths, globs, heaps, patches, dollops, etc. within the context of painterly composition and arrangement. In addition, the material behavior of paint is also prone to simultaneously become other – textured threads, confectionaries, patterning, still life, figurative, and even narrative in appearance. The trauma or fracture is evidenced precisely here as materiality splinters, unwilling to coalesce around a specific behavior. As paint refuses to identify as a complete and simple material, never fully settling into representational effects or metaphor, these painterly practices oscillate between stratagem and devout transparency, culminating in a type of agnostic abstraction. It may also be possible to describe this emphasis placed on materiality as an (in)elegance: through the flaunting of oil and/or acrylic, all of these painters indulge in deceptively clumsy material handling, while at the same time demonstrating continuity with an elegant refinement and ingenuity in the ways in which painterly forms are pushed, coerced, and developed. These eight painters are simultaneously inelegant and yet exist within a trajectory of innovation that exceeds elegance, culminating in a certain perfect and refined awkwardness.
In spite of the above, or perhaps even because of it, evident within Traumatic Materiality is a sincere devotion to painting and to paint, specifically. This is most apparent in these artists’ use of paint to highlight the impossibilities within its own practice. Each painter may be seen as taking the subject of “painting” as their program, as they simultaneously bracket and frustrate its capabilities, in essence articulating a form of meta-critique. While pinpointing an inherent trauma within paint, these artists also manage to soothe this trauma by cajoling the paint into contemporary expressions of what painting is today — something beyond a literal materiality, and yet without the safety net of a metaphysical program. Many of the artists in this exhibition exercise a hyper-self-reflective/post-medium-specific practice, where common themes such as doubt or irreconcilability become the condition and motivation for legitimate contemporary painterly programs. Ultimately, while paint is used here to highlight a split of trauma, it also serves to suture together multiple realities and/or uses, as all painters are aware of working on the precarious edifice that is painting’s metaphysical ruins.
Artists Included: Nick Aguayo, Jonathan Apgar, Steven Hampton, Cole James, Quinton McCurine, Caitlin Slegr, Ian Trout, Tessie Whitmore
MANIPULATED MEDIA/TION: Quinton McCurine
March 10, 2012
The Foundation for Arts Resources (FAR) is pleased to present Manipulated Media/tion, an exhibition of recent works by Los Angeles-based artist Quinton McCurine. The opening reception will be Saturday, March 17, 2012 from 7-10pm at Autonomie Gallery.
Frustrated by the limitations of painting, McCurine recently abandoned the canvas, and began creating sculptural objects out of oil paint, thus making oil both the object and subject of his work. By challenging the two-dimensional nature of the medium, his work questions its traditional use to create representational imagery and exploits its lesser appreciated qualities: its structure, weight, skin and adhesive properties.
By displaying his objects on plinths, McCurine also plays with the language and conventions of sculpture. Elevating his objects onto plinths suggests their monumentality and preciousness, while simultaneously providing a more intimate viewing experience. Situating the objects within the space of the gallery not only allows them to be properly viewed in the round, but also necessitates the audience’s engagement and challenges their relationship to the medium, object and method of display.
McCurine’s sculptures take a variety of forms, from chaotic abstract mounds of paint to recognizable kitsch objects like a hamburger, a fish or a slice of cake. The surfaces of the objects contain traces of gestures which hint at the process of their creation. Regardless of their external skin, the excessive quantities of oil paint in the hidden heterogeneous interiors remain wet and malleable, thereby maintaining their ability to become something else. Due to the entropic nature of the medium, the objects are never completed and instead are trapped in a continual state of becoming and decay.
Quinton McCurine earned his BFA from Notre Dame de Namur University in 2008, where he received the Vincent Van Gogh Award. He continued his studies at Art Center College of Design, where he earned his MFA in 2011. Recently, his work has been shown at UCLA in the group show Circulation, Exchange: Nugget and Gravy. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Pacific Non-Standard Time: Foundation for Art Resources 1977-Present
February 15, 2012
Featuring work by:
The Friendly Falcons
Performances:
Helga Fassonaki
Maya Gurantz
Fatima Hoang & Janice Gomez
Anna Oxygen
The Foundation for Art Resources presents a variation on the ongoing PST events in Los Angeles with a PNST (Pacific Non-Standard Time) contribution. This exhibition aims to celebrate the history of art production supported by FAR from 1977 to the present. FAR’s functions include supporting non-institutional venues, public education and artist-based projects. To this point, we may consider the critical interventions developed by FAR to be a genealogy that is woven within and around the more established trajectories of the Los Angeles fine art world, always injecting a heavy dose of doubt, humor, and/or innovation into artistic practice. With an emphasis on the growth of new art and ideas, as well as the development of an increasingly more diverse community of producers, FAR has been a crucial supplement to much of Los Angeles’s more established canon. As FAR has been a non-white cube, genre-bending/inventing organization since its inception, this Pacific Non-Standard Time event is a welcome response to PST’s sanitized survey format.
While this exhibition presents a thematic highlighting of some of FAR’s key moments, the majority of the selections complement FAR’s extensive involvement with music by creating a backdrop focused around sound and/or musically-driven performance, including, but not limited to, documented events of Glen Branca, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Sonic Youth, and the Swans. With the above in mind, FAR’s PNST event seeks to extend and support the trajectory of these historical instances through an evening of performances that could easily be described as de-standardized art practices.
Morgan Thomas, a founding member of FAR, described the early activities of the organization and its rampant experimentation as being in search of “an appropriate production model.” While FAR has been through a myriad of configurations since the 70s, the artists included in this exhibition exemplify this drive through a consistent re-tooling of standard practices that is anything but. This evening of performances brings together a dynamic group of artists with a similar interest in expanding the role(s) and/or perceived function of the artist as well as the exhibition space. Such a model of production poses questions about how we think about the concept of performativity in the early twenty-first century. Performance and/or theatricality have become increasingly porous as the “artist” becomes a nexus point defined by the roles of musician, composer, videographer and performer. Be it the transformation of the artist into larger than life “rock stars,” or the mutation of the traditional gallery into a makeshift club, it seems as if all of the issues surrounding performance have taken on the trappings of hyper self-reflexivity. We might even read this drive towards heightened (self-)awareness as a necessary model of production in our contemporary spectacle-driven culture because it challenges of what the condition of performance can be.
Bios:
Floating between worlds of experimental sound and visual art, Helga Fassonaki approaches each of these worlds with insights gained from the other. Her practice, including her music-performance projects, Metal Rouge and Yek koo, are informed by New York No Wave musicians and their defying of categorization, audience, and convention; the poetic, political and physical chants of Patti Smith; and the raw and damaged sounds of New Zealand’s free noise music of the Le Jazz Non era for stretching the parameters of improvised music. Informed by such artists and their integration of art and music, she has created sound and art installations, group situations, films, and performances that utilize and question temporality, power structures, subcultures, fan cultures, and the human voice as a crucible for positive transformation.
Fassonaki’s work has been exhibited at UCLA’s New Wright Gallery, Elysian Park Museum of Art, and LACE galleries (Los Angeles), Blue Oyster Gallery (Dunedin, NZ), Elam School of Fine Art (Auckland, NZ), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), and California College of the Arts (San Francisco), among others. She has performed in Open Melody Festival at UC Irvine (CA), Ear&Eye Festival (Auckland, NZ) alongside legendary sound artists Akio Suzuki and Phil Dadson, On Land Festival (San Francisco), Human Resources (LA), Public Fiction (LA), and a multitude of other galleries and venues throughout the country. She is also the cofounder of a record label called Emerald Cocoon, which focuses on experimental, psychedelic, and avant-garde music.
helgafassonaki.net
Maya Gurantz works with social issues by working in video, performance, theater, installation and community-generated projects. Gurantz’s work uses rigorously physical and playful theatricality to expose the dark histories and painful contradictions embedded in performances of power.
Fatima Hoang works in an array of mediums ranging from metals, electronics, soft-goods and video, Hoang’s work investigates a constant revision of his childhood by bringing the fantastic to life with his fabricated toys in an over the top quality which casts them to remain in a dreamlike state. Hoang also explores his adult aspirations to become a ‘rock star.’ Through the licks of his air guitar, he strives to simultaneously find and provide a shared joy with his audience. In addition to taking fun seriously, the notion of ‘sheer will’ is deeply rooted in Hoang’s work–a concept influenced by his parents’ story of immigration from postwar Vietnam to the United States.
Hoang’s work has been shown nationally including Connor Contemporary Art (Washington DC), The Milwaukee Art Museum, Artists Space (New York), and throughout Southern California.
Janice Gomez‘s work, conceptually driven, explores accessibility and self-awareness both in physical and mental space; sometimes manifesting in labyrinth installations that meander through constructed paths, ultimately revealing a niche for reflection and collective interaction. In exploring performance, Gomez has held intimate recitals for an audience of one, occasionally blurring the line between audience and performer in addition to engaging spectators in her air guitar exhibitions. As the theme of self-awareness takes shape across many forms, one is often reminded of what the human body can endure.
She is also a co-founder of Summercamp’s ProjectProject, an artist run space hosting exhibitions, events, lectures and workshops in Los Angeles.
janicegomez.com
The Friendly Falcons is a collaborative duo that creates multi-layered narratives using sculpture, video, music and performance. Our work explores the tension between the fundamental rhythms of life and the ordered systems that humans design to make sense of these rhythms. Our subject matter expresses an existential desire to relate to our surroundings and to one another.
We have been collaborating since 2006 and much of our practice is derived from working together to synthesize our individual visions into one finished product. This give and take relationship is often reflected in the narratives of our projects and our performative roles. We use ourselves as actors, stand-ins, and narrators of the story we are describing.
Through a low tech and handmade aesthetic, we privilege an intimate physicality rather than a detached slickness; this is our way of being inventive without special effects. We tell stories of fantastic realism that promote imagination and creativity. In lieu of society’s increasingly technologically mediated lives, we aim to reinvigorate one’s experience of the everyday with a sense of human intimacy.
Jeffrey Kurosaki and Tara Pelletier met in graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, and have been collaborating as The Friendly Falcons since 2006. They have exhibited and performed internationally, including a self-organized European and Scandic tour in 2010. They were recipients of the Toby Devon Lewis Award and were artists-in-residence on Governors Island, NY through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. They recently had a solo exhibition at Wave Hill Gardens, Bronx, NY and were named Smack Mellon Hot Picks in 2011. They will attend Sculpture Space in Utica, NY this summer.
friendlyfalcons.com
Anna Huffis a multi-media artist, composer and performer. She has extensively toured Europe and the United States under the name Anna Oxygen, performing dance pop recitals and interactive performance pieces. Best known for her aerobics live performances, she has released several albums of electronic and acoustic music, most recently “This is an Exercise” on Kill Rock Stars. She has toured nationally and internationally with her solo work and is a founding member of Performance group Cloud Eye Control. She has performed at PS1 MOMA, The Seattle Art Museum, EXIT Festival in PARIS, the REDCAT in LA, the HAMMER and the Design Museum in Gothenburg Sweden among many others. She often infuses quirky and fantastical narrative into her performances and in her free time likes to make psychedelic aerobics videos and rudimentary cartoon drawings.
annaoxygen.com
Christy Roberts guest blogs for #OccupyArt21: “Occupy a Living Wage”
January 12, 2012
FAR featured-artist Christy Roberts has been chosen as a guest blogger for #OccupyArt21! You can read her blog post here: blog.art21.org/2012/01/11/occupy-a-living-wage/