October 3 – October 31, 2009

OPENING October 3, 2009, 7 – 10pm

The Peninsula

Antoni Wojtyra

Monte Vista is pleased to announce Polish/Canadian artist Antoni Wojtyra's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. 

Wojtyra’s work is elusive, defiant, and humorous. Operating at times like an itinerant worker, Wojtyra moves fluidly from subject to subject, with a varied practice emphasizing conciseness and utility. Wojtyra uses books, discussions, photographs, line drawings, paintings, text, etc. to unhinge conventions and stereotypes—creating spaces for the reimagination of alternatives. 

Wojtyra’s exhibition at Monte Vista promises to surprise yet again as he proposes that art conform to an ecologically-sound, sustainable ecosystem. While material culture strives towards a clean, green, and biodegradable ideal, art continues towards an art that is timeless, classic, reverent, and archival. For this exhibition, Wojtyra was inspired by a migrant strategy of condensing material wealth into diamonds, sewn into the hemlines of clothes, smuggled across borders, only to be sold and converted back into a new life, and possessions, in a new settlement. Using this pragmatic, light, and supremely wise "immigrant logic," Wojtyra reimagines the gallery space as a peninsula, commingling and testing Art's effect and power in relation to *terra firma*, the street.