Caitlin Mullally - Arrangement Against Content

Opening reception is on December 11th from 6-8 pm. 
This exhibition runs from December 11th to December 18th.

Monte Vista Projects presents Arrangement Against Content by Caitlin Mullally. Arrangement Against Content is a sculptural sound installation that addresses domestic beauty and its relationship with conceptual art. Caitlin Mullally has been researching the art of arrangement in relation to sound, china and floral combinations, exploring the tropes of comfort and safety of the “feminine” as a quality of these formats as the containers of meaning. The artist is interested in the atmospheres and feelings created by domestic spaces, as well as regarding them as poetic experiences, and how we consciously and unconsciously construct notions of comfort. The piece discusses the presumed absence of content or aesthetic value of those environments, questioning the lack of need for interpretation in domestic spaces. The installation is inspired by the atmospherics of paintings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Caitlin Mullally is a sound artist who specializes in collaborative installation work. Her work revolves around collaged ideas. She has previously shown her work at C.A.V.E. Gallery (2016), California Institute of the Arts (2016),  Tiger Strikes Asteroid, (2016), Ranney (2015) and the American Red Cross in Tinton Falls New Jersey (2014). She was raised in New Jersey and lived in the United Kingdom. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California and is earning her BFA at California Institute of the Arts.

2016 Holiday Raffle

Season's Greetings!!!

Monte Vista Projects would like you to participate in our annual Holiday Raffle event on December 10th from 4 - 6 pm. If you would like to participate this year, you can drop off artwork at Monte Vista Projects on:

Tuesday, December 6th, 6-9pm

Wednesday, December 7th, 6-9pm

Thursday, December 8th, 6-9pm

Friday, December 9th, 6-9pm

Please have work ready to hang.

All of the proceeds go towards maintaining Monte Vista Projects, including preparing for future exhibitions by Zac Bucek, Kelly Loudenberg, Bessie Kunath and Nick Loewen and many more.

Music and food will be provided during the raffle. Please feel free to spread the word and invite other artists, friends, or family to the event. Raffle tickets will be $10 per ticket.

We are very appreciative for the ongoing support we have had over the last nine years and we hope to continue providing a space for underrepresented artists.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, and we hope to see you soon!!!!

Steven Putz - The Hanging Garden

The Hanging Garden by Steven Putz

Oct. 30th to Nov 20th, 2016.
 
Steven Putz’s most recent work,(The Hanging Garden) an installation using props, sculpture, and set design techniques,  pays homage to the notorious Aokigahara Forest in Japan(also known as The Suicide Forest) . The artist discovered The Suicide Forest during a recent exhibition where he displayed works that addressed the issue of suicide in Japanese culture. The forest was used as part of a practice called Ubasute during the famines in the Edo period (1603-­‐1868). In which, family members would abandon their ill and elderly there in an effort to better ration dwindling food supplies. A majority would have certainly perished due to exposure, inadvertently making Aokigahara Forest Japans most haunted location. 
More recently (1950-­‐present) the forest has become Japans number one suicide location.  Presently the authorities no longer post the number of suicides occurring within the forest in an effort to avoid attracting negative publicity and romanticizing the deaths. However, the popularity of this location continues to increase in the media; Vice Documentaries, New York Times, Japan Times and numerous online sources have all reported on The Aokigahara Forest. And by the time Steven’s installation is presented, MTV will have released The Forest, a film using Aokigahara as a backdrop. Furthermore, several well received books have been published regarding the forest.     

Steven Putz’s Hanging Garden balances between a sense of mystical horror and historical fact, between knowing what is present and what is the past. His installation invites viewers to step beyond what they might recognize as their own mortality.
 
 
Steven Putz received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has exhibited in group shows like I Heart Japan, Duke Gallery, Azusa , CA,. and Ghost Show VI, Borderline Gallery, Milwaukee, WI. He has received international awards for his printmaking.  Steven has completed one novel and coauthored a novella, both unpublished. Though rarely exhibiting throughout his career, his works appear in private collections and have been purchased by such institutions as The Haggerty Museum. Steven resides in Los Angeles where his studio practice continues. 

The No Show Museum

The No Show Museum – Nothing Is Impossible
 This one day event will take place from 6-8 pm along with a curatorial talk at 7pm.
 
"A breathtaking journey to the most remote regions of thinking“
 
Following the success of last year‘s European tour with around 30 exhibitions in 20 countries and a closing show at the 56. Biennale di Venezia, the NO SHOW MUSEUM is on tour across America
from August to October 2016, including pop-up exhibitions in art venues and galleries.
 
In Los Angeles, the No Show Museum is hosted by Monte Vista Projects. At the opening on the October 30 at 7 pm, Andreas Heusser, Curator of No Show Museum, will guide through the exhibition and give an illuminating introduction (lecture performance) to the art of nothing.

The NO SHOW MUSEUM is the world’s first museum devoted to nothing and its various manifestations throughout the history of art. Its collection includes works and documents from over 120 renowned international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, among them, Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Maurizio Cattelan, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Haacke, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Gianni Motti, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Santiago
Sierra, Andy Warhol and Rémy Zaugg.
 
The NO SHOW MUSEUM has a mobile presentation space in a converted postal car. It currently hosts a special exhibition entitled „Nothing is impossible“ with a selection of impossible artworks by 22 international artists. The mobile museum has been shipped from Europe to America and will be installed in front of Monte Vista Projects.
 
For more information please visit  www.noshowmuseum.com
 
Andreas Heusser is a conceptual artist and curator, born in 1976 in Zurich. He currently lives and works in Zurich and Johannesburg. He is mainly known for large scale projects that bridge the gap between art and activism. He is the director of the OPENAIR LITERATUR FESTIVAL ZÜRICH, an international literary festival which annually takes place for the duration of week in Zurich, since 2011. Between 1999 and 2003 he studied Philosophy, Literature and Psychology at the University of Zurich. From 2011 to 2013 he studied again part time and completed a master's degree in Contemporary Arts Practice (Fine Arts) at the Bern University of the
Arts (HKB).
 

Jenn Berger - Hillary as a Child

 Saturday Oct. 22 from 5-9pm and Sunday Oct 23 from 1-5pm, 
Monte Vista Projects presents:
 
Hillary Clinton As A Child by Jenn Berger
 
Combining half of a child size doll, drawing replacing the doll's front, and video eyes sourced from the Benghazi hearing, Hillary Clinton As A Child speaks to the construction of a larger than life identity over time. The mention of just the name Hillary Clinton brings an immediate response. From where do we form an opinion of our politicians? Based on a childhood photo of Hillary, HCAAC stands as a reminder of Hillary’s history, that she was not always the Hillary Clinton we think we know today.
 
"For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of [herself], as offer [herself] as an image of the audience."
-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death, 1985
 
Jenn Berger is a Los Angeles based artist. She earned an MFA in art from the University of California, Irvine and undergraduate degrees from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. Recent exhibitions and performances include The Quiet After 10 curated by Emily O, Violence, Nudes, and Grandmas at The Situation Room, and Another Cats Show at 356 Mission. She recently completed a teaching artist fellowship at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA.
 

Rochele Gomez - Giacometti In My Head

Rochele Gomez

Giacometti In My Head

Opening Reception is Sunday September 25, 4-7pm
September 25 – October 16, 2016

“Slab!” -Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, 1953)

Maybe more than with most materials, you come to know brick as a barrier but also as something that gets built up, laid, one by one in successive rows of red rectangles and grey mortar. It goes up. Imagine laying slabs of brick in a perfect circle around your body up to your entire height, layer by layer. That might grow to feel dark and claustrophobic. Or even more unlikely, imagine pushing a Giacometti sculpture, the big bronze recognizable tall ones, across a floor. That might feel heavy or injure you.

This hypothetical forming is the closest to what I can describe Rochele Gomez’ new body of works, and it does so in intentional and political terms. Gomez asks, “What kind of living situation does not allow for light?” By way of entrance rather than by barrier, she plays with the image of a brick wall in the form of stained glass. Bricks is made up of eight sections of meticulously assembled red and brown stained glass placed over the existing gallery windows, allowing in only their hot red glow to illuminate the space. This glow bleeds onto the same wall where Gomez has projected a video featuring the re-imagination of Swiss sculptor, Alberto Giacometti’s, most iconic figures. Framed in Flowers is made from cardboard and a single frame shot, where an elongated figure is pushed across a living room floor and is at once recognizable in it’s Giacometti esque form but then slowly becomes more squiggly, more long, more abstracted. Bordering this scene are fiber optic flowers. Normally borders are used as devices for containing, corralling, or refining. Again, Gomez flops this orientation. The flowers, presumably relics of her childhood which you might find on a nightstand, do not contain but instead open up to humor and obscurity.

What are the relationships between Giacometti and a living room floor, between Gomez and Giacometti, between fiber optic flowers and brick? These bodies, these things, bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of languages (as taxonomies, as methods, as systems, as vernaculars, as images, as histories) is part of an activity, or a form of life, which gives language meaning. They force us to think about what we are seeing (something taken for granted even in art) and to celebrate a marriage of ideas and records of experience, which are magical and meaningful in their difference.

-Amanda McGough

Rochele Gomez received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine (2014) and BFA from California State University, Long Beach (2006).  Recent exhibitions include, Caza: Rochele Gomez, Margaret Lee, Alejandra Seeber at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (2016), and A Fireplace and Its Mirror at LAXART (2015).  She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present new work by Rochele Gomez. Organized by Amanda McGough.

Opening Reception is Sunday September 25, 4-7pm
September 25 – October 16, 2016

Manny Krakowski - A Simple Chemistry Experiment Explained as a Monument

Manny Krakowski: A Simple Chemistry Experiment Explained as a Monument

August 20, 2016 – September 11, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 20, 2016, 7-10pm

(Los Angeles) – Monte Vista Projects is excited to announce A Simple Chemistry Experiment Explained as a Monument by Manny Krakowski.  On exhibit will be a sculpture that appears to be a monument, complete with virtual space, and a surveillance system.  

Some things need to be physically diagramed. To describe in a way words cannot.
 

A diagram is a symbolic representation of information according to some visualization technique. Diagrams have been used since ancient times, but became more prevalent during the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism along with increased questioning of religious hegemony.  This period marked a shift of how knowledge was perceived as truth through the use of scientific methodology and objects (experiments) to describe virtuality. This virtuality is a kind of potentiality that becomes fulfilled in the actual. It is still not material, but it is real (according to Delueze).

This exhibition measures how the monument, surveillance, and virtual space affect our experience of place.

Distance                    Between                Here                    and               There.           

Freezlume                 Between                Freezer               and               Volume.

Virtual Space viewing is available @ http://www.dbhat.com/freezlume

Some things need to be physically diagramed. To describe in a way words cannot.

“But if you want to know if a piece of yellow metal in your hand is gold (if it is the referent of the word ‘gold’) you do not consult your dictionary, you pour a certain acid on the chunk of stuff and if it melts it is gold, if not it’s fool’s gold.” Manuel Delanda

Gallery Hours are 12 - 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday or by appointment.

To schedule an appointment, please email at: infomvpmail@gmail.com

Manny Krakowski is obsessed with Minecraft, chemistry, and sports through the lens of desire.  Krakowski received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Art at California State University (2016), Long Beach. Over the past 10 years Krakowski has served as Artist in Residence and staff member at the Pilchuck Glass School, WA. His work has been published in New Glass Review through the Corning Museum of Glass, NY. He has exhibited at Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, University Art Museum, Long Beach, City of Brea Art Gallery, Brea. In addition, he has given lectures and demonstrations nationally and internationally at such institutions as Australian National University, California State University, Fullerton, Ohio State University, and Santa Monica College. Krakowski co-organizes WINNING/LOOSING a project space in Los Angeles. Programing focuses on performance and site-specific exhibitions.

Beatriz Cortez - Los Angeles Vernacular: Space Capsule Interior

July 16 – August 7, 2016

Opening Reception is Saturday July 16, 7-10pm

Los Angeles Vernacular: Space Capsule Interior evokes a multiplicity of temporalities and aesthetics. Among them, it references the Back-to-the-Land-Movement that over different generations flourished in the United States, and had important iterations in the outskirts of Los Angeles, in places like Tujunga. Stone builders such as George Harris settled there in the early twentieth-century, and began building with local materials, including river rock from the Tujunga wash. By taking industrial sheet metal and turning it into rocks, this installation also makes reference to the anti-industrialization philosophy of the early craftsman movement, which made a commitment to unique, hand crafted domestic architecture. Furthermore, it continues a syncretic tradition of construction in Los Angeles that has long served as a metaphor for multicultural coexistence, particularly as builders such as Dan Montelongo, an Apache Mescalero, mastered in the early decades of the twentieth-century the construction of homes that brought together an indigenous way of building with river rock in combination with the craftsman aesthetic. This came to be known as a vernacular style of construction that flourished in local neighborhoods such as Sunland, San Fernando, Tujunga, La Crescenta, and Pasadena. In addition, this installation evokes the hippie communes of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Drop City in Colorado, where structures were built in the form of geodesic domes with diverse materials, including recycled sheet metal, following the patented designs by Buckminster Fuller that were made available to the general public in 1966 through a publication of Popular Science magazine. It is also inspired by the design of the spacecraft Dragon series that Space-X has advertised as manned orbit vehicles for the near future. Los Angeles Vernacular: Space Capsule Interior slides back and forth from a past of local materials to a future of extinction, taking place at once within different versions of modernity, being both obsolete and innovative, a relic of the past, a model for the present, a nostalgic dream for the future.

Beatriz Cortez: is a visual artist and a cultural critic. She was born in El Salvador and migrated to the United States in 1989. She holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate in Latin American literature from Arizona State University. Her work explores simultaneity, the existence in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of immigration, and in exploration of possible futures. She has shown her work nationally in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, and internationally in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. She teaches in the Department of Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Organized by Rebecca Bennett Duke.

Tom Trudgeon - Das Neue Werk

June 11 – July 3, 2016

Interior of Ford Explorer Sport; Aliso Canyon Wire Markers; Mats; Northridge, CA 91325; Fly Fishing; and EDC. A thought in a car.

“Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos, which leaves one free to choose the meaning one wants to give it. But, over and above agricultural considerations, geographical irregularities and the various accidents of history and prehistory, the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. A pale blurred line, or an often almost imperceptible difference in the shape and consistency of rock fragments, are evidence of the fact that two oceans once succeeded each other where, today, I can see nothing but barren soil. As I follow the traces of their age-old stagnation despite all obstacles - sheer cliff faces, landslides, scrub or cultivated land - and disregarding paths and fences, I seem to be proceeding in meaningless fashion. But the sole aim of this contrariness is to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition.”
Claude Levi-Strauss

“There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic.”
Erving Goffman

Greg Curtis - Event October Horizon

 

May 7th - May 29th

“Lens flare” is a phenomena in photography and cinema that occurs when non-image forming light enters and refracts within the glass components of a camera lens before reaching the camera’s film or digital sensor. The visible artifacts typically manifest themselves as starbursts, rings, or geometric shapes in a row across the image. These artifacts are a common obstacle in photography, usually suppressed through the use of coated lenses, hoods, and lighting technologies. However, the use of lens flare as a signifier of the presence of a documenting camera is suffuse within filmic culture today as a tool for lending reality to an otherwise fabricated digital world; in CGI sequences lens flare gives the illusion of a camera filming a scene that was digitally fabricated inside a computer.

Greg Curtis’ exhibition Event October Horizon at Monte Vista Projects is an installation of framed chromogenic prints wherein the mechanics of the camera lens itself are the sole object. With a camera pointed at a black backdrop in the artist’s studio, a light was pointed into various lenses to produce and record isolated lens flares. The resulting images are at once diminutive and expansive: portraits of the camera’s own machinations presented as vast extraterrestrial events. The images are paired with identically sized black monochromatic chromogenic prints that contain no information from the camera, pointing to the spaces between still images that construct cinematic sequences. The installed panorama consists of self-reflexive operations made with the fundamental apparatus of the entertainment industry, isolating and foregrounding what is usually considered at best an aesthetic flourish, and at worst an error on the part of the photographer. 

Greg Curtis’ works in photography, video, and animation have recently been exhibited at the Conley Gallery at CSU Fresno; The Institute of Jamais Vu, London UK; Elephant, Los Angeles CA; Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University; Concord, Los Angeles CA; Weekend, Los Angeles CA; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles CA; Land of Tomorrow, Lexington KY; and Dan Graham, Los Angeles CA, among others. He received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is based in Los Angeles.

Corey Fogel - Theater of Haecceity

Opening reception: Sat 4/2/2016 from 6pm - 9pm
Exhibition runs until 4/24/16

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Corey Fogel: Theater of Haecceity, an ambient room for contemplated and performed gestures. 

An experimental composer, percussionist, artist, and collaborator across disciplines, Corey Fogel creates work drawing on strategies of improvisation, chance, and community. He uses site-specificity and performative action to conflate the senses with the sublime, collapsing aural, haptic, and synesthetic experiences, often to absurdist ends. 

Theater of Haecceity uses the gallery as an atmospheric playground for combining sound experiments and art-object scrutiny, a personal instantiation of the artist’s headspace, of what happens when he is there and an audience is not. Distorting traditional, fixed conditions for both theater and gallery, the exhibition will build on aleatory parameters interposed over time. To facilitate the otherwise disparate modes of 'concert' and 'exhibition', a provisional fabric sculpture lines the entirety of the room – a formal complication to the minimal white cube, functioning simultaneously as a monochromatic environment, a curtain, and a lens. 

Like an origami fortune teller at monument-scale, an angular swath of garish pink fabric defines a square antiprism center stage for kinetic sculptural improvisations, and four corner chambers concealing live musicians or playback speakers, contingent upon the daily program. New compositions for four performers will be recorded and broadcast quadraphonically, accumulating into a collage over the show’s duration, shattered and shuffled algorithmically. The resulting thisness will be a record of inspired actions and unlikely marriages between materialities seen, heard, and felt. 

[Haecceity is a non-qualitative property responsible for individuation and identity. It is the essence of a thing by virtue of which it is unique or describable as “this (one).”  It is a non-recurrent thisness, discernibly different from a universal or repeatable whatness or a suchness. A haecceity is identical with itself. ]

Corey Fogel (b. 1977) holds his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and his BFA from Arizona State University. He has presented his work with LACMA, The Hammer Museum, Redling Fine Art, Human Resources, the wulf, and Machine Project, amongst others. In 2014, Fogel was awarded The California Community Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts. He frequently performs and records music nationally and abroad. 

Organized by Amy Thoner.

Tran Truong - New Paintings

Opening reception is on Sat 2/27/2016 from 6pm - 9pm. Exhibition runs until 3/20/16.

      Monte Vista Pojects is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles artist Tran Truong. Truong's recent paintings depict spatial relationships between everyday objects and urban situations, rigorously abstracted into a hyperflat two-dimensional space. Telescoping groups of red, yellow, and green circles on a black background evoke a barren city street at night. A vertical band of color terminating in a large triangle carries the winkingly literal title “Umbrella”. In another work, a vertical stripe on the canvas's surface looks like nothing so much as an orthographic projection of a road making its way up a steep hill. Much color field painting (as epitomized, for example, by the work of Ellsworth Kelly) has traditionally drawn its vocabulary of shape from nature, while obscuring that very act of sourcing through radical formal simplification. In contrast, Truong's motif's identities are almost comically explicit, placing her canvases in a curious zone of overlap between illusionism and literalism. Their heraldic simplicity owes an uncertain debt to their originating inspirations, which they overwrite without precisely representing. These paintings adapt the historical language of “autonomous” art, but make no claim to autonomy. Deprived of the contextual markers that traditionally anchor pictorial depiction, Truong's spare geometries float adrift in the viewer's mind, tossed by waves of association, only distantly moored to their literal subjects.

        Truong's work has been shown in group exhibitions throughout Los Angeles and the bay area. She is currently a 2016 MFA candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. This will be her first solo exhibition.

Jake Longstreth & Andy Woll - Pairs

JAKE LONGSTRETH & ANDY WOLL
Pairs
January 10- February 7, 2016
opening: Sunday, January 10, 3-6 PM

Monte Vista Projects presents a two person show entitled Pairs.  Jake Longstreth and Andy Woll both create Southern California-inspired landscape paintings representationally free from human existence.  With both artists adopting a vertical format, (an unusual strategy for landscape painting), while exploring nearly-identical subject matter, we are allowed to participate in a compare-and-contrast of the two artists strategies.  Longstreth's muted palette and compressed tonal range evoke a harsh and intense luminosity -- there is an understated realism at work here that slowly reveals the inherently abstract nature of its construction upon closer inspection.  Andy Woll's landscapes work in an opposite manner.  Brash and confident, his flurry of brushstrokes and saturated palette read first as highly abstract, in a classic sense, and then are quick to reveal a sophisticated rendering of space and topography. 

Pairs will allow us to look at the artists work together.  There is a push-and-pull between the structural similarities in the two artist's work with how radically different the works end up looking and feeling from one another.  Jake Longstreth depicts desolate, hot, dusty places that are concocted in the studio and based on a lifetime of sense memory.  The work is simultaneously lush and brittle.  Andy Woll has chosen Mount Wilson as his Haystacks as it were, to interrogate again and again, the endless possibilities of paint and hand depicting a single place.  In Pairs, we examine artists working in similar modes towards a divergent end.  Neither artist uses photographs as references in their pursuit -- these are studio paintings invented spontaneously -- Longstreth's naturalism depicts no place in particular while Woll's relative painterly abandon is always in service of depicting a specific, real peak.

Holiday Raffle 2015

Season's Greetings!!!

Monte Vista Projects would like you to participate in our annual Holiday Raffle event on December 13th from 4 - 6 pm. If you would like to participate this year, you can drop off artwork at Monte Vista Projects on:

Thursday Dec 10th and Friday Dec 11th from 6 – 9 pm
Sat Dec 12th from 10 am – 2 pm

Please have work ready to hang.

All of the proceeds go towards maintaining Monte Vista Projects, including preparing for future exhibitions by Beatriz Cortez, Corey Fogel, Jake Longstreth, and many more.

Music and food will be provided during the raffle. Please feel free to spread the word and invite other artists, friends, or family to the event. Raffle tickets will be $10 per ticket.

We are very appreciative for the ongoing support we have had over the last eight years and we hope to continue providing a space for underrepresented artists.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, and we hope to see you soon!!!!

Highland Park Museum of Ceramic Art (HPMCA)

Organized by Tyler Waxman

Opening Reception
November 15th, 4-7PM
November 15th-December 6th

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present the Highland Park Museum of Ceramic Art. Inspired by shows such as the Los Angeles Museum of Ceramic Art at ACME and Dirt on Delight at ICA, the HPMCA aims to celebrate the current excitement and resurgence of artists working with ceramics. Clay, being one of the oldest known expressive and utilitarian materials, is no longer restricted by a narrow definition of craft or purpose. The exhibition is a survey of contemporary ceramics being made in Los Angeles today.

Ranging from veteran artists and professors, to mid-career professionals, through younger artists just completing or in their graduate studies, the HPMCA features a diverse and eclectic roster of artists. 

Participating artists include:Peter Callas, Joe Goode, Phyllis Green, Julia Haft-Candell, Roger Herman, Anabel Juarez, Shoshi Kanokohata, Chris Miller, Brittany Mojo, Kristen Morgin, Thomas Muller, Jackie Rines, Brian Rochefort, Emily Sudd, Christian Tedeschi, and Tyler Waxman.

Heather Brown - Bedfellows

Heather Brown
Bedfellows
October 10th – November 1st, 2015
Opening reception on Oct. 10th from 7-10 pm

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Heather Brown's solo exhibition, Bedfellows. This will be the first public exhibition to show the artist's abstract oil paintings and figurative drawings together. In Brown's pen and ink drawings, figure drawing runs free and wild. Contour becomes form as lines shift from the description of an edge to the internal delineation of a shape. Schematic figures caress, climb, crawl, and strut and across the picture plane. Overlapping bodies ambiguously depict either sexual entwining, a collision of personalities, or a divided subject’s various selves. Brown’s distinctive approach to line has distant precedent in the improvisations of Surrealist practice, the early fashion drawings of Andy Warhol, and the wobbly satires of Saul Steinberg, but her tangled, loopy vision is entirely her own. Brown’s oil on canvas paintings in the exhibition conjure muddy labyrinths of portals, threshholds, and blocked passageways. The compositions and paint application draw from the language of modernism, but instead of a purity of form, the viewer is offered a hardscrabble accumulation of brush stokes seen through a thicket of rubbings, scrapings, and reversals. Brown’s mazes of undo and redo perform an anarchical reckoning with the legacy of heroic geometric abstraction. Taken together, these two formally distinct threads of Brown’s practice enter a complex dialog, informing each other and also informing on each other.

Heather Brownʼs solo exhibitions include Ruins; Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles, Thank You For Your Childhood; Parker Jones, Los Angeles, Drawings; Parker Jones, Los Angeles, and Heather Brown: New Paintings; Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles. Her work has been seen in group exhibitions at several other Los Angeles venues including Weekend, Five Thirty Three, Black Dragon Society, Honor Fraser Gallery, and Angles Gallery. She received an MFA from UCLA and a BA from UCSB. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Check out her review: 

 http://contemporaryartreview.la/heather-brownat-monte-vista-projects/

Michael Bizon - Scenes from Home

Michael Bizon
Scenes from Home

September 5th - September 27th, 2015

Opening September 5th, 7-9 PM

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Scenes from Home, an exhibition of new work by Michael Bizon.  Scenes from Home consists of three separate installations located across three different venues in Highland Park: The Living Room at Monte Vista Projects, The Bathroom at the Mullin Gallery of Occidental College, and The Bedroom at the artist’s studio on Avenue 61 and Figueroa.  Starting at Monte Vista Projects, visitors will be given a map leading to the other locations.

Drawing upon tropes and memories associated with specific rooms of a house, Bizon uses found object, sound and movement to question the functionality of private space and investigate notions of the sublime and uncanny within a personal home.  In Home Stereo, Bizon has constructed a Tower of Babel out of speakers, altered electronics and stereo equipment. This not only provides sonic atmosphere when entering the room, but also examines the power of physical presence in a micro miniature world.   While the work throughout the three spaces is primarily object-based in nature, the interaction amongst constructed keepsakes and a twisted feng shui ask the viewer to construct a story based in personal memory.

Michael Bizon is an artist based in Los Angeles whose practice includes sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, instrument making, and video.  He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.  His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Miami, Tokyo, and most recently at the VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow, Ireland.

Reza Monahan - Grimm's Aged Pill

REZA MONAHAN
Grimm's Aged Pill
August 1 - August 23, 2015
opening: Saturday, August 1, 7-10 PM

Stemming from a recent photo and video pilgrimage to Manhattan and Brooklyn, Grimm's Aged Pill is a multimedia installation wagering that elements of a peculiar cinematic narrative, pulled apart in different media, can energize a space with psychic planes outside the X-Y axes of classical cinema. This installation illustrates a space defined by water-jet-cut and laser-etched marble, text, and light sculptures. These works bask in a large-scale, film-loop glow of still photographs emerging from frenetic moving images, all while the disparate visual elements steep in an encompassing cauldron of machinic and electric audio.
 
Brushing against the tradition of “expanded cinema,” Grimm’s Aged Pill addresses the post–mass audience age but does so not to subvert fiction and drama but to further embrace them as a psychic textile to web narrative into the multidimensional grid of an experiential volume.
 
Reza Monahan is a Los Angeles based multimedia artist. His work varies in realization and can emerge as an intimate, small-gauge, three-channel installation tucked into the corner, a wailing audio flood overwhelming a massive, old wind tunnel, or a black-and-white film about the citizens of L.A. becoming a mournful, disembodied community of consciousness. Since studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and Art Center College of Design, Monahan’s work has underscored the curvilinear, oblique, volumetric, active, and temporal qualities of mediums in high-contrast heat for one another. He does so to achieve “meta-kinesthetics,” placing himself within traditions of the Haptic, a philosophical state of being 20th-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty equates to “felt phenomenology.” His work has exhibited internationally, having screened or been installed at the Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; Echo Park Film Center and LACE, Los Angeles, CA; The LAB, San Francisco, CA; Kunsthaus Dresden, Germany; and OR Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

Jason Kunke - A Good Wall

June 27- July 19, 2015 

"Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects." 
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present A Good Wall, an exhibition of new work by Jason Kunke. A Good Wall consists of two related bodies of work, each considering how objects both submit to and resist our perception of them. Materiality is stressed and subverted in both bodies of work as a method to examine the gap between perception and the world itself, touching on issues of aesthetics and authority.
Grace Hartigan and Signature Strike are mimetic sculptures of neon signs, designed with the assistance of both neon sign and steel fabricators. Unlike real neon signs they do not emit light, but are finished in matte black to absorb as much light as possible, inverting the generous light of regular neon signs; instead of giving, the fake neon signs refuse. This refusal is emphasized in the words the fake signs display. “A Surface That Resists”, is artist Grace Hartigan’s description of the AbEx notion of the subjective mastery of the world achieved through epic, transcendental objects. “Signature Strike” is a term from the vocabulary of drone warfare, describing a method of killing targets based on certain general characteristics rather than an actual identity. Considering how Abstract Expressionism was promoted during the Cold War by the U.S. government as a testament to American cultural freedom, these sculptures connect Abstract Expressionism and drone warfare, examining their shared strategy of generating and using objects to exert and disseminate power. 

Also included are paintings of Martian landscapes using a new type of paint. The artist himself makes this paint by grinding minerals containing quantum spin liquid into powders, which are then dispersed into binders. Quantum spin liquid is a state of matter that, though predicted by theoretical physicists in 1973, was only experimentally confirmed to exist in 2012. It occurs naturally in a handful of mineral crystals, including jarosite, atacamite, and cobalt aluminate. The rarity and difficulty of these paints results in a limited palette and constrained aesthetics. In 2004, a NASA robotic rover discovered jarosite on Mars, confirming suspicions that water had been present on the planet. Images from this and other Mars drones are used to create landscapes, some of which break down into abstracted gestures playing off the simplest tropes of atmospheric perspective.Both bodies of work inhabit the space between our coarse sensory apparatus and the finer, inaccessible machinations of the world, a space normally filled with intentional stances and pathetic fallacies, where we do work “(w)ith a good shovel in the good earth.”

Jason Kunke is a Los Angeles based artist whose practice includes sculpture, drawing, installation, video, and performance. His art examines how authority and aesthetics inform each other. He received his MFA from CalArts in 2007, and his BFA (with a minor in sociology) from University of Houston in 2004. He has exhibited nationally at Polvo in Chicago, Commerce Street Artist Warehouse in Houston, and 25CPW in New York. In Los Angeles he has exhibited at Sea and Space Explorations, LAXART, and Dan Graham, and recently issued a limited edition print with Insert Blanc Press. Along with five other artists, he co-runs Elephant, an artist run space in Glassell Park.

Hoops - Brittany Ko & Leah Rom

Hoops: An installation for your enjoyment

by Brittany Ko and Leah Rom
 

Opening: June 20th, 2014, 7-9pm - one night only

Performance at 8:00 pm 

move through a room, passing your hand through every empty space.
do some spaces feel different from others?
...
hoops from the 99¢ store
sick of jumping through hoops
what will you do if there is a hoop?

we made a hoop
and jumped by it.
stuck a hand through it
stood behind it.
what can we see through the hoop
that we can't see with out it

there are 40 hoops
each one because we decided we knew
what to do.
posed with new problems and obstacles
say hoop really fast over and over
how old are you?

Hoop Dreams
sliding through a hoop
squatting in a hoop
something i can carry
coconut popsicles that make you
10 pounds lighter
hoop skirts
women's "problems" diva cups
hoop for humanity
hoops for all the things i want to
say but don't know how to
liking something or someone 
without knowing why
hoops for working together
do you get sick of everything
some time?

hoops as eyes.
stretching. shimmying, an
excuse for dancing without
having to call yourself a dancer
trying to connect
going for it
not a slam dunk but
maybe a swooshy 3 pointer?
itchy nose
paint covered hands
not wanting and wanting
hate isn't the opposite of love
throw me a hoop and i'll catch it
ring of fire

do as many things
with a hoop as you can
so as not to feel the passing
of time and the ache of your
back and the discomfort of
being in public. do them to
have fun and feel light
and all that other
cheesy but still nice stuff.
feel with a hoop what you feel when
you're drunk. be on hoops
get on my level. you don't have
to go in circles you can go back and
forth or side to side. you can lay
flat on your back and a hoop will
just be a line.