Spectacular Subdivision

Friday, Saturday, & Sunday, April 4-6, 2014, 10am-6pm
Two sites in Wonder Valley, CA
Site 1: 79017 El Paseo Drive, Wonder Valley, CA 92277
Site 2: Ironage Road, Wonder Valley, CA 92277

Performance Schedule:
Friday, April 4
           8pm – Short Sale by Dick Hebdige at El Paseo Ranch
Saturday, April 5
           10am-6pm – SHU by Anastasia Hill at Ironage Road
           1pm – Berlin Open House by Annette Barz at El Paseo Ranch
           10pm – Every New Home: A Ghost by James Cathey at El Paseo Ranch

High Desert Test Sites, Monte Vista Projects, and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) present Spectacular Subdivision, a group project curated by Jay Lizo. This three-day exhibition invites artists to reflect on questions of housing and real estate in the aftermath of the 2008 housing market crisis. What does housing mean to artists in relation to their practice? How has the mortgage meltdown affected artists? How have forms of domesticity and shelter shaped artists' practices?

Spectacular Subdivision stems from the many conversations Jay had with other artists about purchasing a home. These conversations, ranging from the various types of paints used for interiors, to how to expand a house to incorporate a studio, and how to find balance between a living and working space, were simultaneously banal and fantastical. The project both engages and mimics the logic of real estate development as it has played out in the years since settlement began on the edges of habitable space across the Californian desert, e.g. California City in Kern County and Salton City, the failed resort adjacent to the Salton Sea in the Imperial Valley. The call invites participating artists to explore their personal fantasies in tandem with that (il)logic.

The project takes place over one weekend at two sites in Wonder Valley, California, on the fringes of the high desert. Large-scale sculptures are installed in a cul-de-sac formation at the remote, undeveloped Ironage Road parcel. Additional works are on view at El Paseo Ranch, a rental cabin owned by the Sibley Family.

Participating artists include: Matt Allison, Katie Allison, Yuki Ando, Nicole Antebi, Annette Barz, Lara Bank, Allison Danielle Behrstock, James Cathey, Frank Chang, Chelsea Dean, Michael Dodge, Rebecca Bennett Duke, Ken Ehrlich, Patrick Gilbert, Joe Goode, Jenalee Harmon, Anastasia Hill, Dick Hebdige, Oliver Hess, Oree Holban, Olga Koumoundouros, Norm Laich, Jay Lizo, Candice Lin, Clare Little, Justin Lowman, Ben Lord, Nuttaphol Ma, Patrick Melroy, Anna Mayer, Megan Mueller, Ruchama Noorda, Noah Peffer, Nikki Pressley, Ben Pruskin, Nate Page, Carl Pomposelli, Colin Roberts, Marco Rios, Amy Russell, Sam Scharf, Ryan Taber, Emily Thomas, Matthew Usinowicz, Jesse Wilson, and Kim Yasuda.

Project LALO

Project LALO - An exchange between galleries in Los Angeles and London 2014  
Presented in partnership with Artra Curatorial & Campbell Works

ROXY TOPIA & PADDY GOULD
Massages from the second brain

You know its coming but then there it actually is, your early thirties has arrived. It just kind of creeps up on you and then before you know it, has you anxiously by the throat. Thankfully, through the asphyxiation you can start to see things a little clearer; you can meditate your way through the issues.  

Love reveals that it can be a gateway drug potentially leading you onto harder stuff; you take particular note of your diet and notice your guts are not a frictionless log flume but a much more complicated kind of fun; and those hoops you jump through to get to adulthood, the portals of your life, are in fact mesmerising forces.

Gradually you find you are sliding out of the pressures that want you to assume certain attitudes toward success and status, to become standard hetero gender roles. From this anxious climate you dose up on the power of failure; lubing up on its goofy freedoms and going with the flow, whether it's the flow of sexual urges, digestion or meditative space.

Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould present new drawings and sculpture for their first show in LA. They live, work and sleep together in London, England.

Project LALO is an international exchange between dynamic emerging contemporary art spaces in London and Los Angeles. ARTRA Curatorial has partnered with Campbell Works, in London, to bring this 10 venue event to both cities - March in London and April in Los Angeles. http://www.artrala.org/

Post Private - neverhitsend

neverhitsend needs you to help author a collective e-reader. Bring any and all material in response to the prompt “post private." neverhitsend will digitize your contributions with our DIY scanner, offering a selection of original watermarks to transform the scanned material into a collective artwork. Following the event, neverhitsend will email a PDF of the 
collected scans to all participants.

neverhitsend is a primarily Los Angeles-based, twelve person collective that formed in the wake of the 2013 Edward Snowden NSA leaks. neverhitsend performs actions that explore methods of communication in which privacy is not an additive, but a constitutive element. One such investigation takes the form of a continually in-progress draft email in a shared Gmail account—a re-performance of a technique previously employed by Al Qaeda and David Petraeus. Members of neverhitsend will be present to assist with the scanning of materials and available for questions or discussion for the duration of the event.

Friday through Sunday, March 14–16, 12–5pm
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, March 15, 2014 6–10pm

Katie Herzog - Altered State Library

Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Katie Herzog's exhibition Altered State Library. Herzog's first solo exhibition with Monte Vista Projects presents a series of site specific paintings depicting the interior of the public library branch closest to the gallery, each painted through the lens of a different psychedelic drug. The paintings symbolize the embodied subject in contemporary information theory, as information culture moves further into the digital realm and library buildings become defined by sensory perception. Inspiration for the show includes P. N. Witt’s infamous research on the effect of drugs on spiders in 1948, the chemical relationship between paint and madness, and the perceived identity crisis of the contemporary librarian. The materiality of text in the civic sphere is highlighted in Herzog’s Periodic Table of Elements, made of poured paint on a found drop cloth (used to paint her studio walls white), with lettering modeled after the City of Los Angeles beveled municipal font painted on the side of service trucks.

Katie Herzog lives and works in Los Angeles, where she serves as Director of the Molesworth Institute. Recent exhibitions include Transtextuality (Senate Bill 48) at Night Gallery, Object-Oriented Programming at the Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), and Pushing Paradigms in Painting at Rutgers University. Herzog received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts from UC San Diego in 2005. She studied Library and Information Science at San Jose State University and has worked for a number of public and academic libraries ranging from a rural bookmobile in Monterey County to the Kappe Library at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles.

Bia Gayotto - Somewhere In Between: Silicon Valley, 2012

Monte Vista Projects is proud to present “Somewhere In Between: Silicon Valley, 2012” a two-screen video installation by Los Angeles-based artist Bia Gayotto. 

For several years, artist Bia Gayotto has been using an interdisciplinary approach that combines video, collaboration, fieldwork and interviews to examine how ideas of identity and culture intersect in places, objects, and people's everyday lives. In previous projects, Gayotto has chosen elements in the landscape or in urban environments to explore community responses to specific situations or locations, such as commuting spaces in L.A., mountains and women explorers in Banff, Canada, and the sea and islanders in the Azores, Portugal. 

Somewhere In Between is a two-screen video installation that investigates a sense of place through the intercultural experience of first- and second-generation immigrants in Silicon Valley. Residents were invited to participate in an interview and video shoot through an open call, and were asked questions designed to stimulate a dialogue reflecting the pluralities of place, identity, and belonging. For the installation at Monte Vista Projects, these interviews can be heard using an MP3 player and headphones, separate from the video. 

Somewhere In Between is the second iteration in a series that also includes Los Angeles and Chicago. The videos' compositions—which take the form of portraiture, still life, and landscape—use varied elements, such as close-ups and long shots. Inspired by John Cage, chance plays an important role in the project, from the demographics of people who respond to the artist's call for participation to the different neighborhoods in which the videos are shot. Although Gayotto's approach alludes to the traditions of documentary and ethnographic film, during post-production she utilizes non-linear poetic strategies, including montage, multiple projections, sound effects, and looping. The sequence of scenes shown on both screens creates fleeting and serendipitous juxtapositions between (and among) people and their environments, resulting in broad, multilayered portraits of the cities Gayotto considers. 

Gayotto received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Image and Sound, São Paulo. She has received numerous grants and awards and served as artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre, Canada, the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, and “Threewalls” in Chicago. Currently, she serves as adjunct faculty at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and as a visiting lecturer at California State University, LA. Her interest in intercultural space stems from her own cross-cultural upbringing and a desire to portray individuals whose identities are in a constant process of “becoming” as a result of a physical or cultural dislocation.

This project was made possible by the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center. Special thanks to the Luckman Gallery at Cal State Los Angeles.

McLean Fahnestock - Islomania

Monte Vista Projects is proud to present “Islomania” a multi-media installation by Los Angeles-based artist McLean Fahnestock. 

In 1935, the artist’s Grandfather Sheridan Fahnestock and Great Uncle Bruce Fahnestock embarked with a small sailing crew on the first of three expeditions to the South Pacific. In partnership with the Museum of Natural History in New York, their expeditions explored uncharted waters while the crew collected specimens and native music for the museum. While sailing through the Coral Sea, off the coast of Nendo, they came upon a small chain of sandy islands and named them after their boat “Director.” However, “The Good Director Islands” are not on any map, there are only what appear to be open waters at the coordinates for which they are published. Perhaps they have been consumed by the ocean, or perhaps they never really existed, perhaps it is the unmitigated notion of these islands that establishes the illusion of islomania. 

For the artist—embarking on her own artistic expeditions in the wake of her predecessors—islomania is not just a partiality, but rather, a full-blown obsession. Impetuously assembled, Islomania is part of a larger research based project called “The Fahnestock Expedition,” involving years of research, merging together imagery, sound, film, performances, photographs, dreams, complex anecdotes, travelogues, and dialogue with librarians and visits to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC where the Fahnestock South Sea collection is maintained. 

As a long-time influence for explorers, artists, conquerors, writers, expatriates, reality television viewers, all of whom have found themselves rapt in the illusion of the exotic desert island; the illusionary concept of islomania reserves itself as a place of solitude, discovery, and escape. The fantasy of discovering the uninhabited island, where scale inevitably shifts is an apt metaphor for the artist in search of the new.

David Weldzius - Relief

Monte Vista Projects is proud to present “Relief,” a new series of sculptural works by Los Angeles-based artist David Weldzius. 

September 14 – October 6, 2013

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 14th 7–10 pm

Since moving to Southern California in 2005, Weldzius has taken specific interest in the relay between vernacular architecture and popular narrative in shaping putative social history, particularly evident in sites within close proximity to his home which is walking distance from Monte Vista Projects on LA's northeast side. For his project “Relief,” Weldzius will examine a local network of civic structures built in the 1930s and 40s under the auspices of the Work Progress Administration—diligently translating a series of marks inscribed in wet concrete by provisional Federal workers into plaster volumes that will enmesh with the interior architecture of the gallery. With his first sculpture-based project to date, Weldzius hopes to provoke a broad range of inquiries regarding prolonged economic austerity and the amplified role of independently-run project spaces amidst restrained funding for contemporary art initiatives.

Weldzius has exhibited extensively in the US, showing at LACE, MAK Center, and David Kordansky Gallery among other venues. In 2012, Weldzius was awarded fellowship with the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France. Concurrent with “Relief,” Weldzius will commence a second solo project hosted by Otis College of Design’s Department of Photography, and participate in a faculty exhibition at Occidental College's Weingart Gallery.

Ben White - Ruin Upon Ruin

August 10 – September 1, 2013
Opening Reception: August 10, 7 – 9 PM

"If one were to run across one of Ben White's paintings at a suburban garage sale or in the dusty backroom of a thrift store, one would snap it up immediately, display it prominently in one's hip Silverlake-adjacent living room, then post it immediately on Facebook, hoping to learn more about the quixotic outsider genius that produced it. The Council of Nicaea supervising the faking of a moon landing? Unimpeachable. Liberace among the Hyenas in the Colloseum? Fabulous!"
-Doug Harvey, from a forthcoming monograph of Ben White's Ruin Upon Ruin series from Insert Blanc Press. 2013.

"Too smart to accept the subtle prejudices, insidious conformity, and insipid evils of the suburban middle class, White is also too proud to disown its influence, reject its charms or deny his own complicity. Consider the paintings of Ruin Upon Ruin a prog rock riff on the somatic spell of the Valencias of this world. The sickly sweet aesthetics of the embarrassing present intermingle with imagery, symbols, and tropes from throughout human history. Ambitious in scope and subject matter, yet humble in their formal delivery, the images are at turns funny and horrific. They seduce and alienate us, mixing subject matter that entrenched cultural sects would rather keep segregated, and they challenge our idea of what knowledge we privilege, what we discard, and what we are willing to accept from art. At first blanche they feel unsettling and wrong, but White, recovered Christian rocker that he is, is not interested in affirming our faith in at and culture. He is interested in testing it."
-John Hogan, from a forthcoming monograph of Ben White's Ruin Upon Ruin series from Insert Blanc Press. 2013.

Brian Getnick - RGB

R (July2011-July2012)  
G (July2012-July2013) 
B (July2013- )

Beginning July 19th at Monte Vista Projects, Brian Getnick presents RGB; a series of 3 performances and sculptural installations exploring the relationship between memory’s construction and the body.  

RGB re-activates work made from the first two years of a long term project on memory titled The Complete works of the Rainbow in which each year is assigned a color.

“Color coding a year’s worth of performances and correlating sculpture has been a way of tracking my process of discovering a subject. I could say that I enter blindly, or enter darkness as to what the subject is but instead of that intuitive zone being dark, it’s a colorful void. I am reaching into that color to find the forms which let memory, feeling and theory coalesce as an object, then come to life as a performance. The Red year happened in 2012 and the Green year is coming to a close on July 7th, my birthday. Blue will begin in early August with ‘open auditions’. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the blue year will be erotic.”


July 19th and 20th 12-7 pm

Red: Memory vs. the body. A band living inside a body sings the body’s memories. In collaboration with Claire Cronin, Ezra Buchla, Corey Fogel, Nathan Bockelman, and Bryatt Bryant

http://www.briangetnick.com/Memories

July 26th and 27th 12-7 pm, performance times TBA

Green: The head and the body. With performer and writer Bryatt Bryant we developed 2 green characters whose heads occasionally leave their bodies. They see an orgy, they reanimate 2 halves of an oracular dead horse.

http://www.briangetnick.com/Tell-me-not-to-be-afraid 

August 3rd and 4th times TBA

Blue: Open auditions for the new year begin at Monte Vista.

www.briangetnick.com

www.nativestrategiesla.com

Nancy Popp - Strung Broad

In 2010, Eli and Edythe Broad announced plans to open The Broad, a new public museum of contemporary art on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles (anticipated opening: 2014). Dubbed "the veil and the vault", the museum's design merges the two key components of the building; public exhibition space and archive/storage. The museum's exhibition programming will focus on the contents of the renowned contemporary art collections of Eli and Edythe Broad, which feature in total 2000 artworks by more than 200 artists. The Broad Art Foundation and The Elia and Edythe Broad Foundation together comprise The Broad Foundations, which have assets of $2.4 billion.

Meanwhile, across the street at Grand Avuenue, MOCA was melting down. In December 2008, the press reported that the museum's endowment had dwindled in nine years from $40 million to $6 milliion, and that California's attorney general was investigating its finances. A Letter of Agreement between MOCA and the Eli and Edythe Broad foundation was signed on December 23, 2008. Two notable clauses require the museum "to strengthen its Board of Trustees to include a substantial number of individuals who share MOCA's vision of downtown Los Angeles and art" and "to acknowledge Eli Broad as the founding chairman of the Board of MOCA".

On February 10, 2013 Nancy Popp performed on the Broad Museum construction site as an interventionist political action to protest and call attention to the machinations of money and redevelopment that lie behind the establishment of The Broad, including the history of KB Homes (Eli Broad's real estate development corporation) and its role in destroying the urban cores of cities such as Detroit while attempting to 'enliven' downtown Los Angeles.

Sources:
http://broadartfoundation.org/thebroadmuseum.html
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/03/problem-moca-la-jeffrey-deitch

Artist Bio:
Nancy Popp is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. Her performances, videos, drawings, and photographs draw upon the rich traditions of durational, corporeal performance and political intervention to explore relations between body and site, and often incorporate public and architectural spaces. Collaboration is a long-term strategy she employs in her practice. She exhibits frequently at such venues as the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; the Manifesta 9 Biennial, Belgium; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center; Rowan University, New Jersey; SUNY University, New York, numerous galleries in Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, Belgrade, and Tijuana, and many other public sites and institutions. She holds degrees from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and the San Francisco Art Institute, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation's Visual Arts Fellowship and a Lucas Artist Fellowship from the Montalvo Arts Center. Upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Monte Vista Projects and Gallery KM in Los Angeles as well as a group exhibition at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State LA.

Reanimation Library - Highland Park Branch

Reanimation Library: Highland Park Branch

May 19, 7–9 pm
Branch Closing Event with Word Processor Reading by Tisa Bryant and musical performances by TONY and Pitch Like Masses

The Highland Park Branch is a temporary "spore" of the Brooklyn-based Reanimation Library. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from local thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and are given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists.

The opening event will feature new work informed by books from the Highland Park Branch. Participating artists and performers include: Tristan Duke, Ken Ehrlich, Cayetano Ferrer, Corey Fogel, Helki Frantzen, Katie Herzog, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Cassandra C. Jones, Les Figues Press, Rob Ray, and Sarah Simons.

For more information visit www.reanimationlibrary.org and www.montevistaprojects.com, or send us a message at highlandparkbranch@reanimationlibrary.org.

The Reanimation Library: Highland Park Branch is organized by Aurora Tang and Jen Hofer in collaboration with Reanimation Library Founder Andrew Beccone and Monte Vista Projects.

http://www.reanimationlibrary.org/
 

Karen Adelman - Some Insides

Please join Karen Adelman at Monte Vista Projects for a show of apparent sounds and objects.

Friday, April 5th from 12-6pm, the show will be open.

Saturday, April 6th from 12-6pm, the artist will interact with visitors; performance at 4pm.

Sunday April 7th from 3-9pm, the show will be open; closing performance at 9pm.

Steven L. Anderson - Power Plant

February 22 – March 24, 2013

Opening & performance by Steven L. Anderson: Friday, February 22, 7 – 11pm
 

Also featuring lectures, performances, and workshops by Riah Buchanan, Shade Falcon, Robby Herbst, Charles Irvin, Los Angeles Mystery Project, Tom McKenzie, and Guru Rugu.

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Power Plant, Steven L. Anderson’s solo exhibition of painting, drawing, video, and performances. Power Plant is a collection of strategies for charging, releasing, projecting, negating, and focusing energy. Spiraling, text-based drawings become tools for directing vibrations. A large "prayer rug" serves as a charging station for staging performative, creative actions. Tripods supporting video cameras appear as totemic signposts in the energy landscape. On the cameras’ tiny screens, short videos testify to the electricity one feels while exploring the wilderness, reaching a mountain’s summit, or encountering the sublime.

The rhythms of our daily lives, our politics and culture, and our technology surround us completely, encompassing us in white noise—but when we escape into the outdoors, we gain perspective. As our senses refocus, our bodies discover rhythms that can’t be represented on clocks. We begin to experience older, deeper rhythms, of energy flowing through and around us. The exhilaration of the human spirit fuses with the ferocious beauty of nature to make a palpable, tingling essence, and—if an artist is attuned—this energy can become a medium in itself.

The exhibition will feature lectures, performances, and workshops by Riah Buchanan, Shade Falcon, Robby Herbst, Charles Irvin, Los Angeles Mystery Project, Tom McKenzie, and Guru Rugu. Audiences are limited to 15 people. Schedule and sign-ups will be posted at the gallery and online at http://www.montevistaprojects.com/.

Steven L. Anderson works in a variety of media to explore the nature of power, and the power of Nature. His career as an artist has been a cycle of collaborative and individual production, including projects with Tom McKenzie (as Ecstatic Energy Consultants, Inc.); Karl Erickson & Robby Herbst; Elana Mann; Llano del Rio Collective; Signify, Sanctify, Believe; and Cakewalk magazine. Anderson was a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park, and his work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago. A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Steven now lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. More at http://www.stevenlanderson.com/.
 

Michael Kontopoulos - Terra Firma

Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Terra Firma, the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist, Michael Kontopoulos. The exhibition runs from January 19 to February 10, 2013. The opening reception is Saturday, January 19, 7-10pm.

The work in this exhibition borrows strategies from speculative fiction and design in order to explore themes of escapism, the frontier and the illusion of utopia. In collaboration with graphic designers and 3D computer modelers, Michael has fabricated a series of artifacts that contrast the obviously fictitious with the ambiguously realistic and uncanny in an effort to anticipate the political imaginary of abandoning the Earth.

Through print design, sculpture and installation, the works in Terra Firma explore several ideas including the visual vernacular of how rovers and satellites (themselves, unique sculptures) "see" their environment and therefore, how we experience the unknown through them. In addition to this, Michael is utilizing the strategies of graphic design branding campaigns to envision boarding passes for impossible destinations.

At once an imagining of a potential future and a lamentation for an unsatisfactory present, this work investigates space exploration and space tourism as an adult concretization of a childhood need to be subsumed by fantasy.

Michael Kontopoulos is a Los Angeles based artist and educator. After studying electronic and time-based art at Carnegie Mellon University, he went on to receive his MFA in Design and Media Arts from UCLA.

He has exhibited solo and collaborative projects in galleries, festivals and conferences in the U.S., Asia and Europe, including the Santa Monica Glow Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the TED conference. He was the winner of a 2010 Rhizome Commission for Emerging Artists, sponsored by the New Museum (NYC). Currently, Michael teaches electronic media courses at USC, UCLA, Cal State Long Beach and Art Center College of Design.

www.mkontopoulos.com

Minimum Yields Maximum

February 20 - March 20, 2010       Opening Reception February 20, 7-10 pm

Minimum Yields Maximum curated by Gina Osterloh MM Yu, Roya Falahi, Yason Banal, Ringo Bunoan, Joshua Callaghan, Kent Familton, Louie Cordero, Hong-An Truong, Reanne Estrada, Poklong Anading, Lena Cobangbang, Gary-Ross Pastrana

Monte Vista is pleased to announce Minimum Yields Maximum, a group exhibition curated by LA-based artist Gina Osterloh, featuring work by artists from the Philippines, Vietnam, and Los Angeles. Along with the exhibition, Monte Vista will host a book release event for Sarita See’s (Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies, University of Michigan) new book The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance. All of the author proceeds will go to the environmental justice organization FACES (Filipino American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity).

The artists in Minimum Yields Maximum work through a conceptual lens that considers everyday materials, and often engages greater social inquiries—a type of art practice that is both wide-ranging and inclusive. Many of the artists from the Philippines have studied and/or collaborated with artist and teacher Roberto Chabet. Perhaps this exhibition is a reminder that the Philippines has never hailed a singular geographical identity. It is also an appeal to shift art history, to consider a conceptual and political art model that includes the Pacific Rim. Most importantly, as an artist I have felt a strong resonance between the selected works from Manila and those from the United States. The works in this exhibition refuse to be easily identified or placed geographically. Instead, they build upon structures of loss, humor, rupture, trauma, and obliteration.

In the 1970’s, during the Marcos Regime in the Philippines, a strong conceptual art movement began in Manila. Led almost singlehandedly by Roberto Chabet, this movement took a strong stand against representational landscape painting, Social Realist murals adhering to strict aesthetics, and Modernist soft-brushstroke paintings popular in post-WWII Philippines—in short, a move to reject an essentialist identity and a simplistic art historical model of Philippine art. From the 1970’s to the present, artists scattered throughout the world have become actively involved in a dialogue with Chabet through travel, arts grants to Manila, and especially through the artist community that he has mentored.

In the beginning, Chabet’s work was affiliated with the Cultural Center of the Philippines (the CCP) as founding museum director of the CCP. A large Modernist building created by Imelda Marcos, the CCP stands out as a formidable floating cube looming over Roxas Boulevard along Manila Bay. After his departure from the CCP in 1971 due to internal politics, he began teaching at the University of the Philippines, and in 1974 founded a conceptual art group called Shop 6—the first alternative artist-run space in Manila. Subsequent alternative venues such as Agnes Arellano’s Pinaglaban Gallery in the 80’s, and Big Sky Mind and Surrounded by Water in the 90’s and today, all credit Chabet as their inspiration. As an artist himself and mentor to artists since the 70’s, Roberto Chabet has defiantly pushed forward a type of “inclusive conceptualism”1—which has influenced hundreds of art students at the University of the Philippines where he taught until recently, as well as other artists who have met Chabet and experienced his generosity in person.

In the Philippines in particular and Asia as a whole, artists from Manila are well known through their participation in biennials throughout Asia, recognition awarded through the Cultural Center of the Philippines and Ateneo University, the surge of commercial galleries representing their works throughout Asia, and the insistence of independent art spaces such as Green Papaya Art Projects in promoting an international dialogue supported by institutions such as the Asia-Europe Foundation and Arts Network Asia. Other cross-national arts ties in the Philippines include the French Embassy, Alliance Française, and the Goethe-Institut.

Due to the lack of consistent institutional support for the arts between the Philippines and the United States—especially when viewed in comparison to relations between France, Australia, or Germany and the Philippines—independent, artist-run spaces such as Monte Vista are of the utmost importance and urgency to make exhibitions such as Minimum Yields Maximum a possibility.

—Gina Osterloh, February 2010

1Ringo Bunoan, text. Ringo Bunoan has been a constant wealth of historical background for conceptual art practices in Manila. As with many of the artists in this exhibition, we shared many late night conversations during my Fulbright

grant in Manila 2007-2008. She recently exhibited here in Los Angeles at REDCAT for the exhibition Everyday Miracles

(Extended).

Mirjam Dröge Artist Talk

January 31, 2010, 6pm

Mirjam Dröge Artist Talk In conjunction with The Need to Hold Still at UC Riverside/California Museum of Photography

MIRJAM DRÖGE

Ah-round

January 9—February 6, 2010

Opening January 9, 2010, 7—10 pm

Rebecca Ann Hobbs

Monte Vista is pleased to announce our first exhibition of 2010, featuring Ah-round, a single channel video by Australian artist Rebecca Ann Hobbs. About the work, Hobbs says:

Ah-round was made in the summer of 2008, during which time I was involved in a romantic relationship with Madou, the man in the video. Madou and I endeavored to make a work together that celebrated our shared experiences in spite of our apparent differences. He is from Mali and has been living in New Zealand for almost fifteen years now. I, the woman behind the camera, am from subtropical rural Australia and have been in New Zealand for about four years. Mali is a land-locked West African country, whereas New Zealand is an island in the South Pacific. Madou, confident in front of the lens, and I, preoccupied with the lens-based medium of video, realized that it was only natural for us to make a moving image piece together, yet we were also acutely aware of all that we represented as people and how that would affect the reading of the work. We decided that it would be best to confront our concerns candidly, whilst trying not to be too inhibited by the histories that separate us. 

The images in Ah-round are quite literal. They intentionally appropriate iconography found in Romantic representations of the “Other.” These images support an Imperial power structure by incorporating motifs that reinforce existing stereotypes. In this instance, the “Noble Savage” is located in the exotic and faraway Pacific jungle. However, this particular “jungle” is made up of potted plants and exists in an overtly constructed space, a greenhouse. There are also satellite dishes, urban brick houses, a polo shirt, and a manmade ceiling—elements that intrude upon our idea of an untouched wilderness. Ah-round is intended as a parody; Romantic conventions are lampooned in order to make them seem ridiculous. 

This work is founded on my research into Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Of particular interest to me is the idea of the active subject. It was important that Madou was actively negotiating the situation, an independent being, in charge of his circumstances. I have also been researching Marcus Garvey’s work and his supporting ideologies. Garveywas an advocate of Pan-Africanism and he established a shipping company called the Black Star Line. The BSL functioned as a business, as Garvey believed that empowerment could be achieved via financial security, but it was also a logistical strategy to move black people who were victims of the diaspora back to Africa, the Motherland. Financially, the BSL failed in the end, but the power of Garvey’s ideas have remained. The 360-degree camera movement of Ah-round represents the idea of moving full circle and pays tribute to Garvey’s BSL ambitions. The song that Madou is listening to is “Traveling,” by Burning Spear, from the album “Spear Burning.” Burning Spear, also known as Winston Rodney,cites Garvey’s philosophy as a major influence in his life.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994. Grant, Colin. Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. Oxford University Press, 2008. Nelson, Stanley. Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind. 2001.

Hey Man, You're Saved

November 21- December 6, 2009                                                                                               OPENING November 22, 2009, 5–8 pm

Public Dialogue - Wednesday, December 2, 7-9:30 pm

Monte Vista is proud to present Hey Man, You’re Saved, a group exhibition of new work by nine insightful and diverse artists from the USC Roski School of Fine Arts. Operating between the ideal world of the concept and the structured site of the gallery, the work of these artists manifests through different mediums to explore appropriated sound and imagery, photographic process, fantastical and constructed landscapes, and the flux of identity. Hey Man, You’re Saved. So come in and be rescued from the monotony of visual consumption. Let’s get saved!    

Please join artist Sydney Mills and American media scholar Henry Jenkins, for Whiz, Bang, Shimmer, Pop: The Rise, The Fall and The Future of The Video Game Arcade. Together with audience members, Mills and Jenkins will examine the transformation from epicenters of the vibrant, budding gaming subculture of the early 1980’s into modest communities struggling to keep their doors open.

Refreshments 8-8:30

Henry Huang, a long term Jesus People member and his artist / engineer daughter, Hannah Huang, will discuss Birth and Rebirth: The Jesus People in Community. The Jesus People USA is one of the few intentional Christian communities remaining today, situated near uptown Chicago. Topics include street witnessing, sustainable communal living, and the deep rooted subculture that results from this dynamic existence.

The Peninsula

October 3 – October 31, 2009                    OPENING October 3, 2009, 7 – 10pm

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 concisenessand utility. Wojtyra uses books, discussions, photographs, line drawings, paintings, text, etc. tounhinge 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 artconform to an ecologically-sound, sustainable ecosystem. While material culture strivestowards 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 strategyof condensing material wealth into diamonds, sewn into the hemlines of clothes, smuggledacross 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 reimaginesthe gallery space as a peninsula, commingling and testing Art’s effect and power in relation to*terra firma*, the street.

Game Night at Monte Vista

Where: Monte Vista, 5442 Monte Vista St., Los Angeles, CA 90042                                          When: Thursday, September 17, at 8:00pm

Why: FREE SNACKS! And GAMES!

CORPORATE LADDER is a strategic game of stacking blocks for 4 to 6 players. The object of the game is to take up the most space.

GIVE AND TAKE is a game of scrimmage for 2 players. Think checkers meets Chinese finger trap.You can find out more about Corporate Ladder at:

http://hadto.net/category/projects/corporate-ladder