Another Thought - Silvie Deutsch

October 30th-December 12th, 2021

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to announce Another Thought, a solo exhibition by Silvie Deutsch. Another Thought explores breathing and listening through an environment of paintings and sound sculptures. Deutsch investigates visual, sculptural, and sonic ways that breath sets rhythms to our lives and how a layered, sensitive environment can make us breathe differently and transform our experience of space.

Another Thought consists of three large-scale oil paintings and two mobile sculptures that reference the act of breathing: various layers rise to the surface and fall. Time moves slowly during a pandemic. Through breathing, images materialize as layered spacious and diaphanous forms. 

Deutsch was inspired by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who, at the turn of the century, created a body of work that left visible reality behind, making paintings channeled through meditation and séance. Silvie, like many worried people stuck at home during the pandemic, started meditating. She lit incense, closed her eyes, and breathed. Then, like Hilma, she began to make small daily paintings in which she focused only on breathing, watching, and acknowledging her thoughts. Meditating was an act of “self-care” in the face of a terrifying crisis. 

In this exhibition, these small meditation paintings are scaled up and layered to create an immersive experience. Meditation involves breathing, as well as listening inwardly and outwardly. Two ears, listening, form the shape of a heart; listening becomes collective. Accompanying the paintings are two wind-chime-like sculptures that “breathe,”creating a sensitive, enveloping soundscape.  

Silvie Deutsch creates immersive, visceral environments that offer slowness, awe, and a shared experience through sculpture, sound, and painting. Born in Santa Cruz, California, Deutsch earned an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California Irvine and a BA in Art Studio from Wesleyan University. She recently collaborated on an outdoor interactive large-scale musical instrument sculpture for the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. Recent solo shows include the Gallery at Glendale Community College and the Palos Verdes Art Center.

Pond - Jacob Lenc

September 4th-October 17th, 2021

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to announce Pond, an exhibition of new work by the Los Angeles-based artist Jacob Lenc. Lenc is a self-described landscape painter whose work attempts to dissect the representation of nature through the historic and physical confines of painting.

Pond is composed of a single work, Pond 1 (2021), a painting on some 350 lily pad shaped canvases (along with a handful of flower shaped units) that are arranged face-up on the gallery floor. These canvases are organized by the artist in reaction to the space established by the gallery. The viewer is asked to carefully walk through the space the artwork occupies and experience it from both inside and outside its apparent boundaries.

Jacob Lenc earned his BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2015. In 2019 his first solo show Drawings and a Painting, ran at Weekend Gallery in the historic Santa Fe Art Colony. In 2020 he co-founded The Hermitage, an artist-run exhibition space in Eagle Rock. 

Stir Crazy - Marzieh Karimi and Ariel Mazariegos

August 7th to August  22nd, 2021

A souvenir spoon is a uniquely designed relic representing a person, place or historical event. Travelers often purchase them to commemorate a trip, collect them as a niche hobby, or gift them upon their return from travel. Stir Crazy involves an appropriation of a collection of souvenir spoons. Some are tarnished showing the history of ownership, while others have shiny bowls reflecting the room distorted and upside down. Each spoon that was originally a token of a popular place is cut, painted, stamped and manipulated. The newly altered spoons impose fictitious places, memories, thoughts and imagined stories. 

Artist Bio: Marzieh Karimi and Ariel Mazariegos met at California State University, Northridge in 2014. Marzieh came a long way from Tehran, and Ariel, a much shorter distance from New Orleans. They both arrived in Los Angeles pursuing their MFA degree and stayed to continue exploring their artistic urges after graduating. They first grew close by lending their skills, discussing ideas and sharing their expertise. Conversations about memory, place and time — themes that characterize their artworks — led to renewed insight and an exchange of perspective. Most recently, they discovered a common interest in specific iconography like spoons and plants, as well as commercial and street signage. Their current collaboration involves an in-depth examination of one of those specific subjects.

Seasons of Unravelling - Calliope Pavlides

May 1st - May 8th, 2021

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to announce Calliope Pavlides’ inaugural solo show, Seasons of Unravelling. The exhibition will be open by appointment from May 1st to May 8th, 2021.

Seasons of Unravelling features Calliope Pavlides’ latest body of work that formed during a challenging year. With her series of paintings starring embodied natural disasters, Pavlides marks time by creating a metaphor for the pandemic as a personal apocalypse. Digesting her experience through a set of dark tales on canvas enables her to dream of a sunnier reality. The title refers to “unravelling” as the motion of spiralling out of control, as well as the idealistic anticipation for a disentangled world. Using line as a form of unravelling, her brushwork spins, loops, and breathes, in a kind of reckless abandonment to motion. Despite the dark undertones of the subject matter, Pavlides’ mark-making and narrative playfulness bring a lightness to these works. At times, she takes on a child’s perspective, assigning human features to a spring breeze and repeatedly filling in the cracks with rainbows. The show includes 9 paintings on canvas and 9 works on paper.

Calliope Pavlides is a Greek artist currently based in Los Angeles, California. She is a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design where she received her BFA in Painting in 2020 and was awarded the Florence Leif award of excellence. This is her inaugural solo show, a culmination of her personal practice in combination to a sustainable sculpture residency alongside Monte Vista Projects co-director Emily Blythe Jones.

Doubt the Edges - Timothy McMullen and Daniel Alejandro Trejo

March 13th - April 25th

Recorded Artist Talk

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to announce Doubt the Edges, new works by Timothy McMullen and Daniel Alejandro Trejo. In their cross-disciplinary practices, Trejo and McMullen both work with abstract, graphic, ambiguous forms to create works that leave themselves open to the interpretation of the viewer. Doubt the Edges features sculpture works by Trejo and paintings by McMullen. Trejo’s linear ceramic sculptures take inspiration from a symbol of violence and loss – the chalk outlines used in forensic investigations. The sculpture’s soft pastel hues and open forms encourage exploration while subversively referencing safe spaces, insecurity, and the unknowability of the future. In contrast to Trejo’s sculptures, in his recent paintings, McMullen has focused on the practice of making works that escape language by using meditative, simple, and obtuse forms to create a world that allows its inhabitants to re-engage with wonder. Together, the artists’ work leaves the viewer to consider forms in space, the various meanings of simple constructions, and the awareness that comes through contemplation.

Los Angeles-based artist Timothy McMullen uses simple forms as portals to re-engage the viewer in the act of looking. Currently he is building The Game of Painter, a studio based game about making decisions without linear outcomes.

Daniel Alejandro Trejo is a Queer, Latinx, visual artist based out of Stockton, CA working in ceramic sculpture with an adjacent practice in curatorial projects. He received his BA in Art Studio and Art History from the University of California, Davis. Subsequent to completing his undergraduate studies, he obtained studio residency at Verge Center for the Arts in Sacramento, where he concurrently taught ceramics to the community as an Educational Associate.  Trejo’s curatorial projects include organizing Sacramento Zine Fest, and organizing group exhibitions under his collaborative project, Unibrow Collective. The collaborative projects aim to broaden conversations about practices in under-recognized communities in contemporary discourse, and provide curated spaces for many voices, experience, and situations.

Trejo currently holds residency at Verge Center for the Arts in Sacramento, CA where he maintains his studio practice.