Julia Masvernat - Fuerza Suave (Soft Force)

Julia Masvernat
Fuerza Suave (Soft Force)

November 2nd - November 24th, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 2nd, 7-10pm

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Julia Masvernat's exhibition Fuerza Suave (Soft Force) opening on November 2nd. Julia Masvernat is an Argentine visual artist who is exhibiting in Los Angeles for the first time. She develops her work based on the observation of her urban habitat, paying attention to the involuntary drawings of the city, sensitive and twisted geometries that she finds on walks through Buenos Aires, where she lives and works. On this occasion, she presents a series of cut paper and wood works, fragile materials that become strong due to the networks that supports their shapes. The assemblage brings together delicate and soft materials such as paper, along with iron recovered from the construction/demolition industry.

Masvernat is a visual artist, educator, organizer and curator based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She works across a range of media including drawing, painting, objects and audiovisual installations. Utilizing industrial and craft materials as well as analog and digital processes, her practice focuses on the observation of specific urban and historical spaces. She collaborates with several socially engaged projects and collectives, including the feminist art and activism collective La Lengua en la Calle (The Tongue on the Street). Operating at the intersection of artistic practice, politics and feminist activism. She is currently working on a monograph spanning the last 20 years of her art practice. Masvernat is represented by the Gachi Prieto Contemporary art gallery in Buenos Aires.

@juliamasv_glosariovisual
@la_lengua_en_la_calle
@gachiprietogaleria

Curatorial interlocutor, in Argentina: Carolina Cuervo.
Curator + Producer, in United States: Kellan King.
Acknowledgements: Jimena Sarno

Irrational Exhibits 13: Juxtaposing Terrains

Irrational Exhibits 13: Juxtaposing Terrains

One night of Durational Performance, Video, Sound Sculpture, and Photography October 26, 7- 9pm, including 17 Artists at 5 Galleries in The Bendix Building in DTLA.

"Juxtaposing Terrains" serves as a platform for these artists to examine the delicate balance between historical precedents and prospective futures. Through the lens of durational performances, moving images, photographic works, and sound art they provide a nuanced discourse on the precarious nature of our present moment.

In five galleries and three floors of the Bendix Building, as well as transitional spaces these 17 artists share their works. This spatial strategy promotes a continuous dialogue between the artists and the audience, blurring the boundaries between observer and observed. Please join for the show and the post show reception!

GALLERIES: Track 16 Gallery, Durden and Ray, Tiger Strikes Asteroids LA, Monte Vista Projects, 515 Bendix

CURATOR: Deborah Oliver @irrationalexhibits + ASSOCIATE CURATOR Jerod Thompson @jepop

Irrational Exhibits 13: Juxtaposing Terrains/October 26, 2024// 7-9pm in the Bendix Building 1206 Maple St., Los Angeles 90015 at Track 16 1st Floor, Durden and Ray, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Monte Vista Projects, and 515 Gallery with a post-show reception ///Designer Aejin

Zoe Alameda and Sebastian Loo Ode to an Honest Mirror

September 28th - October 20th, 2024

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Ode to an Honest Mirror, a two-person show that delves into profound themes of transformation and awakening through the compelling works of Sebastian Loo and Zoe Alameda.

Sebastian’s artwork invites viewers into a journey of inner awakening. His delicate rice paper creations exude a tangible sense of decay and ephemerality, where each mark and layer encourages introspection. His pieces explore deep themes of loss, rebirth, and the desire to reconnect with one’s inner child. The fragile medium and thoughtful composition highlight the transient nature of these personal reflections, urging viewers to ponder their own experiences and transformations.

In stark contrast, Zoe’s art captures an external kind of awakening, reflecting the relentless pace of the digital landscape. Her work is characterized by high-frequency, brain rot imagery that mirrors the overwhelming flow of digital information whilst also employing visual senses of ephemerality. Employing a stark, monochromatic palette, Zoe’s pieces evoke the transient nature of cultural moments and human experiences in the modern era. Her work, set against the ever-changing backdrop of Los Angeles, emphasizes the fleeting and often overwhelming nature of our current digital lives.

Together, Sebastian and Zoe’s artworks create a compelling dialogue between internal and external worlds. Their distinct approaches meld seamlessly, offering a narrative that challenges traditional boundaries and beautifully merges the physical with the digital - internal with the physical. The exhibition is a testament to the tension between vibrancy and decay, permanence and impermanence.

Through their interwoven narratives, Sebastian and Zoe encourage viewers to embark on a journey of self-discovery, seeing themselves through their works, the collective resonance of both motifs highlighting an interconnectedness. Their art invites us to explore the delicate balance between our inner and outer realities, urging a deeper understanding and reflection on how these elements shape our experiences. This exhibition stands as a statement on the nature of transformation and the continuous interplay between our internal thoughts and the external world.

Zoe Alameda (b. 2000) is a multidisciplinary artist sitting and scrolling in Los Angeles. Through a combination of painting, collage, and sculpture, Alameda’s work embodies desires for connection and presentness in navigating our digitally saturated world. Her work lends interest in the overwhelming nature of internet-sourced imagery and the urban decay of Los Angeles. Alameda seeks to create material portraits of her anxieties, leaning on texture but also flatness to express the complexity of being truly open and vulnerable.

Sebastian Loo (b. 1996) is an LA-based painter working with ink and colors on rice paper. His technique engages in pointillism, paper cut-out and collage approaches to join personal symbols with aesthetics from science, mythology, and spirituality. For him, pointillism is a vehicle of transport to the eternal space of interconnectedness: where all things such as matter, icon, and system are unbound by category and suspended within a field of unconditional relationship. Within this space of joining isolated subjects, he attempts to recover the suffocated humanist wisdom buried deep beneath dogmatic truths, canonized icons, and cemented institutions.

2024 Open Call - Material Manipulations

September 20th, 2024

MATERIAL MANIPULATIONS 

Monte Vista Projects presents our fourth annual open call exhibition, Material Manipulations. This exhibition features the work of eleven California-based artists working in a variety of media. The nature of an open call precludes a single overarching theme, and is the result of chance, the unexpected, and the discovery of surprising links. The constellation of works selected for this exhibition push the boundaries of materiality to invite viewers to see the familiar with fresh eyes. Material Manipulations highlights how everyday objects can be reimagined into compelling forms that challenge notions of labor, history, ancestral mythologies, technology, and the body. The works in Material Manipulations demand viewers’ curiosity with a gravitas that is sure to be carried by viewers beyond the gallery walls. 

As a collective, Monte Vista Projects is committed to providing an artist-run venue that is not beholden to any market forces in order to show work we support and believe in. We have much appreciation for the many applicants to the open call, all of whom we hope will continue to be part of our growing network.

Participating Artists

Taylor Caliz

Debbie Carlson

Franco Castilla

Kevin Clancy

Paloma Dooley

April Ford

Juan Gomez

Christine Hudson

Hung Viet Nguyen

Liam O'Connor 

Katie Shapiro

Image Christine Hudson, I Prefer Your Love, 2023

Zara Kuredjian - Sandbox

Zara Kuredjian
Sandbox

July 20th - August 11th, 2024

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Sandbox, by Zara Kuredjian. The exhibition features an installation of objects from Kuredjian’s Blocks series, a scattered constellation of square stone-like objects that combine earth, hydrostone, and silver. Sandbox was inspired by Kuredjian’s fascination with volcanic sites throughout California as well as architectural elements from monastic complexes in the southern Caucasus.

Within Sandbox, Kuredjian explores relationships between density and levity through interactions between material, surface, light, and space. Consideration for various types of architecture, whether it be the mold, the room, or the frame, contributed to the development of Sandbox and the Blocks series. Each form and surface within the installation is both similar and different, with suggestions of the utilization of a mold and controlled process as well as the less governed movement of material through uneven surfaces, light reflection, and varying densities. The scattered, stone-like objects within the gallery also explore notions of chance, material agency, and controlled process through visible traces of activity within each object.

The idea of the frame is one of several important concepts within Sandbox and the Blocks series and takes on a variety of forms. Broadly, the concept of the frame can be thought of as a territorialization of chaos within the cosmos. It has the ability to enclose. To focus. To erase. To curate. It also has the ability to extend. To build outward into another dimension that otherwise may not have been made visible. The frame is an in-between. An abstract concept. An emphasis of isolation and focus on a particular.  It has the ability to transform living bodies by isolating and concentrating some of the excesses of the cosmos. Moments of increased intensity and oscillation. 



Zara Kuredjian is an LA-based artist with an interdisciplinary practice focused on materials relationship to liminality and the ethereal. She is deeply engaged with the porosity and liquidity of matter. Within her practice, material agency is a paramount consideration for how work is developed and the expression of a material's properties are considered through their inherent qualities as well as how they react to other materials and forces. Within her practice questioning human experience and its relationship to material is as important as thinking through matter and its relationship to the cosmos. This tenuous relationship between emergence and return, flesh and earth, is an idea that she often works through by approaching bodily relationships to material and site. Work is frequently presented in the form of sculpture, installation, and photography.

Daniel Tovar - Anti-Frontier

Daniel Tovar
Anti-Frontier

June 8th - July 7th, 2024

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Anti-Frontier, the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Daniel Tovar. The work in this exhibition, which explores and critiques the notion of the American frontier, encompasses a two-channel video installation, field recordings and synth compositions, and a series of concrete-and-steel sculptures.  

Anti-Frontier is the culmination of multiple trips to the Western Mojave Desert over several years, during which Tovar recorded video and collected sound from two adjacent locations: California City and the Tehachapi Pass wind farm, both roughly 100 miles north of Los Angeles. 

These sites might seem disparate at first. The former had once been pitched to homebuyers as a new kind of mega-suburb; the latter is a wind farm housing thousands of turbines. But both are sprawling developments erected on vast expanses of desert, each dependent on the extraction of resources. Each site, too, was once envisioned as a model for the future. One has clearly failed; will the other?

One channel of the video in Anti-Frontier captures scenes of a planned community in decay: empty grids for tract housing that was never built, abandoned cars adorned with graffiti, street signs and fence posts and sidewalks that lead nowhere. The other channel depicts the wind farm and its towering, god-like turbines; squeaky blades casting shadows on ancient creosote. 

There are moments of synchronicity, beauty, and absurdity: the sound of ducks near a man-made pond, the red lights of turbines blinking in the night, a freight train that catches fire and fills the sky with black smoke. These scenes, devoid of humans but brimming with machines, are reminders of the ways industry and technology have altered and reshaped the landscape. 

In one particularly striking image, a steel pole capped on one end with a mass of concrete lies flat on the dirt, an emblem of suburban defeat. Utilitarian yet uncanny, this object inspired the human-size sculptures that occupy the gallery floor, dominating the space like post-apocalyptic beasts. 

The collection of sculptures, which are imposing yet playful, rigid while somehow evoking movement, look like leftovers from a city in ruins; souvenirs from a post-capitalist decline. But unlike the fallen object that inspired them, these stand mostly upright, resurrected into a new kind of desert creature. There’s something hopeful about these bizarre monuments; then again, maybe they’re yet another unnecessary intrusion in the landscape. 

Anti-Frontier represents Tovar’s ongoing interest in the so-called frontier, the geography of hinterlands, and the tolls of technology and human extraction on the natural environment. His work, which primarily takes the form of video, sound, and sculpture, has been shown and/or performed at Wonzimer, Materials and Applications, Coaxial Arts Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Comfort Station, among others. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University and teaches in the Liberal Arts department at Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Too Late to Turn Back Now - Esther Marie Hall

Esther Marie Hall
Too Late to Turn Back Now

April 27th - May 26th, 2024

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present a body of new works by Esther Marie Hall. The exhibition is framed around Peggy Phelan’s insight from Unmarked (1993), ”the pleasure of resemblance and repetition produces both psychic assurance and political fetishization.” The selective representation of certain individuals or groups, along with the privileges accorded to them, creates conditions conducive to tokenization, which in turn reinforces established power structures, value, and further marginalizes disenfranchised groups. Building upon this discourse, Hall expands upon Phelan's notion of resemblance and representation entrenched in power dynamics within textile visual culture and flat works. Hall produced over 100 drawings establishing a foundation for new pattern-making, and recognizing the heavy influence of Anglo-American politics in textile visual culture. The act of accumulation, stockpiling, and safekeeping revolves around ensuring an adequate supply, akin to safeguarding against potential scarcity. Conversely, Hall confronts the capitalist belief that prioritizes overproduction with the aim of maximizing returns or expecting a surplus in return for one's efforts.

Hall cuts, sews, dyes secondhand fabrics reconstructing the psychic significance of the previous owner. Too Late to Turn Back Now also features sculptural work by Hall in an effort to elaborate the spatial condition of how textile works are typically presented – against a wall; on the floor – and addressing the circumstantial relationship between sculpture and wall; sculpture and floor; sculpture and space.

Esther Marie Hall is a multidisciplinary artist with a primary focus on fiber and textile work based in Sacramento, CA. She uses her work to illustrate her cultural identity through the use of traditional Filipino and American crafting techniques such as weaving, crocheting, embroidery, and quilting. Esther utilizes these mediums with the intention of expanding this material’s language and reconfiguring the meaning of what a quilt can and cannot be, by stretching and skewing forms, using an array of material not typically found in traditional quilting, and thinking about them compositionally as paintings. Quilting has a long history of resistance and documenting the current state of affairs, so the use of this medium felt streamlined as her work has long had existentialist, anti-authoritarian, and climate disruption undertones. Hall predominantly collects and hoards fabric related ephemera and uses donated and secondhand materials as a representation of quantum entanglement with the idea of carrying on any energy the previous owner had intended for the material. 

Esther was born and raised in Northern California and has resided in Sacramento since 2011. She attended the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in San Francisco where her practice in textiles began. Hall has worked with organizations such as the Latino Center of Art and Culture, Planned Parenthood, and Facebook, and has shown work throughout California, Florida, Kentucky, and Washington.

Within Reach - Teresa Ho and Yair Sarmiento

Within Reach
Teresa Ho and Yair Sarmiento

March 23rd - April 14th 2024

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Within Reach, a two person show with Teresa Ho and Yair Sarmiento. 

In the 1989 text Le Goût de l’archive, historian Arlette Farge writes, “Archives are neither faithful to reality nor totally representative of it; but they play their part in this reality, offering differences and alternatives to other possible statements.” A dizzying prospect–for every record kept, there are countless more that have been omitted, excised from history, condemned to be inaccessible to us on the other side of the veil. And to add to our sense of mistrust, whatever is retained still fails to capture the enormity of what has past, even if it happened to us.

Within Reach at Monte Vista Projects, the two-person exhibition by Los Angeles-based artists Yair Sarmiento and Teresa Ho, induces viewers to explore the hidden mechanisms of the world through the artists' extensively material-forward approaches.Their parallel bodies of work, comprising paintings, prints, and drawings—demonstrate a commitment to wrestling detail and meaning from oblique surfaces and tools, as well as exploring a fluid, continuously evolving language of disrupted vernaculars ciphers, and other methods of encoded information exchange embedded in quotidian or overlooked materials.

Superficially resembling codices or variants of asemic writing, Sarmiento’s Surfeit is the result of a durational investigation into the expressive potential of everyday materials—permanent marker, pens, and graphite. For the artist, these are associatively inscribed as accessible, pedestrian tools that can be wielded by anyone, in addition to recalling formative memories of mark-making. Innumerable small dots inundate the flat, white plane of the canvas, which acts as an arena activated by the repetition, revealing the gestural act’s sculptural and mutable nature. Tundra, a large drawing composed of similarly abundant, meticulously applied blue ballpoint pen, vacillates between degrees of saturation and phantasmic variances in opacity. Like Surfeit, Tundra is inscribed with a dynamism that possesses no referent other than itself, proposing a universal value that circumscribes the treachery enjoined by lexical particulars.

The paintings by Ho, with their use of image transfers and vestiges of plausibly familiar landscape signifiers, recall a photographic, archivolithic impulsion. While almost anyone can take or source photographs to be harnessed as reference material, their total material transformation in these works evokes the process of ‘redescription’, a paradigm defined by and often associated with the artist Vija Celmins. As Frances Jacobus-Parker writes in Redescribing the Photograph, “In approaching photographs as ready-made templates to meticulously redescribe, Celmins arrived at a methodology that combined abstraction’s attention to the formal properties of a medium with representation’s observation of the world.” Oyster is a painting where the natural world is effectively redescribed–grass, clouds, water, and other geological features are reconstructed spatially, becoming a monument to the transient interval which they were observed, as well as a steady armature for the artist’s layered marks. Spillage, with incongruous dimensions, recalls organic structures from both within and without-in presenting a moment of potentiality, the viewer has the opportunity to observe the mediation present in their own world, as they traverse both personal and global realms.

Through their work and chosen tools, both artists connect us to a previously intangible dimension of the everyday, encouraging a heightened awareness of the intricate workings of our environment, awareness, and perceptual limits. By creating a space to contemplate surface as an archive of highly methodical, spatialized gestures, (which are themselves transmuted associations), Within Reach asks viewers to examine their relationship to memory, the distortion of which is intrinsic to human experience.

- JASMINNE MORATAYA

Teresa Ho (b. 1996, Da Nang, Vietnam) is currently based in Los Angeles. Their practice explores space, time, and memory through subversion of self-constructed painting systems. They received their BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2020 and is currently an MFA student at the University of California, Irvine. Within Reach is their first duo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Yair Sarmiento (b. 1994, Mexico City) is currently based in Los Angeles. His practice explores universal connectivity through an inquiry on materials and inscription as documentation of presence. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2021. Within Reach is his first duo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Caca - Dorian Wood

Dorian Wood
Caca

February 17th - March 10th 2024

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Caca, the first U.S. solo exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Dorian Wood’s visual work. Caca emerges from Wood’s nightly ritual of documenting the world’s troubles and follies through ink-based illustrations that depict swirling genitalia, gender-absent bodies, distorted icons and coprophagic musings. Over the past 10 years Wood has amassed hundreds of these “disruptive self portraits.” Caca collects a selection of these illustrations, grouped into series by ink color, and will include a mural on the gallery's north wall created by Wood specifically for the exhibition, keeping with the artist's ongoing intent of "infecting" spaces. 

Dorian Wood (b. 1975, pronouns: she/her/they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies with her artistic practice is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people.

 Wood has performed at institutions that include The Broad, Los Angeles, CA (2018), REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA (2019), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, CA (2010), Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid, Spain (2019), the City Hall of Madrid, Spain (2015), Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris, Mexico City, Mexico (2019), Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2017), Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany (2014), Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany (2014) and Moods, Zurich, Switzerland (2019), and at festivals that include Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles, CA (2011), OUTsider Fest, Austin, TX (2019), Festival Cruilla, Barcelona, Spain (2017), WorldPride Madrid, Spain (2017), Festivals Kometa, Riga, Latvia (2016), Moers Festival, Germany (2017), Cully Jazz Festival, Switzerland (2015) and Saint Ghetto Festival, Bern, Switzerland (2017).  

 From 2019 to 2020, Wood completed several successful international tours with their chamber orchestra tribute to Chavela Vargas, XAVELA LUX AETERNA. In 2022, Wood debuted their tribute to the singer Lhasa De Sela, entitled LHASA, at the Festival Internacional de Arte Sacro in Madrid, in collaboration with singer Carmina Escobar and composer Adrián Cortés. That same year, Wood presented Mares Ocultos, a multimedia chamber music project exploring the nature of male heterosexuality, at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. In 2023, Wood premiered the 12-hour composition/installation Canto de Todes at REDCAT in Los Angeles.

As a visual artist, Wood has created illustrations and video installations that have been exhibited in galleries around the world, including Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2022), La Carboneria, Huesca, Spain (2020), Fierman Gallery, New York (2020) and the Queer Biennial, Los Angeles (2018). They have also directed several short films, among them "The angel" (2023), Low's "Disappearing" video (2021), “American Savagery” (2021), “FAF” (2021), “The World’s Gone Beautiful” (2020), “PAISA” (2019, co-directed with Graham Kolbeins), “O” (2014) and “La Cara Infinita” (2013).

 Wood is a recipient of a Los Angeles County Performing Arts Recovery Grant, a City of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Project Grant, a NALAC Fund for the Arts Award, a Creative Capital Award and an Art Matters Foundation grant, and a past artist-in-residence at MacDowell Residency, Loghaven Artist Residency, Building Bridges Art Exchange, Etopia, Centro de Arte y Tecnologia and MASS Gallery. 

Wood has released over a dozen recordings, most recently the albums You are clearly in perversion (with Thor Harris) (Astral Editions, 2023) and Excesiva (Dragon's Eye Recordings, 2023).

Anima Reflections - Olivia Booth

Olivia Booth
Anima Reflections

January 13th - February 4th
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13th, 7-10pm

Monte Vista is pleased to present Anima Reflections, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist, Olivia Booth. Booth creates assemblages of glass and chalk drawings that explore perception, mediation and the role of technology in personal and collective reflection.

In Anima Reflections, she presents a new, eponymously titled diptych for the corner wall. It is accompanied by glass floorboard pieces opposite, and an artist’s book identifying and expanding on the images tracked across the work.

Booth’s medium is a mesh of elements, familiar yet unexpectedly configured. Elements of transparent, semi-transparent, opaque and mirrored glass (along with plastic) frame, contain, shape and obscure drawn elements rendered by hand in soft chalk. Visible hardware operates functionally and aesthetically– punctuating space and yielding details of interest.

Drawing is central to Booth's practice, from notational sketchbook drawing (as seen in her artist's books) to the wall works. Her hand is fluid and gestural as she records encounters from daily experience. Subjects range from informational, to entertainment, to family life. Across the moments that call her attention, Booth is conscious of both the image and its mediated delivery— a mirror, a window, a vitrine, or so often, the screen.

In Anima Reflections, and throughout Olivia Booth’s work, glass is removed from its picture window role. It is glass that has been modified with artistry– blown, slumped, fused, cobbled, drilled or cut. (To create these elements Booth often collaborates with glass artists.) Layered into her assemblage-tableaux, the sculptural glass generates a dynamic interplay between image and surface. This enmeshment, which includes the varied hardware and implements that structurally and conceptually adjoin them, is the pictorial substance of the artwork. It is a uniquely robust– responsive and inclusive– kind of picture making, one that contains and reflects on itself, and the forms of mediation central in contemporary life.

“Anima Reflections is about the daily dance between opacity and transparency, and how we transition between those rightful states as we interconnect with our worlds. It’s about how self-reflection comes to pass– individually and collectively– in those undulating states, and how glass– as mirror, window and, above all, screen– are inextricably involved in this dance.” — Olivia Booth

Olivia Booth has been making art and teaching in Los Angeles since moving from New York City over 20 years ago. In recent years her work could be seen at Irenic Projects, LA, UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, Goldfinch Gallery in Chicago, and Pilchuck Gallery in Seattle. Over the years her work has been shown at spaces like Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, SculptureCenter, The Finley Gallery and The Schindler House, in addition to other exhibition spaces, and has been written about in Art Forum and the LA Times among other publications. She teaches college classes in drawing and also teaches drawing from her own studio, The Drawing Studio, and she feels fortunate to be in constant dialogue with students. She was last a student herself at Art Center College of Design, where she received her MFA in 2003, and before that at Cornell University, where she received her BFA and BA with honors.