Intermittent Dialogues

Rebecca Bennett Duke, Michael Lewis Dodge, Roberta Gentry, Melissa Huddleston, Chris Miller, Stacy Elaine Dacheux and Danielle Sommer, and Tyler Waxman
Opening reception: Sunday March 15th  4-7 pm. 
The exhibition runs until April 5th.

            Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Intermittent Dialogues. This group exhibition featuring the work of current Monte Vista members (and their collaborators).Since 2007, over 20 members have contributed their blood, sweat, and tears to make Monte Vista Projects what it is: soliciting proposals, organizing shows, throwing our infamous annual holiday raffle, participating in group exhibitions, or just having dinner. Part of working collaboratively to program a space means discovering common interests, which in the past have included mysticism, outer space, games, sense of community, and more. Intermittent Dialogues showcases the commonalities and differences between Monte Vista's newest group of members.
            Upon our first group meeting, we decided that we should get to know each other by sharing our work. We quickly realized that there are similar themes between us, mostly in groups of two or three. Rebecca Bennett Duke, Melissa Huddleston, and Danielle Sommer all involve some form of interactivity in their work. Melissa and Danielle (with collaborator Stacy Elaine Dacheux) create intriguing books as part of their art practice while Rebecca creates push button light boxes. Michael Dodge’s textural grid paintings and Roberta Gentry’s crystal-like forms look toward design and geometry. Lastly, Chris Miller and Tyler Waxman manifest interest in mark making, obsessively covering the surfaces of their works with small marks that accumulate to make a larger matrix of forms. 
            It is an unspoken truth that once you are a Monte Vista member, you are always a Monte Vista member. Like a prestigious graduate program, we find ways to include past and present members in the activities that Monte Vista Projects hosts. This exhibition welcomes our newest set of members and reveals the threads between them. 

Tyler Calkin - G.A.M.E. Night

Key-Swipe Finger-Calligraphy

The space will be open for visitors to learn and practice key-swipe finger-calligraphy. Visitors can use a custom fingertip stylus and CMYK paint to trace the forms of 20 sample words. The forms are derived from the shapes traced onto virtual swipe keyboards. These samples have been randomly selected from the one hundred most common words in the English language. As gestural icons they offer a replacement to alphabetic symbols and serve as an introduction to this new mode of writing.

 Gesture Analog Mapping Experiment Night

G.A.M.E. Night is the inauguration of an effort to collectively develop new gestures for use in social communication. Gesture maps tie different hand motions to various functions for touchscreen devices. In the last several years, hundreds of these maps have been patented by corporations like Apple. As smartphones, tablets, and multi-touch trackpads have become ubiquitous, so have gesture map interfaces. After repeated performance of these gestures, our bodies start to remember them. In this way companies colonize our bodies and we no longer perform ourselves; we perform patents. 

 G.A.M.E. Night is a space to improvise new body language by recombining the gestures and functions of Apple’s patents. Three card games let players take screen-based movements beyond the screen into social and spatial communication. Successful players can record their new gesture-function pairs onto an analog surface - paper - to include it in a growing Library of Alternative Gestures.

Tyler Calkin is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in Art and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts and has since shown his work across the US and internationally. He has also led gameplay-based artist workshops in Nepal and Mexico.His participatory projects examine social constructions, habits, and anxieties through play and improvisation. Drawing particularly from safety and hygiene products and developing digital interfaces, Tyler rearranges material culture into social catalysts. The resulting situations propose new models for interpersonal and inter-object relations.

Benjamin Lord - The New Retail Mycology

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present The New Retail Mycology, an exhibition of new photographs by Benjamin Lord. The project explores notions of the made and the found, and how personal experiences are constructed and demolished in an age saturated by advertising.

         The photographs depict elaborate but ephemeral sculptural tableaux, conjoining the intentionality of highly wrought craft objects made by the artist with a range of scavenged materials whose provenance is more obscure.  Reversing the customary assumption of a photographer’s studio as a place of rigid authorial control, Lord’s illusionary assemblages depict tenuous arrangements that walk a line between earnest handicraft and absurdist satire. Mushrooms and fungi appear throughout the project as both physical materials and as a deliriously mixed metaphor for spontaneous organic generation, the corporate branding of psychedelic experience, and the limits of scientific knowledge. Combining influences from advertising imagery, Japanese flower arranging, and the freeform juxtapositions of the internet, these images extend Lord’s longstanding interest in the illusionistic space of “sculptures” that exist only in the photographic imagination. Presented in candy-colored painted aluminum frames, Lord’s miniature worlds chart a space of freedom where the deliberate and the accidental mingle imperceptibly.

The opening reception will be on Feb 7th from 6 – 9 p.m. The exhibition will run until 3/01/2015. Gallery hours are 12 -5 p.m. Sat and Sun or by appointment. 

Checkout review by Alicia Eler "When Consumer Goods Blossom Into Otherworldly Fungi"

Vinyl Potluck - a project by Tom Norris

Vinyl Potluck
a project by Tom Norris
Bring a record, play a few tracks

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present the most recent installment of Vinyl Potluck, a project by Tom Norris. Vinyl Potluck is an ongoing series which investigates our relationship with vinyl records and nostalgia.

Attendees are invited to bring a vinyl record from their own collection and share with the group. The selection can be musical, historical, art-centered, or otherwise personally meaningful. A crate of records will be provided for those participants without records from which they may choose a selection. This record may then be kept by its selector, starting a new thread of nostalgia associated with both the vinyl object and the Vinyl Potluck event.

Nuttaphol Ma - A Grain of Rice Under A Microscope

Monte Vista Projects will be screening Nuttaphol Ma’s film A Grain of Rice Under A Microscope.

The screening will be on Jan 10 and 11 from 12 – 5 p.m.

 A Grain of Rice Under A Microscope. was inspired from an event that took place at a retail day job on a busy autumn Sunday in 2010.  Nuttaphol’s co-worker approached him looking deeply distraught. She saw our managers watching their activities on the office's computer monitor. The artist woke up the following day feeling like a grain of rice under a microscope. In 2013, the artist set out to retrace his experience of that busy autumn Sunday. He performed an act of sitting and surveying in and around the premise of McDonald's to mirror the 8 hour shift of the workers behind the counter. Two rolls of B/W super 8 film were deconstructed to shoot one frame for every four seconds in order to captured my 8 hour sitting where I recorded unfolding events and conversations that occurred between management, myself, and two police officers. The film is a poetic experience that slips between work and memory, protest and meditation, surveillance and watcher.

Nuttaphol Ma’s multidisciplinary works align his dreams, consciousness and memories to compose stories about the dreams of leaving and dreams of roots, the longing and not BE longing. Ma connects the seemingly disconnected patterns and sequences of unfolding moments from the everyday to re-tell empowering stories of belonging and not longing, about flowers blossoming from solitude. Ma currently runs a nomadic self-imposed sweatshop entitled The China Outpost that migrates throughout Los Angeles. Ma has participated in numerous exhibition spaces throughout Los Angeles including: 18th Street Art Center, The Armory Center for the Arts, Pitzer College Lenzner Gallery, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall, The Fellows of Contemporary Art, Angels Gate Cultural Center and Freewaves. Through the generous support of the Los Angeles art community, Ma is a recipient of the following fellowships and artist’s residencies: Armory Center for the Arts Teaching Artist Fellowship, California Community Foundation Fellowship, The Feitelson Arts Fellowship, Pitzer College Emerging Artist Fellow, 18th Street Art Center Artist Fellow, The Mountain School of Art Residency, the Richter Watson Fellowship Fund and the Walker / Parker Memorial Fellowship.

2014 Holiday Raffle

Sunday, December 14, 2014 | 4 p.m. - 7 p.m. Doors open at 4 p.m., tickets picked at random at 5:30 p.m. 

Free admission, tickets $10 a piece, no purchase limit 

Rain or shine, it's raffle time. Come join us for our annual fundraising benefit, featuring art by local artists (that means you). 

Feel like donating? 
Drop off times: 
Wednesday Dec 10, 3 - 9 p.m.
Thursday Dec 11, 3 - 6 p.m. 
Friday Dec 12, 3 - 8 p.m.
Just added! Saturday Dec 13, noon - 3 p.m.

Or donate a service! You can raffle off a service of any kind. Just let us know what you want to do and we will type up a certificate and post it for you . . . email info@montevistaprojects.com. 

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL ARTIST-RUN SPACE. 

Erika Lynne Hanson - Excerpt from Location…

November 1 – November 23, 2014
Opening Reception: November 1, 2014, 7 – 10 pm    

Exhibition open noon - 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday 

“Landscape: a fantasy of not belonging to the totality of life of a terrestrial expanse,
traditionally taking the form: you belong to us we, do not belong to you.”

—Robin Kelsey, Landscape As Not Belonging

Landscape is one of few circumstances where the thing and a representation of the thing share the same terminology. It is this space and overlap that Excerpt from Location......... investigates, specifically which qualities of a place are highlighted, altered, or lost when depicted through (or as) an object. Focusing on the surreal, mundane, and sublime landscapes that exist at the edges of more developed spaces, the show explores the translation of a view in fabric, video, and sculpture. Whether a video or a weaving, information is always lost and added by the method of representation, i.e. pixels jumping, a lens distorting, the linearity of a weaving, or the limitations of the hand. The installation brings together textiles, video projections and related objects (such as plants, rocks, or shelves) that work to create their own scene for the viewer to interact with—a new landscape.

Erika Lynne Hanson creates weavings, videos, and installations that connect diverse materials, histories, and places. Running through her work is a concern with the idea of landscape; specifically how landscape exists, by definition, as a view or representation—a space or scene that can never be reached physically. Hanson received a MFA from California College of the Arts, and holds a BFA in Fiber from The Kansas City Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited in various locations including Los Angeles, Kansas City, San Francisco, New York, Iceland, Chicago and Minneapolis. Hanson is a Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Art fellow and has been artist in residence at Real Time and Space in Oakland CA, and The Icelandic Textile Center in Blonduos, IS. In 2012 she co-founded 1522 Saint Louis, an experimental project space in Kansas City. Hanson is currently Assistant Professor of Fibers/Socially Engaged Practices at Arizona State University.

Michelle Andrade, John Weston, Michelle Wiener - Three's Company

Three's Company

Michelle Andrade, John Weston, Michelle Wiener

September 27 – October 19, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 27, 2014, 7 – 10 pm

Special Collaborative Drawing Event: October 5, 1 – 4PM

Exhibition open noon - 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday 

Whether positive or negative, the number three has significance in our culture.  Artists Michelle Andrade, John Weston and Michelle Wiener propose an exhibition exploring collaboration within a group of three.  Each artist comes from a similar educational background, given that they all attended graduate school together.  But each artist has a singular approach and practice within the fields of drawing and painting.  As individual artists, Andrade, Weston and Wiener have isolating studio practices resulting in long periods of solitude.  Three’s Company proposes a more social way of working.  The exhibition space will be divided into three different realms.  The first of the three will showcase individual discrete works. For the second section the artists will make an in situ wall drawing.  The final area will display works made during social drawing events within the span of the exhibition, reinforcing the collaborative drawing theme.  Through these three components, this exhibition will focus on three artists working as one.  The connective tissues of text, pop culture, and pattern play hinge these artists’ unique practices providing an overlapping ground on which to build collaborative work.  These people genuinely enjoy each other’s work and each other’s company.

Michelle Andrade’s work is a journalistic exploration into the everyday sprawl of the mundane. Brightly colored, whimsical drawings draw the viewer in, but a closer look reveals her personal anxieties, struggles, and insecurities. The fragmented phrases that run through her drawings come from her own thoughts as well as conversations and interactions with others. Taken out of context, these dark and humorous thoughts and phrases, juxtaposed with a playful aesthetic become accessible. That which would traditionally be deemed personal and uncomfortable allows the viewer to locate themselves in the narratives woven into her diaristic journey.

John Weston’s recent work puts a perverse spin on the theme of decoration.  While borrowing liberally from patterns in decorative textiles and optical illusions, the paintings also feature stylized figures on the top of patterned backgrounds creating a hybridized image.  The figures are erotically charged, and allude to the iconic images of underground comics and psychedelic posters.

Michelle Wiener explores topics such as the representation of women in popular culture; specifically film, in her paintings and drawings.  Through the sampling of text from nineteenth and twentieth century literature, as well as the philosophical works of Satre, Camus and Beauvoir, Wiener examines how female archetypes have not changed since The Epic of Gilgamesh.  Her compositions include a vast amount of negative space as well as no cast shadows, making the viewer conclude that the subjects exist within a vacuous imaginary space. 

Christina Agapakis, Rita Blaik, Megan May Daalder, & Amisha Gadani - Opening

Works by Christina Agapakis, Rita Blaik, Megan May Daalder, & Amisha Gadani explore the ‘un-closed’ through experimental videos, cavum prints, scientific illustrations, fragmented photos, & interactive fashion.

Jeff & Gordon: Day Job

If the Lumière Brothers' "Workers Leaving the Factory" is synonymous with both the birth of film and the 20th century, then the 21st century, internet-based version might be called "Workers Always at the Factory" – a paradigm reflected and embodied in this new work by Jeff Foye and Gordon Winiemko. JEFF&GORDON: DAY JOB is a split-screen video (or video diptych) that collapses a day in the life of the two artists – during which they are always in some state of labor, or engagement with labor – into a monolithic 8-hour running time that coincides with the workday that laborers once fought and died for. The 8-hour running time implies a laborious commitment from the viewer but also deliberately undermines the expectation to take in “the whole thing.” JEFF&GORDON: DAY JOB is a time-based work that transcends the boundaries of time, the way our labor now transcends boundaries under the “empire” of late capitalism. At the same time, this transformation of time given over to labor into an object of aesthetic contemplation begs the question, how might we transform our labor?

JEFF&GORDON is the collaboration of Jeff Foye and Gordon Winiemko. In their video and performance based work, the artists examine the social customs and cultural idioms that are so much a part of the "air we breathe" that we often ignore how they shape our lives, for better or worse. Together they have had solo shows at such venues as the UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery, the CSU Northridge West Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and 323 Projects. In 2012 they were awarded the Investing in Artists grant by the Center for Cultural Innovation. They have each been awarded a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council for Long Beach, where they both reside. Jeff received his MFA from CSU Long Beach and currently works part-time there as the student gallery coordinator and as an instructor. Gordon received his MFA from UC Irvine and works as an instructor at the Art Institute of California, CSU Fullerton, Fullerton College, and Los Angeles Mission College.

Elisa Salcedo - Panopticon

Salcedo’s most recent work addresses how society is coming to terms with the rapid evolution of technology, in particular how technology has shaped our relationship to power and control. Human interaction has noticeably shifted to cyber platforms, which “catalog” nearly all informational aspects of our lives: email, social media, online banking and bill pay. Cloud technology is now crowd-sourcing these streams of data into an omnipresent, ethereal and easily accessible cyber storage space. Coupled with advancements in video, Google Earth, satellite, drone and GPS technology, vulnerability and surveillance have become common aspects of our lives, whether we realize it or not.

"Panopticon" explores human vulnerability in relation to surveillance and privacy. How much do we know about the ways our movements are tracked and analyzed? What are the consequences of our everyday internet use at home or with Smartphones? Invoking the idea of a power higher than us, both in physical and metaphysical aspects, and to explore the meaning of being watched, the exhibitions offers an aerial perspective of peoples’ heads. The images portray an anonymous “mug shot” that includes words that the US Department of Homeland Security uses to monitor social networking sites, inviting us to confront ourselves as subject and our choices within. 

Elisa Salcedo is a Los Angeles based artist and art educator. Her work has been shown at Art Space Purl, in South Korea, and through out California, including The Latino Museum in Los Angeles, SomArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, and a solo show at Moorpark College Gallery. Salcedo holds an MFA from Cal State University Long Beach and is a recipient of a Teaching Artist Fellowship from the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA, where she is a faculty member. She also teaches at Cal State University Northridge and the Children’s Institute.

Christina Ondrus - In the Shadow of the Invisible

Reception Saturday, May 17, 7-10pm / Performance at 8pm

Exhibition dates: May 10 - June 1, 2014

Into the late nineteenth century, an invisible substance known as luminiferous ether ( light-bearing ether ) was purported to permeate the universe and provide a medium for the propagation of light. The notion of ether harkened back to Ancient Greece, where it was elucidated by Plato as the classical fifth element, joining earth, air, fire and water in the composition of the universe. In 1887, the Michelson-Morely experiment set out to detect the relative motion of the earth and the luminiferous ether. The experiment produced the now famous “null result”, where no measurable evidence was found indicating the ether, effectively disproving ts existence. Although it seemed to have failed its original mission, the experiment helped establish the constancy of the speed of light, which proved foundational to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, often referred to as the “second scientific revolution”. From the ancient to the modern, we have sought to explain and visualize the unseen, with varying results. Half a world away, and thousands of years earlier, inhabitants of Oba Island created Stone Age ritual rock and sand tracings to guide the passage of the departed into the netherworld. Their labyrinthine courses inscribe a physical path and a spiritual cosmology that formally echoes the path that light was refracted in the Michelson-Morely experiment. Some truths may never be proven to be true. We remain as our ancestors, ever searching for our source, in the shadow of the invisible.

Monte Vista Projects is proud to present "In the Shadow of the Invisible", the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Christina Ondrus, which includes a new series of text and diagrammatic drawings on canvas and a live eurythmy performance. The show involves overlapping languages for the ineffable in science, philosophy and mysticism, exploring ways in which articulations of the unseen inform perception of the visible.

The drawings on canvas pull from diverse sources, including a 19th century experiment on the relative motion of matter (Michelson-Morely experiment), a Stone Age ritual sand tracing, and a series of appropriated texts that describe aspects of the unknown and the nature of the universe. The works suggest how language and imagination provide access to nascent knowledge—tapping into an encompassing sphere of human thought, or state of cosmic consciousness. Formal aspects of the drawings correlate with revelation and obfuscation. Their opaque, matte black surfaces absorb light, while built-up graphite areas of text and image reflect it. Depending on the lighting and position of the viewer, the paintings are more (or less) visible.

The show also presents a one-night collaborative performance with eurythmist Maguerite McKenna, which includes eurythmy, vocal incantation and a group movement of Cassini ovals (a series of quadratic curves named after astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini who investigated them while studying the relative motions of the Earth and the Sun in 1680). Eurythmy is a form of expressive gesture developed by Rudolf Steiner (Anthroposophy) and Marie von Sivers as a therapeutic means to visualize the unseen, such as the heard sound or spoken word.

Christina Ondrus is an artist whose work participates in the experience of mystery and the search for knowledge, wandering a liminal space where science, philosophy and mysticism grasp toward understanding perception, phenomena and one's place in the universe. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and was a 2010 artist fellow with the Terra Foundation for American Art. She recently published an artist book, An Invisible Way: A Synchronous Journey, tracing her travels to a Neolithic archeoastronomy site in France. Christina is also the founding director of KNOWLEDGES, which organized a site-specific exhibition featuring more than thirty artists at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 2012. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Performance participants (subject to change) Diana-Sofia Estrada, Amanda Yates Garcia, Paul Gillis, Lauren McElroy, Marguerite McKenna, Sarah Petersen, David Prince, Brian Ramisch, Sylvie Spencer, Alise Spinella, Clarissa Tossin, Brica Wilcox

Next Words - CalArts MFA Writing Program Graduate Thesis Readings

We are happy to host the CalArts MFA Writing Program for their fourth in a series of Graduate Thesis Readings.

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.