September 8 – September 29
LOS ANGELES—Monte Vista Projects presents Jeffrey Atherton: SLEEPWALKER, a solo presentation of new work by this celebrated Los Angeles-based artist. An important figure in interdisciplinary avant-garde work in Los Angeles for two decades, Atherton will be displaying nine of his haunting photographs chosen from the full set of 44 that make up Sleepwalker: A Journal of Five Events, accompanied by: 10 Rules for Better Sleep. Continuing Atherton’s explorations of the boundaries between photography, fiction and performance—for example, Notes for a Lost Play (1998) and Liddy (2004)—Sleepwalker presents a series of images arranged as journal entries outlining five sleep events. Accompanying the images, the text—10 Rules for Better Sleep—challenges our presuppositions in compelling ways. The dreamlike images represent mementoes of the visions seen during a state of disturbed sleep that has been manipulated by some outside force. The text serves as an open framework for the images, shifting their context. Atherton is interested in the displacement of the object by its photographic representation. This displacement creates issues of fragmented narrative, bibliographic ghosts, signifier/signified slippage and the photographic split between photo documentation (the photojournalistic impulse) and poetics of the photographic image (Bachlelardian concepts of image and reverie). The dizzying effects of this image/text draws the viewer into new ways to relate to experience, revealing fresh capacities of the photographic medium.
Andres Payan-Estrada - BLUE APOLLO
August 4 – August 26, 2018
LOS ANGELES—Monte Vista Projects presents Andres Payan-Estrada: BLUE APOLLO, a solo presentation of new works by the Los Angeles-based artist. For BLUE APOLLO, Payan-Estrada uses LGBTQ nightlife aesthetics to connect the 1969 lunar landing and space exploration with historic and contemporary forms of queer liberation. The exhibition includes drawings, collage, textual pieces, and an immersive installation composed of ceramic sculpture, scent, and lighting. BLUE APOLLO is on view at Monte Vista Projects (1206 Maple Ave #523, Los Angeles, CA 90015) from August 4 through August 26.
In considering the current political climate and onset of a New Space Era, Payan-Estrada’s new body of work urges a dismantling of hetero-patriarchal, colonial, and militaristic histories that define how outer space is understood in the greater American consciousness. He presents the possibility of a space imaginary that poetically mutates these narratives into boundless queer explorations.
Many of the works make poetic associations between these seemingly disparate themes. Downtown LA 1969 and Downtown LA 2018 are charcoal and color pencil drawings that depict the locations of LGBTQ bars as stars in a dark sky—functioning as both geographic maps and imaginary constellations. For Light of a Thousand Moons (Blue), Payan has collaged onto a deep black surface numerous disco ball photographs he has taken at gay bars throughout the U.S. Disassociated from their original context, the group of objects floats without relation to a physical space.
The immersive installation Last Call anchors the exhibition space, consisting of a fifty-foot black velvet curtain with a glowing blue spotlight cast onto the gallery floor and an installation of 500 lbs of loose porcelain. The blue light acts as the only light source in the gallery and evokes the imagined aesthetic of a gay club in a lunar environment. The installation includes objects such as a porcelain-tiled disco ball and a scent that mimics the smells of a bar.
“I am fascinated by the way memory, meaning, and value are placed onto objects and spaces and how these LGBTQ spaces offer the possibility to transport you into a safe reality,” says Andres Payan-Estrada. “One of my fondest memories growing up in Mexico is going to a gay bar for the first time. It was quite a stupefying moment- a sloppy bar night that allowed me to experience the boundlessness of queerness."
Andres Payan-Estrada (b.1987, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and BFA from The University of Texas at El Paso. He is currently the curator of public engagement at the Craft & Folk Art Museum and visiting art faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. His work as an artist, educator, and independent curator champions contemporary craft and ceramic practices. He aims to create accessible ways to understand materiality, object theory, making, and the role they have in adding value to the everyday.
Andy Fedak - The Crystal Spirit Or: How I Became An Anarchist
This exhibition explores Anarchist thought through the eyes of George Orwell’s time in the Spanish Civil War. Probing into anarchism’s altruistic roots, it ties together a diverse group of connections from contemporary neuroscience, to spirituality and politics, on into the current uprising in the Rojava region of Kurdistan where the same anarchist practice is going on today that Orwell discovered in Spain. A deeply personal work, it also reveals the artist’s own journey to find alternative ways of seeing the world after recovering from a mental illness.
A combination of a surrealistic narrative film and virtual reality installation, the work utilizes state of the art visual effects, 3D animation, and interactive virtual reality techniques to immerse the viewer inside the worldview of the anarchist.
Andy Fedak was born in 1978 and lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from New York University and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His work has been shown at the Palace of Fine Art in Mexico City, the Luckman Gallery in Los Angeles, the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Laguna Art Museum, and other venues around the world. Andy is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at California State University, Fullerton.
Nick Loewen and Rimas Simaitis - Optic Treatment
Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Optic Treatment. This exhibition features two Los Angeles based artists: Nick Loewen and Rimas Simaitis. The exhibition explores the relationships between image and form, surface and color, process and content, light and shadow, and their friendship. The work, made by both mechanical and manual means, uncovers similarities between organic and automated processes of production. The two artists first met in graduate school at UCSB, and since their graduation, have reflected on each other’s work. They initially didn’t intend to show together, but circumstance has brought them together. Call it coincidence or chance, it’s clear that they share similar wavelengths.
Nick Loewen creates all over composition paintings using found lenticular imagery. He then meticulously cuts the lenticulars into small squares then reassembles them into mesmerizing and hypnotic mosaics. His randomized method of generating images obscures the content and meaning of the found imagery. From landscapes to still lifes, Nick Loewen splices imagery, color, and movement to make subtle moments that call for interaction on the part of the viewer.
Rimas Simaitis takes inspiration where science intersects moments of mysticism. This is when his work crystallizes. His cast aluminum objects resemble patterns that were left on a sandy beach or in a sandbox. The objects reflect the moments of focused energies or patterns, revealing the possibility and mystery that shapes Simaitis's worldview.
Nick Loewen (b. 1984) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BA from Goshen College in 2006 and an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2012. His work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Wonder Valley, CA.
Rimas K. Simaitis was born in Coeur d’Alene, ID (1983), and currently lives and works in Venice Beach, CA. He completed his MFA in Spatial Studies at the Univeristy of California, Santa Barbara in 2012. His work has been exhibited around the country, and has been included in biennial exhibitions at the Boise Art Museum (2010) and at the New Wight Gallery at UCLA (2012). He has completed residencies at the Ox-Bow School of Art, Wave Farm, and on Andrea Zittel’s Indy Island at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Philip Newcombe - ODEON
April 14th - May 13th, 2018
Philip Newcombe subtly alters everyday objects, creating through the manipulations he makes in relation to their original function, a whole host of possible narratives / alternative realities. Like a deflating beach ball filled with air from the lungs of a dying man or a folded up piece of paper of the most beautiful place in the world, carried around in his back pocket, these objects go beyond the exhibition’s space / time-frame. Some are erected as performative monuments, like the fact of sucking a gobstopper to create a universe or dipping a piece of thread from a fallen button, in perfume. Although at times the work appears elusive, it is nevertheless still concerned with a form of intimate and direct communication with the onlooker.
Philip Newcombe (b. Germany 1970. Lives and works in the UK).Recent selected exhibitions include solo exhibitions at 'ATTIC', Brussels (2018), ‘A+’ Berlin (2017), Maria Stenfors, London (2015, 2014), CAPC Musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux (curated by Alexis Vaillant, 2013) and group shows at MUDAM, Luxembourg (2016) MuHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2014), Tripode, Rezé, Nantes (2014), Neon Parc, Melbourne, Aus (2013), CAPC Bordeaux (2012), Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London (2009), New York Art Book Fair with Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (2008), Centre d'art Contemporain, Chamarande. Paris (2008). Newcombe recently completed a residency in 2017 at CCA Andtratx, Mallorca.
Alex Robbins - Complements
All photos by Ruben Diaz
Alex Robbins
Complements
March 17 - April 8, 2017
Monte Vista Projects presents a continuing series of works by Alex Robbins called “Complements.”
Meticulous copies of early modernist paintings, these works are executed in the complementary colors of the originals. The paintings on exhibit here concentrate on the female nude as painted by artists Christian Rohlfs (1849 - 1938), Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919), Walter Sickert (1860-1942), and Willem De Kooning (1904 - 1997).
The nude painting has historically been an object of desire, titillation, and ownership. It is perhaps only through the history of painting that a naked body can be considered nude. As the nude became cemented as a standard motif, the painters color sense concurrently emerged as arguably their most irreducible subjective quality, a foothold for individuality. Inverting the narrative space of the paintings color by color, brushstroke by brushstroke, Robbins’ “complements” destroy and fetishize the subjective process developed by the original artists. The nudity is laid bare, unprotected by natural light.
Also included is a non-color inverted replication of a work by society painter John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925). “Mrs. Carl Meyer and her Children” is a famed family portrait in the collection of the Tate Britain. The exacting replication acts as a kind of inane but playful doubling whereby artifice investigates art. Next to the inverted nudes, this work seems uncannily protected by clothing and light.
Alex Robbins is an artist and educator working in Los Angeles, CA. Recent exhibitions of his work have appeared at Atlas House (Ipswich, UK), Commonwealth and Council, (Los Angeles, CA), Luckman Fine Arts Complex - CSU LA, (Los Angeles, CA). He is also the curator of a small experimental exhibition space called The Window located at 1909 7th Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90016.
Cell, Share, Swivel Chair
Cell, Share, Swivel Chair
Lynne Marinelli Ghenov, Justin Michell, & Adrian Paules
January 6-28, 2018
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to announce Cell, Share, Swivel Chair, a three-person exhibition featuring works on paper by Lynne Marinelli Ghenov and Justin Michell and sculptures by Adrian Paules.
In what ways can the infinite possibilities of a specific practice or space be aligned with a finite gridded structure? We often think of structures as rigid constraints, but perhaps a necessary flip side to this can be found in children's playground equipment. In this case, the grid functions as a space of open-ended play, where users continually re-invent new ways of interacting within these forms. In ‘Sade, Fourier, Loyola’ Roland Barthes considered three different authors as what he called “logothetes,” the founders of new discourses. Each began by breaking down their subject matter into discreet units or logical possibilities, and then proceeding to put those pieces to use and make choices among them in a combinatory - a field with its own set of rules or grammar. As Wittgenstein might have put it, logothetes are inventors of new language games.
Structure can take the form of a strict self-imposed method of production, an organized visual code found in source materials to be mutated or reacted against, or a visual syntax within which to arrange a set of elements. The resulting production invites us to ‘read’ it according to its own terms, at the same time that it resists attempts to translate it into speech or written words. This structuring exists independently from the kind of linear, propositional logic found in verbal or written statements - enacting itself directly in space. Each of the artitsts in this exhibition explore these themes in distinct ways.
Lynne Marinelli Ghenov uses graphite on found ledger paper that evokes vivid childhood memories of her parents’ home office. The relic becomes both the site and implement for the artist to invent with and compose new amalgams of forms and objects. The results are akin to a child's inventive mimicry of adult activities like bookkeeping.
Justin Michell employs a purposely limited set of elements in his diagrammatic drawings. Colored blocks, comic strip speech bubbles, and wiry lines of acrylic squeezed from syringes suggest interlocutors engaged in imaginary conversations. These noisily mute rebuses tempt us to decipher while resisting straightforward narrative.
Adrian Paules uses stacks of sawn and finished boards as a three dimensional record of movements and thoughts. Each stack functions as a record of its own making, as well as the logic and subjective decsions attached to these changes. In relation to each other, each scuplture becomes one enactment or iteration selected by the artist from an endless virtual series.
In All Sincerity
In all Sincerity
Sierra Harris, Josh Kawahata,
Helena Martinez, Danny Shapiro,
Amy Zapata, Tirsa Delate, Caitlin Mullally & Abriel Gardner
Reception: December 15th 7-10pm
Performance at 8pm
Open Hours: Wednesday, December 13th - Sunday, December 17th, 12-5pm
1206 Maple Ave., 5th floor, suite 523
Los Angeles, CA 90053
In all Sincerity is a group exhibition that speaks to the interactions of parallel realities and contradictions featuring work by Sierra Harris, Josh Kawahata, Helena Martinez, Danny Shapiro, Amy Zapata, Tirsa Delante, Caitlin Mullally, and Abriel Gardner.
Sierra Harris and Danny Shapiro explore the nature of reality as a manifestation of consciousness where both everything and nothing are real. Working through the digital and the corporeal as parallel and superimposed realities, these artists investigate the blurring boundaries between cyberspace and the IRL.
In the process of learning how to sail, Sierra Harris records the audio and GPS coordinates of each endeavor. She created a 3D animation to correlate with the audio. Her work examines how an experience occurs firsthand versus the representation of that experience in a virtual world. She is based in Long Beach, CA and is currently pursuing a BFA in photography at California State University Long Beach.
Danny Shapiro’s paintings use a collage sensibility to grapple with the influx of imagery we experience in our day to day lives. Through the use of translucent fabric the artist is able to form an open space for the viewer to navigate new relationships between images. He earned his BFA from Columbia College Chicago in the spring of 2017 and is based in Los Angeles.
Tirsa Delate grew up in New York City and recently moved to Los Angeles to pursue her MFA at California State University, Northridge. She uses performance, photography, and video to explore relationships among the body, the construction of identity, and nature. In this performance, dance, rhythm, and spontaneous movement are accompanied by and respond to live, electronically produced music in a quest to experience and understand unconstrained dance in institutional spaces? Does live music erase or reinforce the boundary between mind and body, and for whom? The accompanying video, Flashes, compiles of still images documenting past performances. The strobe-like flashing in the video provides a rhythmic, stable pulse that acknowledges the intuitive, primal movements of my body. Displayed on a tablet, Flashes emphasizes technology’s effect on the nuanced relationship between performer and viewer.
Exploring reality through negation and affirmation, the works of Josh Kawahata, Abriel Gardner and Caitlin Mullally are understood through discovering contradictions in our relationships to memories.
Josh Kawahata’s paintings are images based on memories he’d like to relive, or imagined events he wishes had happened or would happen. He explores the blurred lines of memories, the way the mind can paint a picture of things that never occurred and make them seem as true as reality. He is based in Hacienda Heights, California and is studying drawing & painting at California State University Long Beach.
In their collaborative piece titled “In all Sincerity,” Caitlin Mullally and Abriel Gardner actively understand the process of neglect through installation and performance. Through the form of dance scores, they explore the tension of representing something that can only be shown through contrast and negation. Caitlin Mullally is an installation artist and Abriel Gardner is a dancer/ choreographer; both based in Los Angeles. Caitlin Mullally and Abriel Gardner are earning their BFAs from California Institute of the Arts.
Helena Martinez’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Demonic Possession” is a study of schizophrenia interpreted as demonic possession. Because of the misunderstandings and
underrepresentation of schizophrenia, it has become more fictionalized than real. The work identifies parallels between symptoms of schizophrenia and representations of exorcisms in horror. Helena Martinez is an artist exploring mental illness, healing, and the occult through performance and installation. They are based in Los Angeles and earning their BFA at California Institute of the Arts.
Amy Zapata has been a part of the Downtown Los Angeles Drag scene for the past 2 years. It has transformed her preconceived notions of identity and gender. Primarily photographing Queens in Los Angeles has turned her focus not just on the entertainers but the city itself. Each influences the other and are an integral backdrop to the work. Using both digital and film cameras Amy attempts to blur the lines of gender, to highlight the avant-garde, and to document the changing performers their lives and the landscape.
LAndscape
LAndscape
November 4th - 26th
Opening Reception: November 4th, 7-10pm
Monte Vista Projects presents the group show LAndscape. LAndscape looks at the subject of otherness and authenticity, through the lens of the living landscape. LA is a patchwork city of gardens, parks, and vast wild spaces including everything from rare native plants and imported exotics to garden gnomes and greenhouses. For this show LA artists will be invited to either work outside their comfort zones and explore our landscape with traditional painting/ drawing or to make more conceptual/ political work pointing towards the numerous ecological issues facing our city.
LAndscape features the work of Evan apRoberts, Nurit Avesar, Carl Baratta, Arezoo Bharthania, Danny Escalante, Samantha Fields, Nicole Guerrera, Kellan King, John T. Lange, Amanda Mears, Naomi Nadreau, Next of Kin Studio, Christine Nguyen, Erika Ostrander, Kristine Schomaker, Christian Tedeschi, Andre Woodward
Mother Ditch Film Screening
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles and Monte Vista Projects present an evening of film and video works by members of Mother Ditch, a critique group and skills-sharing community for experimental media artists in LA. Mother Ditch formed in summer 2016 to support the artistic process of making experimental/leftside/weirdo/art film in the ultimate industry town.
Join us at 7pm on Sunday, October 29, 2017 for a screening of short works by Mother Ditch members:
Trevor Byrne
Yelena Zhelezov
Chris Adler and Ali Adler
D.S. Chun
Sarah Beeby
Susanna Battin
John Emison
J. Makary
Amanda Kramer and Noel Taylor
Sarah Greenleaf
Jenny Herrick
Theresa Sterner and Zach Trow
Alex Tyson
Above stills clockwise from left: John Emison's "Untitled," Theresa Sterner and Zach Trow's "Point Break Dance," J. Makary's "This Is Where Wool Comes From, and Chris Adler and Ali Adler's "Seabands and Tummydrops"
Mutate - Leonardo González, Marton Robinson, Paul Rosero Contreras
Untitled by Paul Rosero Contreras
Mutate - Leonardo González, Marton Robinson, Paul Rosero Contreras
Curated by Beatriz Cortez
Preview: Saturday, September 16, 7-10pm
Opening: Sunday, September 17 from 5-8pm
Show runs from September 16 - October 18, 2017
For Mutate Leonardo González's Cabbages and Kings, Martón Robinson's Eat Me / Bite Me, and Paul Rosero Contreras's Fresh, merge into a collaborative installation that offers the public a variety of products made with coffee, chocolate, and bananas. The selection of specialty drinks includes a type of coffee that may be impacted by the Chevron oil spill in the Amazon region in Ecuador, and a variety of cocktails once offered by the Untied Fruit Company to its investors in locations removed from the Honduran bananas plantations, mainly, London, New York, and New Orleans, as well as a variety of figures that engage with the practice of consuming dark immigrant bodies as part of the Major League Soccer spectacle.
Leonardo González (Honduras, 1982) graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in Honduras (2001). His work was included in the X Central American Biennial (2016), the 56th Venice Biennial (2015), and the XXXI Pontevedra Biennial, among others. He lives and works in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Marton Robinson (Costa Rica, 1979) has an interdisciplinary background with studies in Physical Education and Art, and is completing his MFA at the Roski Schol of Art at USC (2018). He has shown his work at the X Bienal Centroamericana; el Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC) and Fundación Ars TEOR/éTica in San José Costa Rica; as well as the Getty Center and Eastside International in Los Ángeles, among others.
Paul Rosero Contreras (Ecuador, 1982) holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2015). His work was included in the Moscow Biennial (2016), the Venice Architecture Biennial (2014), and the XI Cuenca Biennial (2011), among others. He lives and works in Quito, Ecuador.
PST LA/LA shows that these works relate to:
This exhibition relates to several of the exhibitions in PST LA/LA, particularly Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas at UCR ARTSblock; Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin at the Huntington Library; and A Universal History of Infamy at LACMA and other venues.
Matthew Usinowicz - Foul Ball!
June 30- July 23, 2017
Foul Ball! Is an exhibition of new works by Matthew Usinowicz that use baseball as a metaphor to describe the American social and political landscape. The body of work draws it's context from the 2016 election results to current, and the ongoing exploits of this presidential catastrophe. Using the spectator experience of baseball parallel to political theater, results in a satirical narrative through work focusing on objects and materials that embody the game of baseball.
The conceptual inspirations for Matthew's work are the layers of human experience and spatial existence - the relationship between humans and obects. Matthew works and lives in San Francisco and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. He received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from UCSB.
Kelly Loudenberg - Foam Sweet Foam
May 27- June 18, 2017
Please join us for the opening of Kelly Loudenberg’s solo show, “Foam Sweet Foam” at Monte Vista Projects new location. With materials and actual props used by The Reality Based Training Association (RBTA), Loudenberg assembled a living space that can completely absorb bullets.
This bullet-absorbent still life, constructed of foam furniture, is a replica of a replica. The RBTA, an advocacy group, proposes that these foam simulations are the best way to prepare officers for shooter scenarios, arguing that they allow “the brain and body to process the experience as if it were actually occurring.”
By moving these props from the shoot-house to the gallery, the artist casts a critical eye on the kind of society that requires such training. With gun violence ever-present and rising, might we all be safer with this “soft-object” domestic design?
Kelly Loudenberg is a filmmaker & artist who has been exploring the physical and emotional landscapes of American justice for over a decade. This project has grown out of her work exploring the fine line between fact and fiction, and how that bleeds into the contemporary world.
She has recently completed production on a new documentary series for Netflix about wrongful convictions based on false confessions using the interrogation tapes to contextualize six separate cases (set to premiere in August 2017).
Her work has been shown at the Maryland Institute College of Art, SXSW Film Festival, and the Guggenheim Labs. She has been artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.
Foam Sweet Foam was supported in part by Borscht Corp.
j.frede & AMBER JEAN YOUNG - This Land
April 22- May 14, 2017
This Land explores landscapes through photos of both known and unknown origins. Transcribed through the quilted works of Amber Jean Young and the arrangements of j.frede.
Amber Jean Young constructs fractured images using photographs of the land and the sky joined together as quilted fiber based art. Matriarchs of rural communities have a long tradition of documenting their family’s history, triumphs and hardships, through quilt making. Using photographs taken on and around the land she grew up on in Northern California, Young continues this tradition, adapting it through abstraction, with finished quilts containing familiar rolling hills, blue skies and quiet clouds that are synonymous with California landscapes but also hold a deeper, personal history for her as she recalls her memories of childhood that played out on that very land and beneath such skies.
complete CV and additional images can be seen at amberjeanyoung.com
In contrast and harmony the Fiction Landscape work of j.frede combines found photographs together creating imagined landscapes that contain the secret memories of those who originally took the photos but have since lost or discarded them. This series addresses the ephemeral nature of documentation and memory. All of the photographs used are purchased at flea markets and carefully constructed into believable landscapes spanning both geography and time that is evident visually in land and the film stock used at the time the photograph was taken.
complete CV and additional images can be seen at jfrede.com
Small Things - Member Show
WE HAVE MOVED!
After a long run in Highland Park, Monte Vista Projects has moved locations! We're now on the 5th floor of the beautiful Bendix Building in the Fashion District. We have joined forces with Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles and Post Gallery, who are both on the same floor. All three spaces will coordinate openings to be on the same night, so there's much to see!
Our new address:
1206 Maple Avenue, 5th floor, #523
Los Angeles, CA 90015
To celebrate our move and all the hard work by our members along with the members of TSA LA, we're having a group show of our past and current member's work. "Small Things" opens Saturday, March 25th, from 7-10 pm.
Some notes about our new location:
Street parking in the Fashion District where we are now located opens up around 6pm. There is plenty of metered parking, some of which is free after 6pm. There is also parking under The Bendix Building if you’d rather.
The entrance of the building is on 12th and Maple. Take the elevator up to the 5th floor and head left where you will see our galleries.
Come check out the new space and help us ring in a new era of MVP!
Joshua Petker - Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun
Joshua Petker - Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun
Opening reception is February 11, 2017 6-9 pm
Exhibition runs until March 5th
Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Joshua Petker. The works in Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun are a continuation of Petker’s tussle between waywardness and structure in popular enlightenment. Floral bouquets of retro-patterned flowers blend a mixture of ephemerality and aesthetics. Amid them is a reference to the use of botanical imagery in painting: a tradition of portraying objects from the natural world with a purpose that is twofold. Depicted amongst the flowers are an infusion of the decorative European fashion that followed the Thirty Years’ War and the bohemian youth of the 1960s. Both periods were characterized by rapid change and inspired by moments of peaceful and relaxed living. In one painting, a hippie in flower dress stares East towards the rising Sun. The hippie’s gaze sets a trance-like mode of viewing that is useful for accessing Petker’s paintings. From such a state of looking, Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun considers generative possibilities of how relationships between history and patterning repeat themselves.
Joshua Petker lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including, Some Hippies and A Hobo at ASHES/ASHES, Los Angeles, CA (2015), Incognito at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2014), and About Face at ACME. Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Petker received his BA from The Evergreen State College and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2015.
Zach Bucek - Acrobat & The Sneaker Deal
ZACH BUCEK - ACROBAT & THE SNEAKER DEAL
Opening reception is Saturday Jan 7. from 6 - 9 pm.
Exhibition runs until Jan 29.
Max Beckmann’s Acrobat on trapeze features a body in motion, but flattened and paused. This body is observed by the circus spectators depicted in the painting far below, and it is observed without the obstruction of distance by any viewer of the painting. This exhibition features paintings of similarly paused bodies, pressed flatly to the surface. The viewer's gaze has been confined further to details of the bodies, such as hands, feet, or bare limbs. The image cropping used in the paintings evokes the compression of space and movement seen in the televised sports spectacle. The sneaker deal is the inscription of athletic success upon the public's physical space, to be shared through mass consumption. Endorsement deals displace and quantify the achievements of these spectral, celebrity bodies. With the power of purchase, we are able to celebrate their elevated status and wear it too. However, within the imaginative world of these paintings, this act of worship is enveloped by erotic play, a trembling of desire and possibility.
ZACH BUCEK received his BFA from The University of Texas at Austin, and currently lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. Acrobat features a body of work created in Los Angeles, where the artist was based 2010-2016. He has been featured in group exhibitions, including Gravity (2013) at the Long Beach City College Art Gallery, New Works Salon (2013) at the Echo Park Film Center, and a solo exhibition Mysterious Traveler as part of the Kamikaze Exhibitions, #25 (2012) at PØST.
Caitlin Mullally - Arrangement Against Content
Opening reception is on December 11th from 6-8 pm.
This exhibition runs from December 11th to December 18th.
Monte Vista Projects presents Arrangement Against Content by Caitlin Mullally. Arrangement Against Content is a sculptural sound installation that addresses domestic beauty and its relationship with conceptual art. Caitlin Mullally has been researching the art of arrangement in relation to sound, china and floral combinations, exploring the tropes of comfort and safety of the “feminine” as a quality of these formats as the containers of meaning. The artist is interested in the atmospheres and feelings created by domestic spaces, as well as regarding them as poetic experiences, and how we consciously and unconsciously construct notions of comfort. The piece discusses the presumed absence of content or aesthetic value of those environments, questioning the lack of need for interpretation in domestic spaces. The installation is inspired by the atmospherics of paintings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
Caitlin Mullally is a sound artist who specializes in collaborative installation work. Her work revolves around collaged ideas. She has previously shown her work at C.A.V.E. Gallery (2016), California Institute of the Arts (2016), Tiger Strikes Asteroid, (2016), Ranney (2015) and the American Red Cross in Tinton Falls New Jersey (2014). She was raised in New Jersey and lived in the United Kingdom. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California and is earning her BFA at California Institute of the Arts.
2016 Holiday Raffle
Season's Greetings!!!
Monte Vista Projects would like you to participate in our annual Holiday Raffle event on December 10th from 4 - 6 pm. If you would like to participate this year, you can drop off artwork at Monte Vista Projects on:
Tuesday, December 6th, 6-9pm
Wednesday, December 7th, 6-9pm
Thursday, December 8th, 6-9pm
Friday, December 9th, 6-9pm
Please have work ready to hang.
All of the proceeds go towards maintaining Monte Vista Projects, including preparing for future exhibitions by Zac Bucek, Kelly Loudenberg, Bessie Kunath and Nick Loewen and many more.
Music and food will be provided during the raffle. Please feel free to spread the word and invite other artists, friends, or family to the event. Raffle tickets will be $10 per ticket.
We are very appreciative for the ongoing support we have had over the last nine years and we hope to continue providing a space for underrepresented artists.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, and we hope to see you soon!!!!
Steven Putz - The Hanging Garden
The Hanging Garden by Steven Putz
Oct. 30th to Nov 20th, 2016.
Steven Putz’s most recent work,(The Hanging Garden) an installation using props, sculpture, and set design techniques, pays homage to the notorious Aokigahara Forest in Japan(also known as The Suicide Forest) . The artist discovered The Suicide Forest during a recent exhibition where he displayed works that addressed the issue of suicide in Japanese culture. The forest was used as part of a practice called Ubasute during the famines in the Edo period (1603-‐1868). In which, family members would abandon their ill and elderly there in an effort to better ration dwindling food supplies. A majority would have certainly perished due to exposure, inadvertently making Aokigahara Forest Japans most haunted location.
More recently (1950-‐present) the forest has become Japans number one suicide location. Presently the authorities no longer post the number of suicides occurring within the forest in an effort to avoid attracting negative publicity and romanticizing the deaths. However, the popularity of this location continues to increase in the media; Vice Documentaries, New York Times, Japan Times and numerous online sources have all reported on The Aokigahara Forest. And by the time Steven’s installation is presented, MTV will have released The Forest, a film using Aokigahara as a backdrop. Furthermore, several well received books have been published regarding the forest.
Steven Putz’s Hanging Garden balances between a sense of mystical horror and historical fact, between knowing what is present and what is the past. His installation invites viewers to step beyond what they might recognize as their own mortality.
Steven Putz received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has exhibited in group shows like I Heart Japan, Duke Gallery, Azusa , CA,. and Ghost Show VI, Borderline Gallery, Milwaukee, WI. He has received international awards for his printmaking. Steven has completed one novel and coauthored a novella, both unpublished. Though rarely exhibiting throughout his career, his works appear in private collections and have been purchased by such institutions as The Haggerty Museum. Steven resides in Los Angeles where his studio practice continues.