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

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

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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.