Past
The Torrance Art Museum 12 Gauge Series
Monte Vista
March 18-20, 2010
Special Event March 20, 11 am – 5 pm
The Torrance Art Museum, 3320 Civic Center Drive, Torrance, CA
http://www.torranceartmuseum.com
From March 17–20, Monte Vista will be part of the 12 Gauge series. As part of this 3 day exhibition, the seven artists who currently run Monte Vista will show a sampling of their own work as well as a collaborative collage that playfully illustrates past members, events, and exhibitions that have been hosted at Monte Vista since 2007.More about this exhibition >
February 20 - March 20, 2010
Opening Reception February 20, 7-10 pm
Minimum Yields Maximum curated by Gina Osterloh
MM Yu, Roya Falahi, Yason Banal, Ringo Bunoan, Joshua Callaghan,
Kent Familton, Louie Cordero, Hong-An Truong, Reanne Estrada, Poklong
Anading, Lena Cobangbang, Gary-Ross Pastrana
The artists in Minimum Yields Maximum work through a conceptual lens that considers everyday materials, and often engages greater social inquiries—a type of art practice that is both wide-ranging and inclusive. Many of the artists from the Philippines have studied and/or collaborated with artist and teacher Roberto Chabet. Perhaps this exhibition is a reminder that the Philippines has never hailed a singular geographical identity. It is also an appeal to shift art history, to consider a conceptual and political art model that includes the Pacific Rim. Most importantly, as an artist I have felt a strong resonance between the selected works from Manila and those from the United States. The works in this exhibition refuse to be easily identified or placed geographically. Instead, they build upon structures of loss, humor, rupture, trauma, and obliteration.
BOOK RELEASE: Sarita See, The Decolonized Eye : Filipino American Art and Performance
Sunday, February 28, 2pm (more)
January 31, 2010, 6pm
Mirjam Dröge Artist Talk (pdf)
In conjunction with The
Need to Hold Still at UC Riverside/California Museum of
Photography
January 9—February 6, 2010
Opening January 9, 2010, 7—10 pm
Rebecca Ann Hobbs
Ah-Round
Ah-round was made in the summer of 2008, during which time I was involved in a romantic relationship with Madou, the man in the video. Madou and I endeavored to make a work together that celebrated our shared experiences in spite of our apparent differences. He is from Mali and has been living in New Zealand for almost fifteen years now. I, the woman behind the camera, am from subtropical rural Australia and have been in New Zealand for about four years. Mali is a land-locked West African country, whereas New Zealand is an island in the South Pacific. Madou, confident in front of the lens, and I, preoccupied with the lens-based medium of video, realized that it was only natural for us to make a moving image piece together, yet we were also acutely aware of all that we represented as people and how that would affect the reading of the work. We decided that it would be best to confront our concerns candidly, whilst trying not to be too inhibited by the histories that separate us.
November 21- December 6, 2009
OPENING November 22, 2009, 5–8 pm
Public Dialogue - Wednesday, December 2, 7-9:30 pm
Monte Vista is proud to present Hey Man, You’re Saved, a group exhibition of new work by nine insightful and diverse artists from the USC Roski School of Fine Arts. Operating between the ideal world of the concept and the structured site of the gallery, the work of these artists manifests through different mediums to explore appropriated sound and imagery, photographic process, fantastical and constructed landscapes, and the flux of identity. Hey Man, You’re Saved. So come in and be rescued from the monotony of visual consumption. Let’s get saved!
October 3 – October 31, 2009
OPENING October 3, 2009, 7 – 10pm
The Peninsula
Antoni Wojtyra
Wojtyra’s exhibition at Monte Vista promises to surprise yet again as he proposes that art conform to an ecologically-sound, sustainable ecosystem. While material culture strives towards a clean, green, and biodegradable ideal, art continues towards an art that is timeless, classic, reverent, and archival. For this exhibition, Wojtyra was inspired by a migrant strategy of condensing material wealth into diamonds, sewn into the hemlines of clothes, smuggled across borders, only to be sold and converted back into a new life, and possessions, in a new settlement. Using this pragmatic, light, and supremely wise "immigrant logic," Wojtyra reimagines the gallery space as a peninsula, commingling and testing Art's effect and power in relation to *terra firma*, the street.
Thursday, September 17, at 8:00pm
GAME NIGHT at MONTE VISTA
Please join us for an evening of games created by David Elliott.
August 8–September 5, 2009
Opening Reception August 8, 7–10 pm
Until we come to one that reminds us
Paintings and sculpture
Kristina Faragher, Christine Frerichs, Amy Green, and Curt LeMieux
Until we come to one that reminds us is an exhibition of four artists whose works reflect an engagement with materials in a landscape of personal and political trouble. Kristina Faragher, Curt LeMieux, Amy Green, and Christine Frerichs use materials as surrogates for body, place, psyche, and the gap between emotion and language.
The paintings and sculptures in this exhibition suggest a substratum of guilt and loss in American psychology, the unease of belonging to a nation engaged in imperialist wars that have not ceased despite popular objection. The works subtly couple a domestic sensibility of the brutal landscape of war in a queasy interplay of long-time American themes.
June 27–July 25, 2009
Opening Reception June 27, 7–10 pm
Historical Vernacular
Melanie Nakaue and Wendy Red Star
Monte Vista Projects presents, “Historical Vernacular”, a two-person show by the artists Melanie Nakaue and Wendy Red Star that investigates American cultural history, language and traditional folk crafts.
May 9 - June 6, 2009
Opening Reception May 9, 7–10 pm
Amass
Brandon Anschultz (St. Louis)
Sarah Baker (London)
Fantastic Nobodies (Brooklyn)
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (London)
Robert Goetz (St. Louis)
Wendy Mason (Los Angeles)
Erick Michaud (Austin)
Brandon Morse (Washington D.C.)
John Watson (St. Louis)
Curated by Dana Turkovic
Amass is an exhibition with multiple intentions and various definitions. First realized at Boots Contemporary Art in St. Louis, the exhibition’s second incarnation will respond directly to the space and mission of Monte Vista but will also maintain its original curatorial premise. The title is a reference in its most direct translation a metaphor for curating an exhibition; to gather artwork, to assemble ideas, to group, and to collect. The exhibition at Monte Vista will bring together new video work from a selection of national and international artists.
April 10 – April 25, 2009
Opening Reception April 10, 7–10 pm
The Permanent Record of Newjack_Rasputin
Tucker Stilley
Walking the tenuous line between a "virtual residency" and an unsuccessful artificial intelligence test, multi-media artist Tucker Stilley pops the hood on his syncretic art-making process. Walking the tenuous line between a "virtual residency" and an unsuccessful artificial intelligence test, multi-media artist Tucker Stilley pops the hood on his syncretic art-making process. In a marathon 2 week session hosted at the Monte Vista Projects - Stilley, almost completely paralyzed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), demonstrates via live webcast & installation the method behind the creation of his on-going hyper-sigil artwork The Permanent Record of Newjack_Rasputin.
March 15, 2009
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) screening
February 21 – March 21, 2009
Drawling Room
An installation by Katie Lewis
After working with borrowed text for the last few years, Lewis has now turned her attention from noun to verb, focusing on the acting of writing rather than words themselves. The result is an installation of swooping, looping marks painted directly on the walls that suggest communication but refuse to make sense. One might wonder if galleries walls could talk, is this what they would say? Punning off of the drawing room as a space of casual conversation and drawl as a relaxed, even stuttering form of speech, Drawling Room offers a wry appraisal of contemporary information exchange.
January 10 – February 7, 2009
The Comfort of Enlightenment
Phillip Maysles
Monte Vista presents new works on paper by Philip Maysles. "The Comfort of Enlightenment" completes his engagement with Norman Rockwell's iconic painting about desegregation, "The Problem We All Live With" (1964). Using the photographs Rockwell made of studio models for this painting as source material for new work, Maysles addresses the failure of white artists to undermine America's racial hierarchy through a conventional studio practice. Maysles interprets and re-imagines the history of White artists' relations to Black life and culture in order to articulate the way in which White masculinity is both affirmed and challenged through contradictory feelings towards its perceived Black other. Inspired by W.E.B. Dubois' remark that, “White artists . . . cry for freedom in dealing with Negroes because they have so little freedom in dealing with whites,” Maysles takes creative liberties with the master narrative of American art history to reveal the inability of Euro-American liberals to recognize how they are both complicit with and subject to violence perpetrated in maintaining White supremacy. By filtering this history through an artistic lens shaped by lived experience, personal feeling and an understanding of critical race theory, Maysles makes the racial dynamic of his own subject position visible.
November 8 – December 7, 2008
Free fall perspective, on line and perception
Ricardo Alzati, Diego Toledo and Alejandro Pintado
"Free fall perspective, on line and perception” is an exhibition that reflects upon the influence of systems in everyday day life, in particular it focuses on perspective. It analyzes the rational and logical way this system has to represent the three- dimensional space. Perspective is known as a system used to create the illusion of three-dimensional images and spatial relationships on a two-dimensional surface. To accomplish this, there are a set of rules that should be followed. The vanishing point is the center from which the order should be placed; everything that is set out of this order is excluded from perspective. By having this apparently simple rule, all other possibilities are shot down. We tend to think that the system of perspective is only used for representation in a flat surface, on a two-dimensional flat object. The truth, is that the influence of this system has not stayed 2D, it has moved to the three-dimensional space. More than ever two-dimensional images describe our experience of the world, this expressions affect the way we perceive our individual experience of the three-dimensional world. Perspective gives preference to the rational and logical order over the abstract and perceptual experience. Free fall perspective on line and perception questions the retinal experience and pushes the boundaries of what is expected to be seen. In the shape of light, shadow, line, paintings and drawings is that the artists Ricardo Alzati, Diego Toledo and Alejandro Pintado invite the viewer to move further away the expected rules enhancing his experience of abstraction of the physical space.
-Alejandro Pintado
September 27 – October 25, 2008
Psychogeometry
David Hatcher, Laura Riboli, Brian Sharp
Organized by Matthew Thompson
Including work in a variety of media by David Hatcher, Laura Riboli, and Brian Sharp, the exhibition takes a nod from Guy Debord's notion of psychogeography—especially his focus on its effect "on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Instead of closing off or articulating a distinct relationship between geometry and psychology, Psychogeometry will function more as a drift through possibilities.
August 16 – September 17, 2008
Welcome Wilmington
Arnoldo Vargas
Wilmington California is synonymous with Industry. Home to more oil refineries than any other US city and gateway to the third largest port in the world, Wilmington is also synonymous with skyrocketing levels of pollution, cancer, asthma, and other ill effects of industry. “Welcome Wilmington” is a photographic exhibition by Arnoldo Vargas chronicling not only the glare of Wilmington’s oil refineries but also the complex political relationship with the thriving community who live within it. Documenting altars of victims of police shootings or participants in this year’s Peace and Dignity Run, Vargas examines the ways various instances of spiritual reflection continue to manifest within this structure.
July 12 – August 2, 2008
Coastal States
Gilda Davidian, Ignacio Genzon, Rena Kosnett, Jeff McLane, Katie Shapiro
July 6, 2008
SEW (a) PIECE: a COLLABORATIVE FLAG REARRANGEMENT
In March 2008, at the War Protest in Hollywood, Jade Thacker performed a rearrangement of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece wearing an American flag as her dress. Sitting in the street, Jade invited anyone to cut a piece from her dress/flag and offered them the choice to either keep it or put their piece in a cup she had for use in a later attempted reconstruction.
With many cut pieces remaining and one very disheveled American flag, Jade invites anyone and everyone to collaborate in a Flag Rearrangement.
May 31-June 28, 2008
"Hey, You Never Know." is the promotional slogan for the New York lottery, including Mega Millions. A multi-state lottery, Mega Millions draws its capital from twelve states, two of which are New York and California. Since migrating to the east coast three years ago, Annie Shaw has found herself living next to the Mega Millions billboards in Manhattan and in Brooklyn. Twice a week, as the number indicating the jackpot would change from low to high, she imagined anticipation rising and falling at each transition. And then once in a blue moon, the number would drop drastically, and she knew someone's life had changed.
May 17, 2008
An Evening With Martha Ronk, Kate Wolf, and Jibade-Khalil Huffman
A celebration of new work by poets and fiction writers at Monte Vista.
April 12 - May 10, 2008
The Mystical, Scatological and the Occult
The Mystical, Scatological, and the Occult is an immersive exhibition of film, video, and sculpture. Inspired by anthropologist Mary Douglas’s idea that all margins are imbued with transgressive power, this exhibition explores the liminal territories between the living and the dead, the sexes, and the bodily interior and exterior, as metaphors for the marginal at large.
March 1-30, 2008
In The Coffeehole, Colin Roberts pokes fun at the caffeine bombarded society we live in today by creating his own version of a coffee shop.
February 16, 2008
MATERIAL volume 1 launch party
Started by artists interested in the writings of other artists, MATERIAL supports visual artists with textual concerns. MATERIAL is not a thematically driven nor 'on-topic' publication, but rather an image-free, ad-free context for the materialization of artists' ideas, divergent opinions, thoughts, and appropriations of language. Our sensibility is experimental and critical. We solicit friction and conviviality both.
January 12 - February 9, 2008
Monte Vista is proud to present “Circle Jerks,” an exhibition of a collaborative painting project initiated by Max Lesser and Brett Cody Rogers. Participating artists are Kathryn Andrews, Tomory Dodge, Bart Exposito, Hadley Holliday, Max Lesser, Katie Lewis, Jay Lizo, Allison Miller and Brett Cody Rogers.
December 15 and 16, 2007
Monte Vista 2007 fundraiser
November 16, 2007
A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon
Mini Tournament With A Brief At The
Opening Regarding the
Rules & History, Pips, Points & Blots
October 27 -November 14, 2007
Monte Vista is pleased to announced the first solo exhibition in the space, featuring the photographs of Dee Williams. For this exhibition, Dee Williams has photographed 4 office buildings built in the Los Angeles area between 1979 and 1986.
Dee Williams participated in the group show Beneath the Underdog at Gagosian Gallery in New York, June 2007.An untitled work, the daguerreotype project, is included in the book We All Laughed at Christopher Columbus, published this summer by Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and Platform Garanti CAC, Istanbul.
September 15 - October 14, 2007
Pyramids still loom before me—something vast, indefinite,
incomprehensible, and awful. — Herman Melville, 1857
Monte Vista is pleased to announce The Pyramid Show, a truly monumental group show on a miniature scale. From the very first pyramids in ancient Egypt, to the glass pyramid of the Louvre, to the still-emerging mysteries of the Great Pyramid of Cholula, pyramids are among the most evocative and distinctive forms in the world. Their continued use as architectural and visual motifs in contemporary culture testifies to their lasting allure. They have long been potent multivalent symbols, representing, among other things, power, divinity, wealth, exoticism, human triumph, nature's perfection, and the occult. The Pyramid Show celebrates the richness of pyramid lore by presenting an exhibition of more than 30 artists, offering the pyramid as common ground to connect their diverse work.
The artists gathered together for The Pyramid Show have exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. For many of them, this will be their first pyramid-themed show. This is the second exhibition at Monte Vista, an artist-run space in Highland Park. The Pyramid Show was co-curated by Noah Peffer and Frank Chang.
The Pyramid Show artists are: Yuki Ando, Raul Paulino Baltazar, Lara Bank, Sadie Barnette, Chris Bassett, Dan Bayles, Alisa Benfey, Becky Brister, Jeff Cain, Frank Chang, Marcus Civin, Irina Contreras, Mike Cronin, April Day, Chelsea Dean, Michael Decker, Lauren Dees, Michael Dodge, Diego J. Garza, Zeal Harris, Fiona Jack, Dawn Kasper, George Kontos, Max Lesser, Katie Lewis, Candice Lin, Jay Lizo, Shana Lutker, Patrick Marcoux, Leah Morelli, Mahyar Nili, Sarah Olmsted, Gina Osterloh, Niki Pressley, Maeghan Reid, Marco Rios, Colin Roberts, Shelby Roberts, Shizu Saldamando, Marco Gimas Sanchez, Sherm, Michael Underwood, Max Warsh, Joel Westendorf, Christie Williams, Alexandria Wolff, and Marco Zamora
July 14 - August 18, 2007
The inaugural show "First Kiss" is a group show curated by the artists initiating the Monte Vista project space. Each of the artists involved in running the space selected one artist that interests them, and the group collectively selected work for exhibition. Participating artists are William Basinski, Jessica Dobkin, Miriam Ewers, Mary Beth Heffernan, Patrick Marcoux, Amitis Motevalli, Layla Rudneva-McKay, and James Everett Stanley.
Thursday, July 5th, 2007, 7 pm
Art 2102 Presents
Beyond Quoi?: Connecting Parallel Universes
Instigated by Japanese curator Mizuki Endo and his interest in discussing ways that alternative projects and spaces in LA can connect with similar ventures in Asia, the event is intended to initiate a discussion of practices in both these contexts. The resulting discussions will contribute to research for a publication by ART2102, Mizuki Endo and other participants on people and organizations wanting to collaborate and expand horizons for contemporary art practices.
Mizuki Endo will present two alternative spaces he established in Fukuoka, Japan and Manila in the Philippines that highlight the different situations of the art system in Asia. He will be joined by Mauricio Marcin, an independent curator based in Mexico City, who will additionally talk about a range of projects that are currently operating in the metropolis. A discussion will follow, coordinated by Danny Orendorff, curator-in-residence at ART2102.
See www.art2102.org for more information