Ah-round

January 9—February 6, 2010

Opening January 9, 2010, 7—10 pm

Rebecca Ann Hobbs

Monte Vista is pleased to announce our first exhibition of 2010, featuring Ah-round, a single channel video by Australian artist Rebecca Ann Hobbs. About the work, Hobbs says:

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. 

The images in Ah-round are quite literal. They intentionally appropriate iconography found in Romantic representations of the “Other.” These images support an Imperial power structure by incorporating motifs that reinforce existing stereotypes. In this instance, the “Noble Savage” is located in the exotic and faraway Pacific jungle. However, this particular “jungle” is made up of potted plants and exists in an overtly constructed space, a greenhouse. There are also satellite dishes, urban brick houses, a polo shirt, and a manmade ceiling—elements that intrude upon our idea of an untouched wilderness. Ah-round is intended as a parody; Romantic conventions are lampooned in order to make them seem ridiculous. 

This work is founded on my research into Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Of particular interest to me is the idea of the active subject. It was important that Madou was actively negotiating the situation, an independent being, in charge of his circumstances. I have also been researching Marcus Garvey’s work and his supporting ideologies. Garveywas an advocate of Pan-Africanism and he established a shipping company called the Black Star Line. The BSL functioned as a business, as Garvey believed that empowerment could be achieved via financial security, but it was also a logistical strategy to move black people who were victims of the diaspora back to Africa, the Motherland. Financially, the BSL failed in the end, but the power of Garvey’s ideas have remained. The 360-degree camera movement of Ah-round represents the idea of moving full circle and pays tribute to Garvey’s BSL ambitions. The song that Madou is listening to is “Traveling,” by Burning Spear, from the album “Spear Burning.” Burning Spear, also known as Winston Rodney,cites Garvey’s philosophy as a major influence in his life.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994. Grant, Colin. Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. Oxford University Press, 2008. Nelson, Stanley. Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind. 2001.

Hey Man, You're Saved

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!    

Please join artist Sydney Mills and American media scholar Henry Jenkins, for Whiz, Bang, Shimmer, Pop: The Rise, The Fall and The Future of The Video Game Arcade. Together with audience members, Mills and Jenkins will examine the transformation from epicenters of the vibrant, budding gaming subculture of the early 1980’s into modest communities struggling to keep their doors open.

Refreshments 8-8:30

Henry Huang, a long term Jesus People member and his artist / engineer daughter, Hannah Huang, will discuss Birth and Rebirth: The Jesus People in Community. The Jesus People USA is one of the few intentional Christian communities remaining today, situated near uptown Chicago. Topics include street witnessing, sustainable communal living, and the deep rooted subculture that results from this dynamic existence.

The Peninsula

October 3 – October 31, 2009                    OPENING October 3, 2009, 7 – 10pm

Antoni Wojtyra

Monte Vista is pleased to announce Polish/Canadian artist Antoni Wojtyra’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.Wojtyra’s work is elusive, defiant, and humorous. Operating at times like an itinerant worker,Wojtyra moves fluidly from subject to subject, with a varied practice emphasizing concisenessand utility. Wojtyra uses books, discussions, photographs, line drawings, paintings, text, etc. tounhinge conventions and stereotypes—creating spaces for the reimagination of alternatives.Wojtyra’s exhibition at Monte Vista promises to surprise yet again as he proposes that artconform to an ecologically-sound, sustainable ecosystem. While material culture strivestowards 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 strategyof condensing material wealth into diamonds, sewn into the hemlines of clothes, smuggledacross 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 reimaginesthe gallery space as a peninsula, commingling and testing Art’s effect and power in relation to*terra firma*, the street.

Game Night at Monte Vista

Where: Monte Vista, 5442 Monte Vista St., Los Angeles, CA 90042                                          When: Thursday, September 17, at 8:00pm

Why: FREE SNACKS! And GAMES!

CORPORATE LADDER is a strategic game of stacking blocks for 4 to 6 players. The object of the game is to take up the most space.

GIVE AND TAKE is a game of scrimmage for 2 players. Think checkers meets Chinese finger trap.You can find out more about Corporate Ladder at:

http://hadto.net/category/projects/corporate-ladder

Until We Come to One that Reminds Us

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.

Kristina Faragher’s hundreds of small, craft-store balsawood “keepsake” boxes are strategically

smashed, reconstructed, and enameled with painstaking attention to detail. The pieces are then

forced back into the boxes, no longer able to contain sentiment. Faragher’s work suggests the

violence inherent in frustration at the limits of knowledge, cycles of violence and creation, and the

potential recuperation of those who have been disfigured and forced back into a cultural system

that must contend with them.

Christine Frerichs uses charged materials—active carbon, cement, dirty turpenoid—in order to call

up the penetrable split between the conscious and unconscious and the personal and cultural

impact of repression. Images are cultivated on the surface of her paintings to be immediately

rejected and wiped out. Some images are barely allowed to form, while others have been

laboriously plied. Frerichs rehearses the connection between personal and cultural conflicts,

between what is spoken and what is denied. The incompatibility of materials echoes the way in

which emotion and language disengage at the height of tension, neither being enough for the

other, both resonating apart.

Amy Green’s felt paintings delicately try the relationship between craft and abstraction. The

paintings recall metaphors of stain and place, of an uneasy bargain between surface and

support, and of the liminal space of the 70’s household, wherein women understood the murky

possibilities between liberation and reduction in the tight confinements of the physical world.

Green’s tentative placement of the frayed felt surfaces against the hard edges of the stretcher

bars belies a hesitation in the juxtaposition of craft against its heavy modernist counterpart.

Curt LeMieux’s sculptures and mixed media drawings allude to the witnessing of bodily trauma

within the tragedy of mediated warfare, linking barbarity to everyday cultural referents--remnants

of curtains, socks, pencils, and shoes. Materials are handled with a delicate aesthetic that opens

up a place into which the sense of both the disjunction and union of violence and security can

flow. Surveying LeMieux’s small drawings and sculptures, one has the sense of the viewer

as mute witness to a concatenation of banal and terrible events that have been reviewed,

acknowledged, and dismissed.

ARTIST AND CURATOR BIOS

Kristina Faragher, Artist

Kristina Faragher has exhibited works of art individually and collaboratively in a host of media

including video, installation, film, and performance. Selected venues and festivals include: The

Oakland Museum, Oakland, California; The Autry National Center, Los Angeles; The REDCAT

Theater, Los Angeles; Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica; Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica;

SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico; LA Freewaves Ninth Annual International Media Festival,

Los Angeles; The Fifth Festival International de la Image in Colombia, South America; and

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus. Publications include: The Smithsonian

Institution’s Archives of American Art, Yosemite Art Of an American Icon (UC Berkeley Press), and

Extensions: Online Journal of Embodied Technology at UCLA.

Christine Frerichs, Artist

After receiving her B.F.A. from University of Arizona, Christine Frerichs lived in Brooklyn, then

moved to California to complete her M.F.A. at UC Riverside. She also attended the intensive

residency, Painting’s Edge. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Riverside,

Tucson, Boston, Chicago, and New York and has been published in the 2005 Northeastern

Edition of New American Paintings. Exhibitions include “New Work: Christine Frerichs,” Sweeney

Art Gallery, Riverside; Painting’s Edge, Riverside Art Museum; Works on Loan from the 21st

Century, Riverside Art Museum; and My Buddy at UCLA New Wight Gallery.

Amy Green, Artist, Curator

Amy Green received her B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Tennessee in 1995 and an M.F.A.

in Studio Arts from CalArts in 1997. Her paintings have been shown nationally and internationally

and appear in numerous private collections. Exhibitions include Rolf Ricke Galerie in Cologne;

the Neues Museum in Nurnberg; Galerie Monika Reitz, Frankfurt; Kunstverein St. Gallen in

Switzerland; Evelyne Canus Gallery, Paris; Cirrus Gallery, Susanne Vielmetter, Sea and Space

Explorations in Los Angeles; and Cohan Leslie and Browne in New York, among other venues.

Reviews include: New York Arts Magazine, Art Issues, the Basel Art Fair Catalogue, and Neues

Museum Catalog Essays. Recent exhibitions include “New Works” at 24Hr Gallery, “Let the trees

decide”, at Glendale College Art Gallery, and “Cosmos Factory” at Cirrus Gallery. Amy Green is

represented by Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Cologne, Germany.

Curt LeMieux, Artist

Curt LeMieux received his B.F.A. in Painting in 1998 and his M.A. in Sculpture in 1999 from

the University of Wisconsin at Superior. He received his M.F.A. in Drawing and Installation in

2001 from the Claremont Graduate University. His works have been shown nationally and

internationally and appear in numerous private collections. Exhibitions venues and events include

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus; The Sixth Festival of International Images in

Manizales, Colombia; The Berkeley Video and Film Festival in Berkeley; The Santa Monica

Museum of Art in Santa Monica; Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica; Los Angeles Contemporary

Exhibitions in Los Angeles; and Sea and Space Explorations in Los Angeles.

Asher Hartman, Curator

Asher Hartman is a painter, performance installation artist, and filmmaker. Hartman’s work

has been exhibited extensively in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Venues include the Whitney

Biennial in collaboration with Charles Long and Wilderness, the Cultural Center of the Philippines,

The Images Festival (Toronto), Recontres International (Paris/Berlin), and The Beijing Open

International Performance Festival. Solo and collaborative works in Los Angles include exhibitions

at Track 16, LACE, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Highways Performance Space, Sea

and Space Explorations, and New Image Art. Hartman served as co-director of Crazy Space, a

gallery for experimental art and durational performance at the 18th St. Arts Center in Santa Monica (2000-2005) and teaches at the University of California, Riverside. He received a B.A. in Theater

from UCLA and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from CalArts.

Historical Vernacular

June 27–July 25, 2009

Opening Reception June 27, 7–10 pm

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.

Melanie Nakaue’s “Folklore” series is comprised of two single-channel animated videos and one

three-dimensional quilt block sculpture. The artist connects the dual role of physical and aesthetic

labor in her maternal and paternal grandmother’s lives, and examines how family histories are

preserved through folklore and folk crafts that reflect the daily histories and lives of working

women.

By juxtaposing analog (folk crafts) and digital (animation/video) forms the artist attempts to create

a discourse between representation, alternative narrative, history and aesthetic and personal

experience though animation, sound and sculpture.

Exhibitions of her sculptures, installations and video screenings include: Beloit College, Beliot, WI,

Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film festival, Portland, OR, Searching for Gold Mountain

Series, Alexander Gallery, Oregon City, OR, Un/Common, Pacific NW College of Art, Portland, OR,

The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Supersonic, The Windtunnel, Art Center College

of Art and Design, Pasadena, CA; Gallery 4F, Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco Art Institute, San

Francisco, CA. Melanie was also selected for a public arts commission, Newhall Art Walk, in

Newhall, CA.

Wendy Red Star’s “The Crow Language Project” is both a website and series of non-web

presentations comprised of work made by Wendy Red Star in collaboration with Crow language

speakers. The project is geared towards creative ways to learn how to speak Crow. By using a

creative series of engaging exercises, videos, and interviews with Crow speakers Wendy Red Star

teaches herself and her two year old daughter how to speak Crow.

Wendy Red Star was born in Billings, Montana just outside of the Crow Indian reservation where

she was raised. She grew up in a multi-cultural family. Her mother is of Irish decent, her father a

full blood Crow Indian and her older sister is Korean. Wendy left the Crow Indian reservation when

she was eighteen to attend Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana where she studied

sculpture. She then went on to earning her MFA in sculpture at UCLA. Wendy currently lives in

Portland, Oregon where she is an adjunct professor of art at Portland State University.

Wendy Red Star’s work explores the intersection between life on the Crow Indian reservation and

the world outside of that environment. She thinks of herself as a Crow Indian cultural archivist

speaking sincerely about the experience of being a Crow Indian in contemporary society.

Her work has been shown at Helen E. Copeland gallery, Bozeman, MT, The Fondation

Cartier L’Art Contemporain, Paris, France, The CSULB gallery, Long Beach, CA, Research &

Development, Chicago, IL, The Museum Tower at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, And/Or gallery,

Dallas, TX, The UCLA New Wight gallery, Los Angeles, CA, The L.A. Municipal Art gallery, Los

Angeles, CA, The Domaine De Kerguehennc, Brittany, France, The Hudson D. Walker gallery,

Provincetown, MA, The Plush Gallery, Dallas TX, The Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, England, The

Luckman gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and The Volitant gallery, Austin, Texas.

The Permanent Record of Newjack Rasputin

April 10 – April 25, 2009

Opening Reception April 10, 7–10 pm

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.

“I feel it is logical, my own nervous system failing, that I would spontaneously generate an alterego,

tear a hole-in-space and try to escape. My situation warrants immediate and drastically

uncompromising self-metamorphosis. An exquisite new aesthetic unfolds when you are

standing on the deck of a burning ship. Being paralyzed amplifies the uneasy link between intent

and action and brings into question the true meaning of this place and time that we occupy…and

of what our ultimate audience might prove to be.”

An artist for over thirty years, in as many media, Tucker Stilley 48, attended Studio for Interrelated

Media, at the Massachusetts College of Art. He has worked in Boston, San Francisco, and Los

Angeles as a media artist, sound designer and film editor. Previous exhibitions include ART,

Cambridge, REDCAT & Octopus Garden Salon, LA.

This exhibition was curated by Sam Durant.

Katie Lewis' Drawling Room

February 21 March 21, 2009
opening reception February 21, 7 10 pm

An installation by Katie Lewis

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to announce the opening of 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. Ropey garlands of lazy language take their time with articulation and suggest that our continual quest for instant information gratification might in fact produce nothing more than nonsense. And maybe that really isn’t so bad.

Katie Lewis studied art and art history at Dartmouth College and NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts before completing her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2005. She has exhibited her work at numerous venues in Los Angeles, such as 507 Rose, Harvey Levine Gallery, and JAIL. Her paintings were also included in the 2005 Greater L.A. exhibition at Cal State Long Beach and featured in an episode of the hit HBO series Entourage in the fall of 2008. In addition to painting, Lewis also writes about art occasionally and teaches in the art program at CalArts. 

 

Phillip Maysles The Comfort of Enlightenment

January 10 February 7, 2009
opening reception January 10, 7 10 pm

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.

Philip Maysles was born in and currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BA with honors from Brown University (2002) and MFA in Art from The California Institute of Arts (2005). Maysles has exhibited painting, drawing and installation at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art (Long Island City), Artists Space (New York), Project Row Houses (Houston), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Amistad Center for Art and Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT). His writing on art and music has appeared in Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Thought (Indiana University Press, 2001) and The CORE Journal (MFA Houston, 2006). He has been a lecturer in Art at Rice University and the University of Houston (2005-2007). He currently teaches documentary filmmaking and runs a non-profit cinema in Harlem, New York. This is his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles