Monte Vista Projects is proud to present “Islomania” a multi-media installation by Los Angeles-based artist McLean Fahnestock.
In 1935, the artist’s Grandfather Sheridan Fahnestock and Great Uncle Bruce Fahnestock embarked with a small sailing crew on the first of three expeditions to the South Pacific. In partnership with the Museum of Natural History in New York, their expeditions explored uncharted waters while the crew collected specimens and native music for the museum. While sailing through the Coral Sea, off the coast of Nendo, they came upon a small chain of sandy islands and named them after their boat “Director.” However, “The Good Director Islands” are not on any map, there are only what appear to be open waters at the coordinates for which they are published. Perhaps they have been consumed by the ocean, or perhaps they never really existed, perhaps it is the unmitigated notion of these islands that establishes the illusion of islomania.
For the artist—embarking on her own artistic expeditions in the wake of her predecessors—islomania is not just a partiality, but rather, a full-blown obsession. Impetuously assembled, Islomania is part of a larger research based project called “The Fahnestock Expedition,” involving years of research, merging together imagery, sound, film, performances, photographs, dreams, complex anecdotes, travelogues, and dialogue with librarians and visits to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC where the Fahnestock South Sea collection is maintained.
As a long-time influence for explorers, artists, conquerors, writers, expatriates, reality television viewers, all of whom have found themselves rapt in the illusion of the exotic desert island; the illusionary concept of islomania reserves itself as a place of solitude, discovery, and escape. The fantasy of discovering the uninhabited island, where scale inevitably shifts is an apt metaphor for the artist in search of the new.
David Weldzius - Relief
Monte Vista Projects is proud to present “Relief,” a new series of sculptural works by Los Angeles-based artist David Weldzius.
September 14 – October 6, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 14th 7–10 pm
Since moving to Southern California in 2005, Weldzius has taken specific interest in the relay between vernacular architecture and popular narrative in shaping putative social history, particularly evident in sites within close proximity to his home which is walking distance from Monte Vista Projects on LA's northeast side. For his project “Relief,” Weldzius will examine a local network of civic structures built in the 1930s and 40s under the auspices of the Work Progress Administration—diligently translating a series of marks inscribed in wet concrete by provisional Federal workers into plaster volumes that will enmesh with the interior architecture of the gallery. With his first sculpture-based project to date, Weldzius hopes to provoke a broad range of inquiries regarding prolonged economic austerity and the amplified role of independently-run project spaces amidst restrained funding for contemporary art initiatives.
Weldzius has exhibited extensively in the US, showing at LACE, MAK Center, and David Kordansky Gallery among other venues. In 2012, Weldzius was awarded fellowship with the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France. Concurrent with “Relief,” Weldzius will commence a second solo project hosted by Otis College of Design’s Department of Photography, and participate in a faculty exhibition at Occidental College's Weingart Gallery.
Ben White - Ruin Upon Ruin
August 10 – September 1, 2013
Opening Reception: August 10, 7 – 9 PM
"If one were to run across one of Ben White's paintings at a suburban garage sale or in the dusty backroom of a thrift store, one would snap it up immediately, display it prominently in one's hip Silverlake-adjacent living room, then post it immediately on Facebook, hoping to learn more about the quixotic outsider genius that produced it. The Council of Nicaea supervising the faking of a moon landing? Unimpeachable. Liberace among the Hyenas in the Colloseum? Fabulous!"
-Doug Harvey, from a forthcoming monograph of Ben White's Ruin Upon Ruin series from Insert Blanc Press. 2013.
"Too smart to accept the subtle prejudices, insidious conformity, and insipid evils of the suburban middle class, White is also too proud to disown its influence, reject its charms or deny his own complicity. Consider the paintings of Ruin Upon Ruin a prog rock riff on the somatic spell of the Valencias of this world. The sickly sweet aesthetics of the embarrassing present intermingle with imagery, symbols, and tropes from throughout human history. Ambitious in scope and subject matter, yet humble in their formal delivery, the images are at turns funny and horrific. They seduce and alienate us, mixing subject matter that entrenched cultural sects would rather keep segregated, and they challenge our idea of what knowledge we privilege, what we discard, and what we are willing to accept from art. At first blanche they feel unsettling and wrong, but White, recovered Christian rocker that he is, is not interested in affirming our faith in at and culture. He is interested in testing it."
-John Hogan, from a forthcoming monograph of Ben White's Ruin Upon Ruin series from Insert Blanc Press. 2013.
Brian Getnick - RGB
R (July2011-July2012)
G (July2012-July2013)
B (July2013- )
Beginning July 19th at Monte Vista Projects, Brian Getnick presents RGB; a series of 3 performances and sculptural installations exploring the relationship between memory’s construction and the body.
RGB re-activates work made from the first two years of a long term project on memory titled The Complete works of the Rainbow in which each year is assigned a color.
“Color coding a year’s worth of performances and correlating sculpture has been a way of tracking my process of discovering a subject. I could say that I enter blindly, or enter darkness as to what the subject is but instead of that intuitive zone being dark, it’s a colorful void. I am reaching into that color to find the forms which let memory, feeling and theory coalesce as an object, then come to life as a performance. The Red year happened in 2012 and the Green year is coming to a close on July 7th, my birthday. Blue will begin in early August with ‘open auditions’. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the blue year will be erotic.”
July 19th and 20th 12-7 pm
Red: Memory vs. the body. A band living inside a body sings the body’s memories. In collaboration with Claire Cronin, Ezra Buchla, Corey Fogel, Nathan Bockelman, and Bryatt Bryant
http://www.briangetnick.com/Memories
July 26th and 27th 12-7 pm, performance times TBA
Green: The head and the body. With performer and writer Bryatt Bryant we developed 2 green characters whose heads occasionally leave their bodies. They see an orgy, they reanimate 2 halves of an oracular dead horse.
http://www.briangetnick.com/Tell-me-not-to-be-afraid
August 3rd and 4th times TBA
Blue: Open auditions for the new year begin at Monte Vista.
www.briangetnick.com
www.nativestrategiesla.com
Nancy Popp - Strung Broad
In 2010, Eli and Edythe Broad announced plans to open The Broad, a new public museum of contemporary art on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles (anticipated opening: 2014). Dubbed "the veil and the vault", the museum's design merges the two key components of the building; public exhibition space and archive/storage. The museum's exhibition programming will focus on the contents of the renowned contemporary art collections of Eli and Edythe Broad, which feature in total 2000 artworks by more than 200 artists. The Broad Art Foundation and The Elia and Edythe Broad Foundation together comprise The Broad Foundations, which have assets of $2.4 billion.
Meanwhile, across the street at Grand Avuenue, MOCA was melting down. In December 2008, the press reported that the museum's endowment had dwindled in nine years from $40 million to $6 milliion, and that California's attorney general was investigating its finances. A Letter of Agreement between MOCA and the Eli and Edythe Broad foundation was signed on December 23, 2008. Two notable clauses require the museum "to strengthen its Board of Trustees to include a substantial number of individuals who share MOCA's vision of downtown Los Angeles and art" and "to acknowledge Eli Broad as the founding chairman of the Board of MOCA".
On February 10, 2013 Nancy Popp performed on the Broad Museum construction site as an interventionist political action to protest and call attention to the machinations of money and redevelopment that lie behind the establishment of The Broad, including the history of KB Homes (Eli Broad's real estate development corporation) and its role in destroying the urban cores of cities such as Detroit while attempting to 'enliven' downtown Los Angeles.
Sources:
http://broadartfoundation.org/thebroadmuseum.html
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/03/problem-moca-la-jeffrey-deitch
Artist Bio:
Nancy Popp is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. Her performances, videos, drawings, and photographs draw upon the rich traditions of durational, corporeal performance and political intervention to explore relations between body and site, and often incorporate public and architectural spaces. Collaboration is a long-term strategy she employs in her practice. She exhibits frequently at such venues as the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; the Manifesta 9 Biennial, Belgium; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center; Rowan University, New Jersey; SUNY University, New York, numerous galleries in Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, Belgrade, and Tijuana, and many other public sites and institutions. She holds degrees from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and the San Francisco Art Institute, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation's Visual Arts Fellowship and a Lucas Artist Fellowship from the Montalvo Arts Center. Upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Monte Vista Projects and Gallery KM in Los Angeles as well as a group exhibition at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State LA.
Reanimation Library - Highland Park Branch
Reanimation Library: Highland Park Branch
May 19, 7–9 pm
Branch Closing Event with Word Processor Reading by Tisa Bryant and musical performances by TONY and Pitch Like Masses
The Highland Park Branch is a temporary "spore" of the Brooklyn-based Reanimation Library. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from local thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and are given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists.
The opening event will feature new work informed by books from the Highland Park Branch. Participating artists and performers include: Tristan Duke, Ken Ehrlich, Cayetano Ferrer, Corey Fogel, Helki Frantzen, Katie Herzog, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Cassandra C. Jones, Les Figues Press, Rob Ray, and Sarah Simons.
For more information visit www.reanimationlibrary.org and www.montevistaprojects.com, or send us a message at highlandparkbranch@reanimationlibrary.org.
The Reanimation Library: Highland Park Branch is organized by Aurora Tang and Jen Hofer in collaboration with Reanimation Library Founder Andrew Beccone and Monte Vista Projects.
http://www.reanimationlibrary.org/
Karen Adelman - Some Insides
Please join Karen Adelman at Monte Vista Projects for a show of apparent sounds and objects.
Friday, April 5th from 12-6pm, the show will be open.
Saturday, April 6th from 12-6pm, the artist will interact with visitors; performance at 4pm.
Sunday April 7th from 3-9pm, the show will be open; closing performance at 9pm.
Steven L. Anderson - Power Plant
February 22 – March 24, 2013
Opening & performance by Steven L. Anderson: Friday, February 22, 7 – 11pm
Also featuring lectures, performances, and workshops by Riah Buchanan, Shade Falcon, Robby Herbst, Charles Irvin, Los Angeles Mystery Project, Tom McKenzie, and Guru Rugu.
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Power Plant, Steven L. Anderson’s solo exhibition of painting, drawing, video, and performances. Power Plant is a collection of strategies for charging, releasing, projecting, negating, and focusing energy. Spiraling, text-based drawings become tools for directing vibrations. A large "prayer rug" serves as a charging station for staging performative, creative actions. Tripods supporting video cameras appear as totemic signposts in the energy landscape. On the cameras’ tiny screens, short videos testify to the electricity one feels while exploring the wilderness, reaching a mountain’s summit, or encountering the sublime.
The rhythms of our daily lives, our politics and culture, and our technology surround us completely, encompassing us in white noise—but when we escape into the outdoors, we gain perspective. As our senses refocus, our bodies discover rhythms that can’t be represented on clocks. We begin to experience older, deeper rhythms, of energy flowing through and around us. The exhilaration of the human spirit fuses with the ferocious beauty of nature to make a palpable, tingling essence, and—if an artist is attuned—this energy can become a medium in itself.
The exhibition will feature lectures, performances, and workshops by Riah Buchanan, Shade Falcon, Robby Herbst, Charles Irvin, Los Angeles Mystery Project, Tom McKenzie, and Guru Rugu. Audiences are limited to 15 people. Schedule and sign-ups will be posted at the gallery and online at http://www.montevistaprojects.com/.
Steven L. Anderson works in a variety of media to explore the nature of power, and the power of Nature. His career as an artist has been a cycle of collaborative and individual production, including projects with Tom McKenzie (as Ecstatic Energy Consultants, Inc.); Karl Erickson & Robby Herbst; Elana Mann; Llano del Rio Collective; Signify, Sanctify, Believe; and Cakewalk magazine. Anderson was a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park, and his work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago. A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Steven now lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. More at http://www.stevenlanderson.com/.
Michael Kontopoulos - Terra Firma
Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Terra Firma, the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist, Michael Kontopoulos. The exhibition runs from January 19 to February 10, 2013. The opening reception is Saturday, January 19, 7-10pm.
The work in this exhibition borrows strategies from speculative fiction and design in order to explore themes of escapism, the frontier and the illusion of utopia. In collaboration with graphic designers and 3D computer modelers, Michael has fabricated a series of artifacts that contrast the obviously fictitious with the ambiguously realistic and uncanny in an effort to anticipate the political imaginary of abandoning the Earth.
Through print design, sculpture and installation, the works in Terra Firma explore several ideas including the visual vernacular of how rovers and satellites (themselves, unique sculptures) "see" their environment and therefore, how we experience the unknown through them. In addition to this, Michael is utilizing the strategies of graphic design branding campaigns to envision boarding passes for impossible destinations.
At once an imagining of a potential future and a lamentation for an unsatisfactory present, this work investigates space exploration and space tourism as an adult concretization of a childhood need to be subsumed by fantasy.
Michael Kontopoulos is a Los Angeles based artist and educator. After studying electronic and time-based art at Carnegie Mellon University, he went on to receive his MFA in Design and Media Arts from UCLA.
He has exhibited solo and collaborative projects in galleries, festivals and conferences in the U.S., Asia and Europe, including the Santa Monica Glow Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the TED conference. He was the winner of a 2010 Rhizome Commission for Emerging Artists, sponsored by the New Museum (NYC). Currently, Michael teaches electronic media courses at USC, UCLA, Cal State Long Beach and Art Center College of Design.
www.mkontopoulos.com