Season's Greetings!!!
Monte Vista Projects would like you to participate in our annual Holiday Raffle event on December 13th from 4 - 6 pm. If you would like to participate this year, you can drop off artwork at Monte Vista Projects on:
Thursday Dec 10th and Friday Dec 11th from 6 – 9 pm
Sat Dec 12th from 10 am – 2 pm
Please have work ready to hang.
All of the proceeds go towards maintaining Monte Vista Projects, including preparing for future exhibitions by Beatriz Cortez, Corey Fogel, Jake Longstreth, 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 eight 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!!!!
Heather Brown - Bedfellows
Heather Brown
Bedfellows
October 10th – November 1st, 2015
Opening reception on Oct. 10th from 7-10 pm
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Heather Brown's solo exhibition, Bedfellows. This will be the first public exhibition to show the artist's abstract oil paintings and figurative drawings together. In Brown's pen and ink drawings, figure drawing runs free and wild. Contour becomes form as lines shift from the description of an edge to the internal delineation of a shape. Schematic figures caress, climb, crawl, and strut and across the picture plane. Overlapping bodies ambiguously depict either sexual entwining, a collision of personalities, or a divided subject’s various selves. Brown’s distinctive approach to line has distant precedent in the improvisations of Surrealist practice, the early fashion drawings of Andy Warhol, and the wobbly satires of Saul Steinberg, but her tangled, loopy vision is entirely her own. Brown’s oil on canvas paintings in the exhibition conjure muddy labyrinths of portals, threshholds, and blocked passageways. The compositions and paint application draw from the language of modernism, but instead of a purity of form, the viewer is offered a hardscrabble accumulation of brush stokes seen through a thicket of rubbings, scrapings, and reversals. Brown’s mazes of undo and redo perform an anarchical reckoning with the legacy of heroic geometric abstraction. Taken together, these two formally distinct threads of Brown’s practice enter a complex dialog, informing each other and also informing on each other.
Heather Brownʼs solo exhibitions include Ruins; Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles, Thank You For Your Childhood; Parker Jones, Los Angeles, Drawings; Parker Jones, Los Angeles, and Heather Brown: New Paintings; Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles. Her work has been seen in group exhibitions at several other Los Angeles venues including Weekend, Five Thirty Three, Black Dragon Society, Honor Fraser Gallery, and Angles Gallery. She received an MFA from UCLA and a BA from UCSB. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Check out her review:
http://contemporaryartreview.la/heather-brownat-monte-vista-projects/
Michael Bizon - Scenes from Home
Michael Bizon
Scenes from Home
September 5th - September 27th, 2015
Opening September 5th, 7-9 PM
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Scenes from Home, an exhibition of new work by Michael Bizon. Scenes from Home consists of three separate installations located across three different venues in Highland Park: The Living Room at Monte Vista Projects, The Bathroom at the Mullin Gallery of Occidental College, and The Bedroom at the artist’s studio on Avenue 61 and Figueroa. Starting at Monte Vista Projects, visitors will be given a map leading to the other locations.
Drawing upon tropes and memories associated with specific rooms of a house, Bizon uses found object, sound and movement to question the functionality of private space and investigate notions of the sublime and uncanny within a personal home. In Home Stereo, Bizon has constructed a Tower of Babel out of speakers, altered electronics and stereo equipment. This not only provides sonic atmosphere when entering the room, but also examines the power of physical presence in a micro miniature world. While the work throughout the three spaces is primarily object-based in nature, the interaction amongst constructed keepsakes and a twisted feng shui ask the viewer to construct a story based in personal memory.
Michael Bizon is an artist based in Los Angeles whose practice includes sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, instrument making, and video. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Miami, Tokyo, and most recently at the VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow, Ireland.
Jason Kunke - A Good Wall
June 27- July 19, 2015
"Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects."
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present A Good Wall, an exhibition of new work by Jason Kunke. A Good Wall consists of two related bodies of work, each considering how objects both submit to and resist our perception of them. Materiality is stressed and subverted in both bodies of work as a method to examine the gap between perception and the world itself, touching on issues of aesthetics and authority.
Grace Hartigan and Signature Strike are mimetic sculptures of neon signs, designed with the assistance of both neon sign and steel fabricators. Unlike real neon signs they do not emit light, but are finished in matte black to absorb as much light as possible, inverting the generous light of regular neon signs; instead of giving, the fake neon signs refuse. This refusal is emphasized in the words the fake signs display. “A Surface That Resists”, is artist Grace Hartigan’s description of the AbEx notion of the subjective mastery of the world achieved through epic, transcendental objects. “Signature Strike” is a term from the vocabulary of drone warfare, describing a method of killing targets based on certain general characteristics rather than an actual identity. Considering how Abstract Expressionism was promoted during the Cold War by the U.S. government as a testament to American cultural freedom, these sculptures connect Abstract Expressionism and drone warfare, examining their shared strategy of generating and using objects to exert and disseminate power.
Also included are paintings of Martian landscapes using a new type of paint. The artist himself makes this paint by grinding minerals containing quantum spin liquid into powders, which are then dispersed into binders. Quantum spin liquid is a state of matter that, though predicted by theoretical physicists in 1973, was only experimentally confirmed to exist in 2012. It occurs naturally in a handful of mineral crystals, including jarosite, atacamite, and cobalt aluminate. The rarity and difficulty of these paints results in a limited palette and constrained aesthetics. In 2004, a NASA robotic rover discovered jarosite on Mars, confirming suspicions that water had been present on the planet. Images from this and other Mars drones are used to create landscapes, some of which break down into abstracted gestures playing off the simplest tropes of atmospheric perspective.Both bodies of work inhabit the space between our coarse sensory apparatus and the finer, inaccessible machinations of the world, a space normally filled with intentional stances and pathetic fallacies, where we do work “(w)ith a good shovel in the good earth.”
Jason Kunke is a Los Angeles based artist whose practice includes sculpture, drawing, installation, video, and performance. His art examines how authority and aesthetics inform each other. He received his MFA from CalArts in 2007, and his BFA (with a minor in sociology) from University of Houston in 2004. He has exhibited nationally at Polvo in Chicago, Commerce Street Artist Warehouse in Houston, and 25CPW in New York. In Los Angeles he has exhibited at Sea and Space Explorations, LAXART, and Dan Graham, and recently issued a limited edition print with Insert Blanc Press. Along with five other artists, he co-runs Elephant, an artist run space in Glassell Park.
Hoops - Brittany Ko & Leah Rom
Hoops: An installation for your enjoyment
by Brittany Ko and Leah Rom
Opening: June 20th, 2014, 7-9pm - one night only
Performance at 8:00 pm
move through a room, passing your hand through every empty space.
do some spaces feel different from others?
...
hoops from the 99¢ store
sick of jumping through hoops
what will you do if there is a hoop?
we made a hoop
and jumped by it.
stuck a hand through it
stood behind it.
what can we see through the hoop
that we can't see with out it
there are 40 hoops
each one because we decided we knew
what to do.
posed with new problems and obstacles
say hoop really fast over and over
how old are you?
Hoop Dreams
sliding through a hoop
squatting in a hoop
something i can carry
coconut popsicles that make you
10 pounds lighter
hoop skirts
women's "problems" diva cups
hoop for humanity
hoops for all the things i want to
say but don't know how to
liking something or someone
without knowing why
hoops for working together
do you get sick of everything
some time?
hoops as eyes.
stretching. shimmying, an
excuse for dancing without
having to call yourself a dancer
trying to connect
going for it
not a slam dunk but
maybe a swooshy 3 pointer?
itchy nose
paint covered hands
not wanting and wanting
hate isn't the opposite of love
throw me a hoop and i'll catch it
ring of fire
do as many things
with a hoop as you can
so as not to feel the passing
of time and the ache of your
back and the discomfort of
being in public. do them to
have fun and feel light
and all that other
cheesy but still nice stuff.
feel with a hoop what you feel when
you're drunk. be on hoops
get on my level. you don't have
to go in circles you can go back and
forth or side to side. you can lay
flat on your back and a hoop will
just be a line.
Bunny Sandwich Collective - Floating Edge
Opening reception on Saturday, May 23, 2015 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Exhibition runs until June 14, 2015.
Beginning with the American Nomads Project, the Bunny Sandwich Collective has responded to the likelihood of climate change with a series of proposals which enable a more migratory lifestyle. They craft the tools and narrative imagery to allow us to comfortably imagine life in new circumstances.
In FLOATING EDGE the two deviate from their typically collaborative practice and individually explore the literal and metaphoric meanings of ‘border crossings’ as a route towards change of identity and purpose. Their research reveals a complex relationship towards travel and cultural transmission; the need for shelter housed in worn clothing and for history held not in libraries but instead contained within the body.
Cori’s work for FLOATING EDGE approaches the external necessities for crossing borders. Using a variety of camouflage for different geographic entryways, she creates ensembles that address the importance of rapid movement and basic shelter. Her clothing considers the competing need to be seen as Belonging, or as Other, and offers real questions about history’s mercurial relationship with migration. Sandra’s paintings and wool constructions for FLOATING EDGE take on abstract and symbolic form while they imagine multiple centers populated with geometric shapes – crisp borders merge with atmospheric skies, archetypal characters and radial symmetry to create a fantastical landscape suggestive of imminent change.
Individually, the projects differently point towards forging new lives on the move. Together, the parts align and a larger whole emerges – a whole committed to unencumbered movement within a deeply rooted vision for the future.
James Boulton - Quality Time
James Boulton
Quality Time
April 18th - May 10th, 2015
Saturday, May 9th at 4PM performance by Steve Roden
Sunday, May 10th at 4PM performance by Gabie Strong
Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Quality Time, new work by James Boulton. This exhibition consists of new works on paper and sculptures. The works on paper continue Boulton’s experimentation with unique approaches to mark making techniques and layering. Translucent watercolor stains, hand painted texts, and images of helicopters flying in something of a toxic atmosphere appear in one of the watercolor drawings. Accompanying the drawings are rock form sculptures that populate the floor of the gallery, appearing as chunks of concrete and stone. Installed together, the works on paper and rock sculptures create a visual record of Boulton’s memory. Quality Time is a physical index of the intersection between what he sees and what he paints, between memory and spontaneity.
James Boulton received his MFA at Claremont College in 2007. He has exhibited painting, sculpture, and video in Los Angeles, Portland, Berlin, and Madison, Wisconsin. Most recently his work was exhibited at Cypress College and at Raid Projects in Los Angeles.
Checkout review by Moto Okawa "Crossing Point of No Return"
#YoTambienExijo: A Restaging of Taitlin’s Whisper 6
Monte Vista Projects will be participating in solidarity:
A CALL TO PEOPLE AROUND THE GLOBE TO RE-STAGE AN ARTWORK ON FREE EXPRESSION IN SOLIDARITY WITH TANIA BRUGUERA, ANGEL SANTIESTEBAN AND DANILO MALDONADO “EL SEXTO”
The event will take place on April 13th from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m.
By re-staging Tania Bruguera’s participatory art work, Taitlin’s Whisper 6, we stand in solidarity with her, Angel Santiesteban and Danilo Maldonado “El Sexto” and all other artists around the world who face criminal charges and violence for exercising their basic human right to free expression. As article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights states, Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Governments must embrace the rights of their citizens and non-citizens alike to share their voices, ideas, values, beliefs and dreams without fear of persecution or violence. As citizens of the world with a shared humanity, we urge the government of Cuba to drop all charges against Tania Bruguera, Angel Santiesteban and Danilo Maldonado “El Sexto” who are either imprisoned or facing imprisonment for doing what every person of the planet should be able to do: expressing themselves.
Title of Work:
#YoTambienExijo: A Restaging of Taitlin’s Whisper 6
Instructions:
For performance
-No microphone is needed. Instead use a human microphone like the one’s used in Occupy Wall Street
-A small box (soapbox style) for the speaker to stand on.
-People are invited to speak for one minute about freedom of speech.
-Optional- If you want to you can include a WHITE dove, but do not to keep the dove on the shoulder as this is extremely difficult. Each person can hold the dove in their hands, and hands it over to the next person. Have a few… just in case they escape.
For documentation
-Please document events (either by camera or video) and post to the Creative Time Facebook page at facebook.com/creativetime, as well as on personal and, preferably, institutional Twitter and Instagram accounts, using the hashtags #YoTambienExijo and #FreeTaniaBruguera.
Please indicate where the performance occurred and when.
For more information:
On Tania Bruguera
http://www.latimes.com/…/la-et-cam-cuban-artist-tania-brugu…
https://news.artnet.com/…/cuban-government-pressures-tania-…
On Angel Santiesteban
http://en.rsf.org/cuba-dissident-blogger-completes-year-28-…
Danilo Maldonado “El Sexto”
http://translatingcuba.com/…/el-sexto-danilo-maldonado-mac…/
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Creative Time
Intermittent Dialogues
Rebecca Bennett Duke, Michael Lewis Dodge, Roberta Gentry, Melissa Huddleston, Chris Miller, Stacy Elaine Dacheux and Danielle Sommer, and Tyler Waxman
Opening reception: Sunday March 15th 4-7 pm.
The exhibition runs until April 5th.
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Intermittent Dialogues. This group exhibition featuring the work of current Monte Vista members (and their collaborators).Since 2007, over 20 members have contributed their blood, sweat, and tears to make Monte Vista Projects what it is: soliciting proposals, organizing shows, throwing our infamous annual holiday raffle, participating in group exhibitions, or just having dinner. Part of working collaboratively to program a space means discovering common interests, which in the past have included mysticism, outer space, games, sense of community, and more. Intermittent Dialogues showcases the commonalities and differences between Monte Vista's newest group of members.
Upon our first group meeting, we decided that we should get to know each other by sharing our work. We quickly realized that there are similar themes between us, mostly in groups of two or three. Rebecca Bennett Duke, Melissa Huddleston, and Danielle Sommer all involve some form of interactivity in their work. Melissa and Danielle (with collaborator Stacy Elaine Dacheux) create intriguing books as part of their art practice while Rebecca creates push button light boxes. Michael Dodge’s textural grid paintings and Roberta Gentry’s crystal-like forms look toward design and geometry. Lastly, Chris Miller and Tyler Waxman manifest interest in mark making, obsessively covering the surfaces of their works with small marks that accumulate to make a larger matrix of forms.
It is an unspoken truth that once you are a Monte Vista member, you are always a Monte Vista member. Like a prestigious graduate program, we find ways to include past and present members in the activities that Monte Vista Projects hosts. This exhibition welcomes our newest set of members and reveals the threads between them.
Tyler Calkin - G.A.M.E. Night
Key-Swipe Finger-Calligraphy
The space will be open for visitors to learn and practice key-swipe finger-calligraphy. Visitors can use a custom fingertip stylus and CMYK paint to trace the forms of 20 sample words. The forms are derived from the shapes traced onto virtual swipe keyboards. These samples have been randomly selected from the one hundred most common words in the English language. As gestural icons they offer a replacement to alphabetic symbols and serve as an introduction to this new mode of writing.
Gesture Analog Mapping Experiment Night
G.A.M.E. Night is the inauguration of an effort to collectively develop new gestures for use in social communication. Gesture maps tie different hand motions to various functions for touchscreen devices. In the last several years, hundreds of these maps have been patented by corporations like Apple. As smartphones, tablets, and multi-touch trackpads have become ubiquitous, so have gesture map interfaces. After repeated performance of these gestures, our bodies start to remember them. In this way companies colonize our bodies and we no longer perform ourselves; we perform patents.
G.A.M.E. Night is a space to improvise new body language by recombining the gestures and functions of Apple’s patents. Three card games let players take screen-based movements beyond the screen into social and spatial communication. Successful players can record their new gesture-function pairs onto an analog surface - paper - to include it in a growing Library of Alternative Gestures.
Tyler Calkin is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in Art and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts and has since shown his work across the US and internationally. He has also led gameplay-based artist workshops in Nepal and Mexico.His participatory projects examine social constructions, habits, and anxieties through play and improvisation. Drawing particularly from safety and hygiene products and developing digital interfaces, Tyler rearranges material culture into social catalysts. The resulting situations propose new models for interpersonal and inter-object relations.
Benjamin Lord - The New Retail Mycology
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present The New Retail Mycology, an exhibition of new photographs by Benjamin Lord. The project explores notions of the made and the found, and how personal experiences are constructed and demolished in an age saturated by advertising.
The photographs depict elaborate but ephemeral sculptural tableaux, conjoining the intentionality of highly wrought craft objects made by the artist with a range of scavenged materials whose provenance is more obscure. Reversing the customary assumption of a photographer’s studio as a place of rigid authorial control, Lord’s illusionary assemblages depict tenuous arrangements that walk a line between earnest handicraft and absurdist satire. Mushrooms and fungi appear throughout the project as both physical materials and as a deliriously mixed metaphor for spontaneous organic generation, the corporate branding of psychedelic experience, and the limits of scientific knowledge. Combining influences from advertising imagery, Japanese flower arranging, and the freeform juxtapositions of the internet, these images extend Lord’s longstanding interest in the illusionistic space of “sculptures” that exist only in the photographic imagination. Presented in candy-colored painted aluminum frames, Lord’s miniature worlds chart a space of freedom where the deliberate and the accidental mingle imperceptibly.
The opening reception will be on Feb 7th from 6 – 9 p.m. The exhibition will run until 3/01/2015. Gallery hours are 12 -5 p.m. Sat and Sun or by appointment.
Checkout review by Alicia Eler "When Consumer Goods Blossom Into Otherworldly Fungi"
Vinyl Potluck - a project by Tom Norris
Vinyl Potluck
a project by Tom Norris
Bring a record, play a few tracks
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present the most recent installment of Vinyl Potluck, a project by Tom Norris. Vinyl Potluck is an ongoing series which investigates our relationship with vinyl records and nostalgia.
Attendees are invited to bring a vinyl record from their own collection and share with the group. The selection can be musical, historical, art-centered, or otherwise personally meaningful. A crate of records will be provided for those participants without records from which they may choose a selection. This record may then be kept by its selector, starting a new thread of nostalgia associated with both the vinyl object and the Vinyl Potluck event.
Nuttaphol Ma - A Grain of Rice Under A Microscope
Monte Vista Projects will be screening Nuttaphol Ma’s film A Grain of Rice Under A Microscope.
The screening will be on Jan 10 and 11 from 12 – 5 p.m.
A Grain of Rice Under A Microscope. was inspired from an event that took place at a retail day job on a busy autumn Sunday in 2010. Nuttaphol’s co-worker approached him looking deeply distraught. She saw our managers watching their activities on the office's computer monitor. The artist woke up the following day feeling like a grain of rice under a microscope. In 2013, the artist set out to retrace his experience of that busy autumn Sunday. He performed an act of sitting and surveying in and around the premise of McDonald's to mirror the 8 hour shift of the workers behind the counter. Two rolls of B/W super 8 film were deconstructed to shoot one frame for every four seconds in order to captured my 8 hour sitting where I recorded unfolding events and conversations that occurred between management, myself, and two police officers. The film is a poetic experience that slips between work and memory, protest and meditation, surveillance and watcher.
Nuttaphol Ma’s multidisciplinary works align his dreams, consciousness and memories to compose stories about the dreams of leaving and dreams of roots, the longing and not BE longing. Ma connects the seemingly disconnected patterns and sequences of unfolding moments from the everyday to re-tell empowering stories of belonging and not longing, about flowers blossoming from solitude. Ma currently runs a nomadic self-imposed sweatshop entitled The China Outpost that migrates throughout Los Angeles. Ma has participated in numerous exhibition spaces throughout Los Angeles including: 18th Street Art Center, The Armory Center for the Arts, Pitzer College Lenzner Gallery, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall, The Fellows of Contemporary Art, Angels Gate Cultural Center and Freewaves. Through the generous support of the Los Angeles art community, Ma is a recipient of the following fellowships and artist’s residencies: Armory Center for the Arts Teaching Artist Fellowship, California Community Foundation Fellowship, The Feitelson Arts Fellowship, Pitzer College Emerging Artist Fellow, 18th Street Art Center Artist Fellow, The Mountain School of Art Residency, the Richter Watson Fellowship Fund and the Walker / Parker Memorial Fellowship.