Photographic collages @ RoseGallery, Santa Monica, CA

Her First Meteorite. Photographic collages

RoseGallery, Santa Monica, CA

Through 28 November 2015

Ken Graves 

Heat Source, 2003 

(c) Ken Graves, Courtesy RoseGallery

ROSEGALLERY presents Her First Meteorite, a selection of unique photographic collages by Carolle Benitah, James Gallagher, Melinda Gibson, Ken Graves, Stéphanie Solinas, Annegret Soltau, and Grete Stern. 

Found, sliced and assembled, the photographic collage establishes experimental and introspective forms through the combination of familiar and obscure images. The montages from the various artists each evoke a distinct entry into surreal worlds, bound together by connected and intertwined photographs. With found objects and images, the spontaneity of discovery and combination counters the intricacy of the details in the works.

Although half a century apart, Ken Graves’ collages and Grete Stern’s Sueños both reimagine worlds for the figures on the page. Graves pulls from magazines of Stern’s period, the mid twentieth century, and creates moments not bound to time. Celestial and earthbound settings often mingle in his works to create a space free from our known society yet afloat in cultural commentary. Whether a comical social critique by Ken Graves or James Gallagher or an intimate family portrait threaded by Carolle Benitah, the collage generates newfound connections between recognizable forms, creating a unique image independent from our reality while strangely familiar.

In the early twentieth century, Dadaist montage rejected reason. With ideologies regarding identity at the forefront of political strife, surrealist art attempted to escape the categorization of the self. Allusions to the other, the alternate, and the unknown frequent a surreal image. Examining her own identity, Annegret Soltau states, “to me relying on one permanent identity makes no sense. It makes no sense if you are always supposed to be ‘the self,’ the one and only ‘self’.” The multiplicity of her own image, spliced and sewn, demonstrates the substance of the female identity through a critique of the documents that dictate and constrict a woman’s role. In a literal interpretation of multiplicity, Solinas’ Phénomènes depict forty-four sets of twins. Displayed in the manner of a 19th century scientific document, the organization creates a detachment, implying the otherness of the twins in the photographs. Using recognizable imagery in new contexts, these collages present alternate perceptions of our own world, providing a surreal space left for interpretation. 

ROSEGALLERY

Bergamot Station Art Center

2525 Michigan Avenue, G5

Santa Monica, California 90404

www.rosegallery.net

Larry Johnson & Marnie Weber, Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica

Larry Johnson & Marnie Weber

Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica

February 8 - March 15, 2014

Patrick Painter, Inc. presents an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artists Larry Johnson and Marnie Weber. The exhibition features pieces that explore different approaches to photo-based imagery.

LARRY JOHNSON’s stylized text-based works often play off of humor, celebrity fascination and class politics. Larry Johnson creates images by re-contextualizing found materials using his signature graphic style. His narratives and dialogues often originate from newspapers, recordings and magazines and employ dark themes including sexuality, disillusionment, death, and the American Dream.

The voice behind Untitled (Ghost Stories) (1992) addresses memories of the fictional variety. During the 1970’s and 1980’s in America, the media ushered in 1950’s nostalgia. ‘Doris Day,’ ‘patent leather shoes,’ and ‘virgin pins,’ refer to the decade immediately preceding Johnson’s own historical memory. Because the text directly addresses the viewer, there is a presupposition of collective memories. Here Larry  Johnson pokes fun at the media-engendered capacity to fondly remember a past that no one ever really knew. "Hungarican" is a combination of ‘Hungarian’ and ‘Puerto Rican’ and alludes to 1970’s comedian Freddie Prinze, who shot himself in the head.

This body of photo-collages by MARNIE WEBER follow a narrative based on her on-going series, titled, “The Spirit Girls.” The story chronicles an all-female band whose members die tragically, but due to unfulfilled dreams, return as spirits to communicate their message of emancipation. With accompanying music and performance, the group is inspired in part by the American Spiritualist movement of the 1850’s. With their costumes, masks, and wigs, the Spirit Girls create a musical performance that is consciously visual.

In A Warm Deer (2007) a Spirit Girl is pictured lying down in front of a large stag. A snow-covered forest envelops them in the background. Marnie Weber’s use of strange, exaggerated color and motifs span a range of art historical and pop cultural references which render the time ambiguous. The sinister look in the Spirit Girl’s eyes defies the child-like innocence of her pose. The mask leaves her emotions up for interpretation. The scene is reminiscent of tableau vivant, and creates a palpable sense that this is a snapshot in her performance-journey. The absurdity and whimsy nonetheless carry dark undertones.

LARRY JOHNSON received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and has been shown in many prestigious institutions throughout the world. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Marc Jancou Contemporary in New York (2010), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2009), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009). He lives and works in Los Angeles.

MARNIE WEBER received her B.A. from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Based out of Los Angeles, Weber’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group shows. She recently had a solo show at Cardi Black Box in Milan (2013) and her work has been exhibited at the Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2013), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2012).

PATRICK PAINTER INC.

2525 Michigan Avenue, Unit B2, Santa Monica, 90404

www.patrickpainter.com

Chiho Aoshima at Blum & Poe, Santa Monica

Chiho Aoshima
Blum & Poe, Santa Monica
February 8 - March 9, 2002

In her solo debut, Chiho Aoshima exhibits five medium to large-scale digital prints. Most recently seen in the traveling exhibition Superflat, her work is identified with the visual and conceptual precedents of Takashi Murakami's work. Chiho Aoshima's style demonstrates the striking trend of anime- and manga-influenced work that has garnered so much attention in recent Japanese art. This work derives many of its stylistic cues from 18th- and 19th-century traditions of formal and spatial reduction. In Chiho Aoshima's work, space and scale are obfuscated by the all-over compositional methods she creates digitally. Though they have the appearance of paintings, she composes her brightly-hued work entirely on the computer, which allows for every inch of the work to be painstakingly rendered.

Chiho Aoshima's works often depict adolescent girls in humorous or bizarre situations. These range from magical and dream-like to dark and horrific. The visual vocabulary she uses exemplifies kawaii, or cute, imagery, but Chiho Aoshima twists this distinctly Japanese device into her own. Frogs, girls, cherry blossoms, fish, snakes, and noodles all occupy the same world, a world with indecipherable terrain, where there is no demarcation between air, water, or land. Still-life and portraiture mix easily in Chiho Aoshima's variously scaled works, as do fashion, design, and traditional art practices.

Chiho Aoshima lives and works in Tokyo and is the head of Digital Drawing for Takashi Murakami's Hiropon Factory.

The pieces were created with the support of Canon, who generously assisted Chiho Aoshima with the printing.

BULM & POE
2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.blumandpoe.com

André Kertész, Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica

André Kertész: Painting with Light
Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica
January 15 - March 4, 2000

The Peter Fetterman Gallery presents an exhibition of the photographs of André Kertész, one of the twentieth century's foremost photographers. The exhibition features photographs from all periods of Kertész's oeuvre.

André Kertész, (1894-1985) was born in Budapest, Hungary. At age eighteen, Kertész purchased his first camera, which was an early hand-held instrument. This gave him the freedom to be much more creative in his photography. From 1914-1918, André Kertész fought in World War I, where he served in the Austro-Hungarian army and photographed behind the lines. After the war, André Kertész struggled to find his niche as he worked at the Budapest Stock Exchange and began experimenting with photography including some early distortions and tension in his compositions.

André Kertész career began to take off when he moved to Paris in 1925. He was the first serious photographer to master the newly invented Leica camera. A vast improvement over the earlier hand-held camera André Kertész once used, the Leica allowed the photographer to assume the role of the flaneur, easily moving among the crowds of Parisians on the street and in the cafes. His easy mobility allowed André Kertész to photograph on a whim, capturing odd angles and a decidedly modern sense of chance. At this time, others recognized André Kertész's brilliance and his photographs were included in various exhibitions and several were already in the permanent collections of museums in Germany.

By the late 1930's, André Kertész moved to New York where he freelanced as a photojournalist for several magazines including Vogue, House and Garden, and Harper's Bazaar. When World War II broke out, André Kertész was forced to register as a resident alien and was restricted from taking photographs on the street. During this time, André Kertész attempted to enter the New York art world only to be spurned by dealers and curators who had difficulty accepting his style. André Kertész worked for Condé Nast publications from 1947 to 1964, photographing interiors for design magazines, but continued his own artistic pursuits. After 1964, André Kertész devoted himself entirely to his art, and his American recognition finally came in the form of exhibitions and publications. His work from this later period reflects a feeling of distance possessed by André Kertész. Often he would photograph scenes in Washington Square Park from the balcony of his apartment, producing elegant compositions of branches and people strolling. André Kertész remained in New York City until his death in 1985.

The photographs of André Kertész are included in museums worldwide and every major collection. He received awards such as a Guggenheim fellowship and the Medal of the City of Paris. André Kertész's work remains as a testament to his genius as a photographer and his status as the father of modern photography.

PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Gallery A7, Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.peterfetterman.com

Camilo José Vergara at Getty Research Institute, Santa Monica - "They saw a very great future here": Photographs from Central Los Angeles

"They saw a very great future here": Photographs from Central Los Angeles by Camilo José Vergara
Getty Research Institute, Santa Monica
November 4, 1996 - May 2, 1997

In 1992, the Greater Holy Light Missionary Baptist Church, at 7316 Broadway in South Central Los Angeles, was serving a dwindling African-American congregation. Four years later, the same building now houses the Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo es el Camino, and the pastor, a Salvadoran woman, would like to add a second story. This is just one example of Los Angeles' changing urban landscape as seen in a new exhibition of photographs at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. 

For 20 years, photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara has documented the physical transformation of low-income urban communities in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Newark and, most recently, Los Angeles. While the poor and homeless have long served as poignant subject matter for photographers, Camilo José Vergara focuses on the urban environment of ghettoes, how they change over time, and how they reflect the lives of the people who inhabit them. By photographing the same sites over a period of several years, Camilo José Vergara documents how a movie theater is converted into a church by the addition of a sign, some crosses, and a bible; how a storefront is abandoned and later remodeled into a drug treatment center; and how an apartment building is closed, boarded up, covered with graffiti, and ultimately torn down.

"They saw a very great future here," co-curated by Camilo José Vergara and Research Institute Deputy Director Thomas Reese, includes photographs, taken primarily from 1992 to 1996, of East Los Angeles, Pacoima, Skid Row, and South Central Los Angeles. Through his photographs and interviews with neighborhood residents, Camilo José Vergara captures the physical evidence of people coping with the effects of chronic poverty--from boarded-up and abandoned buildings to security fencing, barred Windows, and colorful murals that disguise a disintegrating infrastructure.

"Central Los Angeles is a port of entry," says Camilo José Vergara, "teeming with poor people struggling to find a place to live, work, and raise children--people who want to speak their language, eat the foods they are accustomed to, and share in the city's prosperity. Here, openness coexists with closure. Fortresses surrounded by spiky fences sit next to colorful vernacular structures."

In his photographs of Los Angeles, Camilo José Vergara captures the ongoing impact of the 1992 riots on buildings in South Central, the complex economy of downtown's Skid Row, and the transformation of traditionally African-American communities by the recent influx of new inhabitants of Latino descent. Among the photographs are: a city block, destroyed in the 1992 riots and now surrounded by fencing used by plumbers, carpet cleaners, and hair dressers to advertise their services; a portrait of Martin Luther King on one storefront commissioned by a Latino business owner from a Latino artist in order to attract African American customers and discourage graffiti taggers; an anonymous storefront whose crosses and faded praying hands indicate that it was once a church.

Camilo José Vergara, born and raised in Chile, came to the United States in 1965 to study at the University of Notre Dame. He received a master's degree in sociology from Columbia University and the Revson Fellowship at Columbia University's School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His photographs have been exhibited at the National Building Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, the Queens Museum of Art and elsewhere. He has written about urban issues for several publications, most notably The Nation. He is the author of The New American Ghetto (Rutgers University Press, 1995). Vergara is currently a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. This is the first west coast exhibition of his work.

"They saw a very great future here" is part of a year-long series of events and activities relating to Los Angeles organized by the Getty Research Institute. These events include: · The 1996-97 scholar year, Perspectives on Los Angeles: Narratives, Images, History, in which 28 writers, artists, and academics are studying the people, historical events, and economic forces that have shaped Los Angeles ·"L.A. as Subject," a project to inventory local historical resources on the cultural heritage and evolution of Los Angeles ·"L.A. Culture Net," a unique, collaborative initiative under the leadership of the Getty Information Institute which is creating a local, on-line cultural community.

The activities will culminate in late 1997 with the public opening of the Getty Center, a cultural complex dedicated to the visual arts and the humanities, now under construction in the Sepulveda Pass alongside the San Diego (405) freeway.

Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities
401 Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica, California
www.getty.edu