Notes From the Front Line

January 6, 2016 – February 14, 2016
Opening Reception: January 6, 2016, 7-10pm

Notes From the Front Line is a two person multi-media exhibition that explores artistic interrogations into asymmetric strategies in art production in a post-global economic crisis world.  This exhibition features two solo installations by Long Beach based artists OIga Lah and Jason Wallace Triefenbach. Both artists’ works utilize the language of site specific installations,  allegorical explorations through forms and asymmetric strategies in art making embodied by found objects, readymades and performance.

Curated by Ed Gomez, this exhibition was inspired by Germano Celants’s essay, Notes for a Guerilla War in which Celant makes the case that the Arte Povera artist creates spaces of possibility in which artworks can manifest from the everyday materials of existence without the industrialized process of machined fabrication or static commercial replication.  The Arte Povera artists posit themselves in opposition to the formalist underpinnings of Abstract Expressionism and the neutral modernist cube.

Notes from the Front Line consists of two separate installations utilizing LACE’s Project Space and rear entrance hallways. These projects interrogate not only the architecture of the exhibition spaces with site specific installations but activate the aesthetics of Assemblage Art and agency of the D.I.Y. generation.

BIOS
Ed Gomez is an artist, curator, and educator who received his BFA in Painting from Arizona State University in 1999 and his MFA in Painting from the Otis College of Art and Design in 2003. Since then he has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally and curating various art exhibitions that deal with the region of California and Mexico as an area of aesthetic production.

Ed Gomez’s interdisciplinary art practice revolves around the questioning of exhibition practices, institutional framework and historical models of artistic production. In 2006, he co-founded the MexiCali Biennial, a bi-national art and music program addressing the region of the US-Mexico border, which he is currently a director and co-president.  This project serves not only as a curatorial project but also a satirical statement to the abundance of biennials occurring around the globe and the impact they have on the art community.  Mr. Gomez is also the director of G.O.C.A., The Gallery of Contemporary Art, which is a traveling self-contained exhibition space humorously located in his suitcase.  It has showcased emerging and established artists from Los Angeles, Phoenix, New York and Mexico.

Jason Triefenbach
Reptile Intelligence/ Possessed By Love (Another Wet Nightmare)
To see as a dog sees. Total periphery, a cold and total attention, surgical in its detachment- its leveling and ordering of input. Pleasure is in the world; pleasure and pain.

Jason Triefenbach (born 1978 rural IL, based in Los Angeles) offers a fragmentary scenic entanglement, approaching the sculptural process as an arousal of the spirit on an expanded field of fetishism- a sensual, tactile engagement with the raw materials of his physical and social environment, informed by a highly subjective ontological playfulness.

The room size mixed-media installation forms an incomplete psychotropic diorama: dry fountain, cracked shell, detritus of hidden acts in a city’s liminal spaces. Ruins of labyrinth or fairway, rough joining of signifiers inviting multiple viewpoints and symbolic of a speculative folding of space and duration. A play with actors absent, lost in the falling curtain.

Rudimentary formal systems haunt the tableau. Color and pattern reoccur, smudged across subject matter and obscuring a comfortable reading of the whole. Mirrored glass, spices, fingers of rebar, broken angles. A coming together. Triefenbach appropriates literary strategies such as textual cut-up and concrete poetry into overlapping sculptural modalities to achieve an obliquely balanced derangement. Burning the last match- a perverting of the ordered Universe and an invitation to bestial reverie. A wine so sweet we have to drink it in the graveyard.

Olga Lah is a second generation Korean-American, born and raised in the Los Angeles area. She now resides in Long Beach, California. She received a B.A. in both Studio Art and Art History from the University of California at Riverside. She later received a M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. Her interest in the relationship between theology and art led her to an art practice exploring these themes in site-specific installations and sculpture. She has exhibited most recently at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles; the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance; and at the Venice Arsenale in Italy. She has completed residency at the prestigious Djerassi Resident Artists Program as well as recently received the Korea Arts Foundation of America Biennial Award. olgalah.com