For the Listening Party, RJ Smith expertly led a wander through Detroit's musical (and political) history. Smith is the author of The Great Black Way: LA in the 1940s and the Lost African American Renaissance and is a Senior Editor at Los Angeles Magazine. He is currently writing a biography of James Brown.

ART OFFICE and Slab, two artist-run collaborative projects join together to present a 60-minute screening of contemporary video work by local, national, and international artists. The videos in this program explore how realities are tested through representation, physical configuration, creative desire, and potential failures.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
 Julia Brown
 Kim Collmer
 Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
 Lyn Elliot
 Peter Harkawik
 Jon Irving
 Lauren Kelley
 Jennifer Levonian
 TV Moore
 Shana Moulton
 Corinna Schnitt


ABOUT ART OFFICE
As an ongoing platform for critical investigations and artistic projects, ART OFFICE for Film + Video actively seeks, promotes and presents contemporary video and film in art contexts. Founded by artists and CalArts alums Victoria Fu, Julie Orser and Jennifer L. Porter, ART OFFICE was formed to expand both emerging and established artists working in time-based media in the Los Angeles area.
Art Office

ABOUT SLAB
Slab is an exhibition method founded by Los Angles-based artist Wendy Mason and Houston-based curator Nancy Zastudil. Enacted in unexpected locations, Slab functions as a platform for artists' works, including solo, group and collaborative projects. We consider the transitory roles of artists and curators while aiming to facilitate artist's projects and events, exploring the fun and experimental nature of creative activity.
Slab Projects

LACE'S INFAMOUS VALENTINE'S DAY PARTY IS BACK!

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions celebrated the grand tradition of VALENTINE's day from years past with, good friends, random lovers, and strangers and to kick off our 30th anniversary in style!

Organized by artists David Burns and Margie Schnibbe (aka Vena Virago) with Peter Bolton & Carla Hart, Franco Castilla, Lenora Claire, Chad Clark, Robert Crouch, Christine Nichols and Carol Stakenas, Lust 4 LACE celebrates the grand tradition of years past and all manner of delightful debauchery by creating a night featuring explicit, naked, juicy, tasty, slippery, slimy, crunchy, gooey, sexy, voyeuristic, fetishistic live action animated narrative squishy hand-made video, live art and musical performance--DJ sets by John Tejada, Henry Self and Robert Crouch--not to mention kinky crafts with JP Craft Captain sponsored by Babeland and delectable libations by Stone Brewing Co.

Featuring brand new and rarely seen explicit videos and performances from Southern California artists including: Buck Angel, Skip Arnold, Jordan Biren, Squeaky Blonde, David Burns, Peter Caine, Franco Castilla, Mark B. Chamness, Charong Chow, Jennifer Cohen, Geoff Cordner, Michael Dee, Dino Dinco, Willia Drew, Zachary Drucker, Martin Durazo, Micol Hebron, Tyler Hubby, Bryan Jackson, Kadet Kuhne, Darin Klein, Lauren Lavitt, Matt Lipps, Selene Luna, Ming-Yuen S. Ma, Eon McKai, Julie Orser, Julianna (JP) Parr, Kathryne Layne Paxton, Barry Pett, Eva Posey, Dustin Robertson, Margie Schnibbe, Mark Cosmo Segurson, Thairin Smothers, Vena Virago, Austin Young, Carlos Zamora, and more.

LUST 4 LACE part of the LACE LIVE! commissioning series. Throughout 2008 LACE is developing projects to celebrate LACE’s rich history, inspire heightened usage of its archival holdings, promote exploration of contemporary art in Los Angeles since 1978.

Be our MYSPACE valentine!!

Download the Lust for LACE press release here.

LACE kicked off the year at ART LA 2008 with a special 30th anniversary celebration!  HIT+RUN was invited to explore LACE's archives and select imagery to reflect their long history of supporting experimental art.  HIT+RUN is proud to celebrate this vital Los Angeles art institution, and we invite you to a live screenprinting session this Saturday, January 26th in Santa Monica. Each person got to choose from exclusive designs, featuring moments in LACE history with Mike Kelley, Dorit Cypis, Tony Oursler, Frederick Fisher, Highland Art Agents and HIT+RUN, to create their own FREE commemorative LACE T-shirt! Organized by Christine Nichols, Special Projects Director

DIY T-shirts is the first LACE LIVE! commission. Throughout 2008 LACE is developing projects to celebrate LACE’s rich history, inspire heightened usage of its archival holdings, promote exploration of contemporary art in Los Angeles since 1978.

EL CUBO explores notions of social architecture through a transportable sound sculpture whose sound track responds to site-specific locations.

EL CUBO  is a transformable object that articulates experiences in its interior and its exterior.  EL CUBO exists thanks to the conjunctional initiative of different creators with the goal of provoking the eruption of different sonorous gradients, incessant voices, ephemeral chronics and ambient episodes in the city .

Unstable, EL CUBO unfolds and loses its defined limits only to replicate the extreme growth from the surroundings to which it tries to echo. Constructed of wastes, signs of the consumption economy, EL CUBO is a kamikaze version of its neutral and white predecessor.

EL CUBO  unfolds its aesthetic potential in concrete spaces as much as imaginary; it is drop-down architecture, a sonorous intervention in the noise of the city, a specific-social cartography that projects to the public, between the public, towards the public.

Listen to LARADIOCUBO

El Cubo is part of Street Address, an ongoing storefront series at LACE that offers a 24/7 art experience to Hollywood Boulevard passersby.

An Atlas is a traveling exhibition of artists working with “radical cartography”—a practice that uses maps and mapping to promote social change. The 10 participating artists, architects, and collectives take on issues from globalization to garbage and explore the map’s role as a political agent. The exhibition and accompanying catalog contribute to a growing cultural movement that cuts across boundaries of art, cartography, geography, and activism.  It is a companion exhibition to the publication, “An Atlas of Radical Cartography," (upcoming Fall 2007, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, Los Angeles.) 

Works include Ashley Hunt’s intricate diagram of the social effects of the global prison-industrial complex; the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s mapping of the people who make and manage the “garbage machine” in New York City; Jane Tsong’s drawing of how nature and culture clash in Los Angeles’ watershed; and Trevor Paglen and John Emerson’s route map of CIA rendition flights.

AN ATLAS CONTRIBUTORS

An Architektur
The Center for Urban Pedagogy
Ashley Hunt
Institute for Applied Autonomy with Site-R
Pedro Lasch
Lize Mogel
Trevor Paglen & John Emerson
Brooke Singer
Jane Tsong
Unayyan

An Atlas is made possible in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation, and is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. For more information, please visit www.an-atlas.com

Download An Atlas press release.

This public art project, an ice cream truck-turned-mobile-karaoke-unit, was deployed throughout Los Angeles to unite people in a collective quest to perform and record new versions of pop songs using the vernacular of ice cream truck music. Karaoke Ice introduced people to the playful ways in which technology can be used to give voice to personal and collective concerns, as well as enable meaningful social interaction between groups, both large and small.

Click here for more information.

THE TOUR
Breaking out from its LACE Hollywood headquarters, the Karaoke Ice tour will visit an array of distinct neighborhoods across Los Angeles. Lucci and Remedios will make daytime and evening appearances at a variety of public spaces that encourage social gathering. Come and join the tour and rediscover Los Angeles through Karaoke! Click here for a more detailed schedule.

Download Karaoke Ice press release.

Out Side In is an exhibition of artwork by 2007 MFA graduates from the University of California, Irvine, presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). The aesthetic and intellectual interests of this group are varied and expressed using video, photography, painting, drawing, installation, sculpture and performance. The navigation of sites and space is considered in works addressing the militarized landscape, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map of the earth, sites of historical trauma, and the everchanging neighborhood where LACE is located. Other artists explore the body and interpersonal relationships. Figures pose in lushly constructed paper rooms, a woman interacts with images of deceased artists, and animated bodies engage with each other in intimate and awkward ways. Others use criticality and humor to expose Dr. Condoleezza Rice, stereotypes of Japanese femininity, and the vagaries of political speech.

The exhibition's title alludes to the various positions and dynamics at play in political, philosophical, geographic, bodily, and emotional states of being. It refers to a fluidity of perspective and the artists' multiple attempts to upset the familiar and re-route its meaning through skillful and thoughtful manipulations of their chosen media. With equal doses of wit, analysis, poetry, and attention to craft, the work in this exhibition exemplifies the diverse influences of the institution where these artists met.

The artists featured are Dan Bayles, Douglas Green, Anna Kim, Lara Odell, Gina Osterloh, Jeff Sheng, Kristine Thompson, Lisa Tucker (collaborating with Matthew Bryant and Cheryl Gilge), Gordon Winiemko, and Chie Yamayoshi. A limited-edition publication will accompany the exhibition.

Download the Out Side In press release.

16 June 2007
2:30-4:30pm Everything About Nothing and Nothing About Everything Symposium
5:00-8:00pm aporia:aporia Opening & Grand Opening and Closing of The the food, aporia:aporia's restaurant

17 June 2007
Curator/Docent-led Tours every hour on the hour (2,3,4pm)
after 5pm: an invitation to join us at a playing field to play or watch an almost Impossible Game

Aporia means roadblock. It is the logical conclusion that disproves its hypothesis. It is the idea collapsing under the weight of its own consequences. In a sense, it is a failure. It is also the moment that most starkly illuminates the true outline of the idea, hypothesis, or origin.

What would artists make if they were free to give in to ambition without constraint? -- if they were not limited by material circumstances, nor by anxiety over their work's reception, nor by their own faculties and resources? -- if, in fact, they were imagining something that could never be realized in this world? This unique curatorial project will inspire our audiences to imagine the impossible with both seriousness and delight.

The exhibition is accompanied by a podcast audio tour and two publications. Download the audio guide podcast at dbfoundation. Be sure to bring your mp3 player. The dBfoundation invites you to remix the aporia audioguide.

Featuring works by

(aporia) (aporia:aporia)

Aaisha
Joan Banach
Daniel Bozhkov
eteam
Rochelle Feinstein
Carl Ferrero
Monika Goetz
Nakazawa Hideki
Tianna Kennedy
Karen Margolis
Sarah Oppenheimer
Jim Skuldt
Allyson Spellacy
Peter Wegner
Treva Wurmfeld

(aporia:aporia)

Chiwan Choi
Raul Vincent Enriquez
Maymanah Farhat
Aaron Kunin
Judeth Oden
Linda Pollack
Tom Russotti
Maya Schindler
Geoff & Sarah Seelinger

(audioguide)

Juliana Francis
limbic, inc.
Henry Strozier
Raul Vincent Enriquez

This exhibition and accompanying publication, “Impossibility Made Easy” are made possible with support from the ...

The Mexican Museum’s Nuevo Arte: Colección Tequila Don Julio is a national traveling showcase of contemporary works by some of today’s most innovative Mexican and Mexican-American artists selected by Tere Romo, curator of exhibitions at The Mexican Museum based in San Francisco.

Of the 17 Nuevo Arte: Colección Tequila Don Julio artists, eight are California-based.  Highlights in the collection include Los Angeles’s own Camille Rose Garcia’s All Hail the Reindeer Army, a satirical interpretation of modern-day cartoons; local artist Arturo Romo’s Vast Arcade Los Angeles, a multi-faceted commentary on the complexity and beauty of the urban landscape; and Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s La Mojado, a delicate, porcelain teacup accented with cookies that look good enough to eat.

Following its showing at LACE, Nuevo Arte: Colección Tequila Don Julio will be gifted to The Mexican Museum to augment the museum’s permanent collection with artists whom are not currently represented.  This exhibition previously showed at White Box in New York City, New World Museum in Houston, and the Aldo Castillo Gallery in Chicago.

Download the Nuevo Arte press release.