Who's in a Name? began as an intervention in a public project by artist John Baldessari. In January 2011, Baldessari launched YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS on the façade of the Australian Museum in Sydney, Australia. Leading up to the launch of the project and during its three-week duration, viewers were invited to register their names on a dedicated website. Participants were then informed when their names would be illuminated on a nearly 100-foot L.E.D. screen; the website presented a 24/7 streaming image of registered names coming in and out of view every fifteen seconds. In January 2011, when Silton first learned about the project, she invited artist friends and colleagues to each register the name of an artist who had committed suicide. These names she culled from a Wikipedia site devoted to the archiving of artists (and others) who had ended their lives.

Fifty-nine artists, including Silton, agreed to participate. Subsequently the artist asked eleven young art historians/writers to rewrite 200-word bios of all of the living and non-living artists. These biographical entries, along with screengrabs Silton captured of all of the suicidees' registered names, and an essay by art historian Liz Kotz, are gathered together in the book.

(Living) artists who participated in WHO’S IN A NAME:

Suzanne Adelman, Lisa Anne Auerbach, S.A. Bachman, Judie Bamber, Laurel Beckman, Lynne Berman, Kaucyila Brooke, David Burns, Kristin Calabrese, Joshua Callaghan, Rebecca Campbell, Anthony Carfello, Carolyn Castaño, Young Chung, Marcus Civin, Ginny Cook, Eileen Cowin, Robert Crouch, Mara De Luca, Ken Ehrlich, Robert Fontenot, Micol Hebron, Annetta Kapon, Farrah Karapetian, Dawn Kasper, Sant Khalsa, Alex Klein, David Lamelas, Eve Luckring, Audrey Mandelbaum, Yong Soon Min, Brian Moss, Amitis Motevalli, Sandeep Mukherjee, Hillary Mushkin, Meena Nanji, Pat O’Neill, Adam Overton, Taisha Paggett, Sheila ...

LA Forum for Architecture and Design at Woodbury Hollywood (next door to LACE)
6518 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028

FREE

Gather at WUHO for a conversation led by Dont Rhine with Shoshanna Scholar, current Clean Needles Now Executive Director, and AIDS activists, artists and members of the needle exchange past and present.

Clean Needles Now was an artist-run project that came out of Act UP. Dont Rhine, Shoshanna Scholar, and past and present members and activists of the needle exchange will talk about the beginning of the organization and trace it through to the present, with a focus on the role of artists and the neighborhood of Hollywood.

As an organization invested deeply in its neighborhood of Hollywood and the artists and activists of the needle exchange, LACE is proud to present this conversation.

Following the discussion, Dont and Shoshanna will lead the group to visit the needles exchange site just around the corner.

Read the related feature in current issue of X-TRA. More on X-TRA at x-traonline.org

Visit Clean Needles Now website. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Shoshanna Scholar has served as the Executive Director of Clean Needles Now / Los Angeles Community Health Outreach Project since 2003. The organizations aim to support the rights and responsibilities of those affected by drug use to protect their health and the health of their communities. Scholar is an outspoken advocate for the rights of drug users who has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the issues facing people who use drug on the local, state, and national level.

Dont Rhine has been involved in HIV/AIDS organizing since 1989. He co-founded the international sound art collective Ultra-red in 1994. Dont also teaches in the low-residency Visual Art MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

LACE, Phaidon, and For Your Art invite you to celebrate the launch of Art and Queer Culture by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer.

Spanning 125 years, Art and Queer Culture is the first major historical survey to consider the ways in which the codes and cultures of homosexuality have provided a creative resource for visual artists. Attempts to trouble the conventions of gender and sexuality, to highlight the performative aspects of identity and to oppose the tyranny of the normal are all woven into the historical fabric of homosexuality and its representation. From Oscar Wilde to Ryan Trecartin, from the molly houses of eighteenth-century London to the Harlem drag balls of the 1920s, the flamboyant refusal of social and sexual norms has fuelled the creation of queer art and life throughout the modern period.

Art and Queer Culture includes not only pictures made and displayed under the rubric of fine art but also those intended for private, underground or otherwise restricted audiences. Scrapbooks, amateur artworks, cartoons, bar murals, anonymous photographs, activist posters – all appear in its pages, as do paintings, sculptures, art photographs and video installations. Writing queer culture into the history of art means redrawing the boundaries of what counts as art as well as what counts as history. It means searching for cracks in the partition that separates ‘high’ art from ‘low’ culture and in the divide between public achievement and private life.

Please note this event will take place at For Your Art, 6020 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036.

Click here to learn more about the book.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 
Catherine Lord is Professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. She is a writer, artist and curator and has received numerous fellowships and awards for her work on cultural politics, disability, queer identities ...

21 March 2013

7 – 9pm
LA Forum for Architecture and Design at Woodbury Hollywood (next door to LACE)
6518 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028
FREE

Join us for a very special presentation by French artists Michael Quistrebert and Pierre-Laurent Cassiere, moderated by LACE Curator-in-Residence Martha Kirszenbaum.

Presented as part of Ceci n'est pas…Art Between France and Los Angeles, Cassiere and Quistrebert will present work and discuss both their individual practices as well as the projects they will be exhibiting as part of The End of the Night in the fall.

The End of the Night is the second exhibition in a two-part exhibition cycle Kirszenbaum will research and develop during her residency at LACE. This pair of exhibitions explores the visual influence of two major experimental filmmakers: one French, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and one American, Kenneth Anger. The first project, La Fin de la Nuit, will take place at the Palais de Tokyo (21 June  – 9 September 9, 2013), and frames an exploration of Los Angeles-based artists through the prism of Kenneth Anger’s aesthetics. The second exhibition in the cycle, The End of the Night, will open at LACE in the fall (16 October – 15 December 2013) and will examine the impact of Clouzot’s unfinished film L'Enfer on notions of visual and sound experimentation, the kinetic, and optical illusions in contemporary French art.

Please note this event will take place next door to LACE at the LA Forum for Architecture and Design at Woodbury Hollywood, 6518 Hollywood Boulevard.

Collaborative duo Florian & Michael Quistrebert (b. 1982 and 1976 in France, live and work in Amsterdam and Paris) have grounded their practice in abstract painting, video, invoking incisive geometrical forms, architectural structures and experimental imagery. Their series of paintings Gradient comprises multi-layered pieces playing with atmospheric spray-paint ...

Public Opening Reception: Friday 8 March, 6:30-10PM

LACE is pleased to host acclaimed New York-based street and stencil art visionary Logan Hicks for Thin Veils And Heavy Anchors, a new solo showing of his work.  Thin Veils And Heavy Anchors will debut to the public on March 8, 2013 and run through March 10, 2013, and marks a triumphant return for an artist whose works have been shown in Auckland, Cape Town, Shanghai, Taipei, and just about everywhere in between.

Originally a professional screen printer, Hicks’ work has gained considerable global recognition for its exploration of the urban environment and its ability to capture the sometimes-mundane cycle of city life in a haunting, yet highly refined, manner using hand-sprayed stencils.  His new body of work has evolved. The paintings have moved inside: from endless streets of colorful building facades up to six feet in scale to more intimate interior settings; from exterior cityscapes to the interiors of various buildings; and from distant lights to the direct gaze of figures who are in the process of walking away or climbing up stairs; shapes and curves of emotionless figures juxtaposed against the rigid linework of architecture bring attention to the contradictions of the city. More at www.loganhicks.com

The LA Weekly is doing a print giveaway with Hicks. Enter here.

LACE is delighted to host the launch of the latest edition of NATIVE STRATEGIES, the performance art journal of Los Angeles! This limited edition issue looks closely at the ways performance artists use ritual and whose work draws inspiration from the images and affectations of spirituality. These artists occupy wildly divergent positions relating to their audience; this is the congregation we call an artistic community. The featured artists' performances at Human Resources this past February 1st and 2nd ranged in tone, from sincerity and gentleness, to humor and fierceness. 

Also at stake in this issue is the notion of the document as an activator of performance. Tanya Rubbak's essay on the subject of design as mediumship was put into action as the artists created separate small documents integrated into their performances as totemic objects, maps, guides, and offerings. 

NS#3 features interviews with Sam White, Cynthia Carr, Samara Golden, Alexa Weir, Liz Glynn, Jane Brucker, Rafa Esparza, Signify, Sanctify, Believe, and Amanda Yates, with essays by Tanya Rubbak and Brian Getnick. Designed by Tanya Rubbak

We are excited to present at the launch a performance by Lee Relvas of Rind in the rear gallery. Positioned next to Andrea Fraser’s Un monumento as Fantasias Decartadas (A Monument to Discarded Fantasies), Revlas will perform an excerpt from The Porous World, a virtuosically sung mini opera in which Relvas subtly manipulates a family of moon-like faces into configurations on free standing poles.  She describes this work as "self-portraiture to create historical artifacts of (herself) in the future, using light and shadow to reveal the porous mesh between the past and the yet-to-come."

General Admission $5 // Students $2 // FREE for LACE Members
Publications $10
Purchase your copy of Native Strategies Issue 3 AND your admission to the performance and launch party ...

LACE is excited to participate in the first Printed Matter annual LA Art Book Fair, from February 1-3, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. An opening will be held on the evening of Thursday, January 31.

Free and open to the public, the LA Art Book Fair is a unique event for artists’ books, art catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines presented by 220 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-one countries.

We will be presenting a selection of recent artist books and publication projects from Tad Beck, Brian Bress, Karen Lofgren, OJO, and Steve Roden, and will also have available a selection of hard-to-find print projects from the LACE archive.

Steve Roden will also be signing copies of his recent project, i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces, Saturday February 2 from noon to 1pm. Limited copies of the book will be available at a special rate of $25 (normally $40).

LACE is honored to announce LA Existancial , organized by curator Marie de Brugerolle, an ambitious group exhibition that brings together international artists across generations to explore the legacy of Guy de Cointet. Brugerolle’s project is based on Cointet’s Cizeghoh Tur NDJMB (1973), a portfolio of 12 serigraphs (red letters on white) created in Los Angeles and realized in France. This portfolio, written in a coded language, was the stage-prop of his first performance in 1973 at the Paris Sonnabend Gallery. 

LA Existancial is a double exploration of Los Angeles as myth as well as a site of cinema and crime. Formally, the works will engage multiple aspects of “folding-unfolding” a story, to explore different post-performative possibilities. Like Cointet’s piece, each artist’s respective works will have more than one status: a wall drawing is also a poster; a drawing can be also a script; a mailed letter becomes a map; a carpet is a score; and a window blind is a poem that can be sung. 

Brugerolle has selected an impressive, multigenerational roster of artists, which includes: John Baldessari (US), Julien Bismuth & Jean-Pascal Flavien (F), Simon Bergala (F), Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet (F), Elsa Bourdot & Clara Gensburger (F), Andrea Fraser (US), Dora Garcia (Spain), Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly (US), Morten Norbye Halvorsen & Jessica Warboys (Norway), Emily Mast (US), Jimmy Robert(F), Mickaël Salvi (F), Benjamin Seror (F), Lucille Uhlrich (F) and Veridiana Zurita (Brazil).

OPENING RECEPTION PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Ongoing: Marie de Brugerolle, The Colors of the Day
Ongoing: Dora Garcia, The Sphinx and Prayers
7:15PM (VIP Reception)  Benjamin Seror, Mime radio, chapter XII
7:50PM  Mickael Salvi, The Student Has Surpassed the Master
8:00PM  Guy de Cointet, Espahor ledet ko uluner !
8:30PM  Guy de Cointet, The dog story
8:50PM Julien Bismuth & Jean-Pascal ...

For a limited time, everyone can take advantage of the perks of LACE membership by enjoying a 15% discount on all online purchases now through 16 December!

Take advantage of members-only perks by enjoying a 15% discount on all LACE purchases* made online now through 16 December. The annual holiday sale runs December 15 - 16 at LACE, but you can take advantage of the savings now by purchasing online.

Recently added items include the Fire in the Belly book, Native Strategies Issue II, 2500 Random Things About Me Too, and Sniper.

Click here to go to the LACE online shop, and select the "member" price from the drop down menu and start saving today.

*15% discount does not apply to LACE Limited Editions