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 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 ...

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) presents the North American premiere of (Re-) Cycles of Paradise, 25 October – 16 December 2012, a thematic group exhibition organized by curatorial collective ARTPORT_making waves. International in scope, this exhibition explores the complex relationship between gender and climate change, featuring works by Kim Abeles (USA), Subhankar Banerjee (India/USA), Charley Case (Belgium/Spain), Meschac Gaba (Benin/NL), Anita Glesta (USA), Melodie Mousset (Switzerland/USA) with Zachary Sharrin (USA), Nnenna Okore (Nigeria/USA), Ursula Scherrer (Switzerland/USA), Roman Signer (Switzerland), George J. Steinmann (Switzerland), Frances Whitehead (USA), and Insa Winkler (Germany).

The curatorial premise of (Re-) Cycles of Paradise originates from the hypothesis that the world is, by necessity, the only possible paradise that we can create and conserve. Starting from this position, ARTPORT_making waves selected a diverse array of artworks that explore and underscore inter-dependencies between gender roles and climate change. Various sub-themes like mitigation, adaptation, financial incentive and technological development are woven into the poetic, interpretative and documentary approaches of the artists.

Using the context of climate change, these artists’ works examine the vulnerability and strength of “the second sex” including the impact of women’s control, or lack thereof, over natural resources; the consequences of forced migration; as well as the inextricable link between climate change and public health; ultimately noting the resilience of women as they take on the grim environmental challenges that face us today.

In Frances Whitehead’s video, UNFORESEEN:, she traces the work of Lydia Rodinam, an early twentieth century plant geneticist who starved herself to death during the siege of Leningrad in order to save important seeds. Whitehead brings together key figures in science and politics including Dr. Pamela Anderson, head of the International Potato Center in Lima Peru; Wangari Maathai, Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner ...

Join us for the closing reception of Group Dynamics and Improper Light  on Thursday, 13 September 2012, 7-9PM. Visitors will have the opportunity to see the final photographs and videos which have resulted from Osterloh's residency.

The exhibition has been extended through 30 September 2012.

LACE is proud to present Group Dynamics and Improper Light a new large-scale installation by artist Gina Osterloh, curated by Carol A. Stakenas and Robert Crouch. Osterloh constructs life-size room environments and activates them through still serial performances, paper-maché models, and cardboard cutouts. Group Dynamics and Improper Light will explore the relationships between abstraction and identity, the space between individuals, and what determines “a group” within a social context.

This commission marks a new arc in Osterloh’s career. Group Dynamics and Improper Light is the first time the artist’s process has been made public – her meticulous set construction, how each set is dependent upon her 4x5 large format camera, lighting decisions, and experimentation with materials.

For her residency at LACE, Osterloh moved her entire studio practice into the main gallery in June 2012 and has constructed a life-size room environment from start to finish. The gallery has been open to the public, allowing Osterloh to engage with visitors as part of her process. When a visitor enters the gallery, they will walk into a unique working stage set installed in the gallery. The set explores abstraction and identity through the lens of “improper light”, as each material and light both illuminates and obscures the subjects being photographed.

A monograph accompanying the exhibition will be forthcoming.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gina Osterloh is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles, California. Currently she is working on a short film essay that addresses issues of perception and identity through the lens of blindness.  Osterloh ...

Join us for the opening reception of  Shells, Bells, Steps And Silences and Group Dynamics and Improper Light on Thursday, 28 June 2012, 8-10PM.

LACE is proud to present Shells, Bells, Steps And Silences, a new video installation and film survey by Los Angeles artist Steve Roden, curated by LACE Associate Director/Curator Robert Crouch. While Roden has been making films for over 20 years, this is the first body of work he has made with video exclusively, although the visual language and the approach to performance is certainly an extension of his 2011 film, Striations. Shells, Bells, Steps And Silences incorporates 3 research projects conducted by the artist over the past year: a collection of sea shells acquired by Roden from the estate of modern dancer Martha Graham, notes from a recent residency at the Walter Benjamin archive in Berlin, and John Cage’s seminal 4’33”, a work that Roden performed daily over the course of an entire year.

In October 2011, Steve Roden was invited by the DAAD to spend a month researching Walter Benjamin’s archives at the Akademie der Kunste, after having seen some of Benjamin’s notebooks previously in an exhibition in Berlin in 2006. Because he is unable to speak or read German, Roden responded primarily to the visual aspects of Benjamin’s notebooks - and was particularly excited by a series of color-coded symbols that resembled the kind of graphic notations avant-garde composers were exploring during the 1960’s. Benjamin used a variety of visual systems to organize his writings within his manuscripts, and so Roden spent much of his time translating Benjamin’s various graphic decisions and idiosyncrasies into scores.

When Roden arrived in Berlin, he was already ten months into a yearlong project of performing John Cage’s 4’33” every ...

Join us for the opening reception of Capsize and Now he's out in public and everyone can see on Thursday, 8 March 2012, 8-10PM.

LACE is proud to present Capsize, a new collaborative installation and performance by Tad Beck and Jennifer Locke. Capsize is curated by Marjorie Vecchio, PhD., and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno. Taking place on an island off the coast of Maine where Beck had spent many summers both as a child and adult, the two artists developed a body of work utilizing objects, landscape and models from this island incorporating Locke’s approach to action/performance and the camera.

Capsize incorporates an unorthodox utilization of materials through performance, upending the normal order of symbolic relations. The elements of each discrete piece (boat/body/water/camera/model/artist) are shuffled and reshuffled into various permutations, and thus function as a matrix supplying terms for the invention of activities and their positioning within the camera’s frame.

Both artists have worked with the male body in the past, each in their own way. For Beck, the erotic potential of the body is usually coupled with absurdist/humorous activities, utilizing eros as a springboard for looking at more abstract notions of repetition, failure, exertion, voyeurism, and the masculine subject. Locke’s utilization is similarly concerned with exertion and the dynamics of looking/voyeurism, but is also particularly concerned with the way that bodies animate and inhabit a space, the ways in which the presence of a camera and/or viewer transforms that body's way of occupying physical space, and in so doing explores architectural themes.

PUBLICATION
Curator Marjorie Vecchio, PhD is collaborating with LACE to publish a catalogue that will include a keynote essay by Jennifer ...

Join us for the opening reception of Now he's out in public and everyone can see and Capsize on Thursday, 8 March 2012, 8-10PM.

LACE is proud to present Now he's out in public and everyone can see, an 18-channel video installation by Natalie Bookchin that weaves together found fragments from online video diaries in which vloggers recount a series of media scandals involving African American men. The multiple stories originally circulated and enflamed by networks of corporate media gone viral, intersect around themes of racial and class identity and explore popular attitudes, anxieties, and conflicts about race. Bookchin’s work creates a critical context for otherwise isolated and scatter-shot online voices, drawing links, making connections, and locating tropes between individual rants and responses. The montage produced by the multiple monitors in the gallery mirrors the composite story, of a racialized subject under scrutiny. Where the typical viewer of online video is a single person in front of her screen, the installation produces an active social space where multiple viewers navigate through a media environment, piecing together a fragmented and layered narrative told across space and time.

A major new work by Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see was developed over the past two and a half years and is part of a larger body of work in which Bookchin repurposes videos made and circulated online, giving new social shape and form to individual expression. Previous video works in this series also address current social events and phenomena including joblessness, mood-stabilizing drugs, and DIY dance videos. This newest project is more spatially and conceptually complex, weaving together many more videos, sounds, voices, narratives, and perspectives into three-dimensional space. This further evolution of form reflects and explores the mix of struggles, conflicts, and harmony ...

LACE will host Dutch sound artist collective Staalplaat Soundsystem for a 10 day residency 20 Feb. – 1 March 2012. Within the current mood of worshipping the latest technology in media art, Staalplaat Soundsystem provides a breath of fresh air, reminding us of the 100-year tradition of noise-making machines, in which “mad” inventors and various kinds of artists operating in the margins of the art world meet. During their residency Staalplaat members Geert-Jan Hobijn and Carlo Crovato will construct a site specific, interactive sound installation that will also serve as the focal point for a participatory sound performance. They will also lead a two-day youth workshop, culminating in a concert.

Using “everyday electronic junk” scavenged from thrift stores and donations, Hobijn and Crovato will fashion new “sound machines” that will be controllable by the audience via smartphones. As the residency proceeds the artists will create and add more machines to an ever-growing installation in LACE’s main gallery space. In the final phase of the residency they will re-locate the installation to the storefront space and set it up so that LACE visitors and the general public can conduct the “orchestra” via their mobile phone both inside and outside from the Walk of Fame.

ABOUT STAALPLAAT SOUNDSYSTEM

Since its inception in 2000, Staalplaat Soundsystem has started creating a multitude of “machine installations” using all manner of consumer electronics, such as a dozen floor polishers (Sweet Sissy and the Ballroom Hiss), and Avantilator, a composition for one hundred electric office fans. At the heart of this work is a low-tech philosophy: to make installations appear simple, revealing rather than concealing how they are made.

Artists participating in the LACE residency include Staalplaat Soundsystem founder Geert-Jan Hobijn and Carlo Crovato. Staalplaat Soundsystem has been showing works at several international festivals, museums, galleries and ...

“Performance’s potency comes from its temporariness, its ‘one time only’ life.”  –Peggy Phelan

Los Angeles Goes Live is an exhibition, performance series and publication project that explores the histories and legacies of performance art in Southern California in the 1970s and early 80s. It will include a broad range of materials that represent the varied material record of performance: from photographic and video documentation to scores, scripts, costumes, posters and artist books. The Los Angeles Goes Live performance series will feature re-inventions of historical performances and new performative actions staged throughout the city. 

Los Angeles Goes Live is part of Pacific Standard Time. This unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. LACE’s exhibition, performances and publication are supported by a generous grant from the Getty Foundation. For more information on each commissioned artist and a full description of the Los Angeles Goes Live exhibition, visit losangelesgoeslive.org

LACE invites its audiences to interrogate a central issue at the core of performance art practice and scholarship: 

How can one revisit performance art after the fact? Through documentation? Through restaging the work by the original artist? Through a contemporary reinvention by another?

EXHIBITION

The exhibition will feature performance art documentation and ephemera that has gone unseen for generations and will feature a range of artists and approaches to performance. Artist and guest curator Ellina Kevorkian has organized Recollecting Performance. This collection of clothing and objects suggests that the clothing or objects used in a performance are not remnants but a sculptural void holding an inherent performance to be fulfilled. Building upon the dominant history created by the actions of Eleanor Antin ...