Opening Performance: June 3, 2017 7-9PM
Exhibition Dates: June 4-10, 2017
Closing Performance and Reception: June 10, 2017 4-6 PM
Curated and Produced by Deborah Oliver
Featuring Artists: Zeina Baltagi, Michael Bizon, Claudia Bucher, Jarred Cairns, Juan Capistran, Reanne Estrada & C. Ree, Nathalia Fagundes, Janice Gomez, Adele Han Li, Steve Irvin, Curt LeMieux, Thinh Nyugen, Cindy Rehm, Lara Salmon, Eduardo Sanchez, Alexander Smith, Freddy Villalobos, Sichong Xie, and HK Zamani.
Irrational Exhibits 10th Anniversary Program
In honor of Irrational Exhibits’ 10th Anniversary, 19 performance works will take place throughout LACE’s gallery in artist-constructed installations that function as settings for their evolving actions. Composed of diverse themes and aesthetics, all the works explore a physical engagement with the body and materials in front of the audience in real time. Although the performances will be happening simultaneously they are not the same length, giving the audience the option to move through the spaces, circulate, browse, return, or spend immersive time at their own pace, thus creating a shared experience between viewer and maker in process. Irrational Exhibits celebrates works that embrace unpredictability, the messiness of biological and organic processes and materials, and the chaos of our times.
In addition, performances from previous Irrational Exhibits will be presented alongside new works, by both repeating artists and those new to the project, thus providing a historical perspective and future directions.
During the week following the one-night performances, the installations and video works will remain on view. Lara Salmon will be performing during gallery hours, culminating on June 10th from 4-6PM.
Please join the artists in Irrational Exhibits for this one night of Live Art. Find Irrational Exhibits on Instagram – @irrationalexhibits
Artists’ Bios:
Zeina Baltagi is a first-generation Lebanese-American artist based in Los Angeles. Her work reveals intimate transformations in relation to her lived experiences.
Michael Bizon is an artist based in Los Angeles whose practice includes sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, instrument making, and video. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Windsor, Miami, Tokyo, and most recently at the VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow, Ireland.
Claudia Bucher is a Los Angeles and Joshua Tree based artist who creates performative sculptural installations to explore ideas about extended sentience. She is interested in the crossover between art, science and technology, architecture, mysticism and science fiction. Her recent work is inspired by space exploration, the Mojave Desert, biomorphic design, and DIY culture. She has an MFA from Art Center College of Design and has taught sculpture and 3D printing at UCLA, Otis College of Art and Brandeis University. She is an artist contributor to the recently published Reading Contemporary Performance (Routledge, 2016).
Jarred Cairns received his BA in the Studio Arts Program at University of California at Irvine. He has been a member of Rachel Rosenthal’s Company Tohubohu for over eight years and the last two years he has been studying with Rudy Perez. He also performed Kiss And Tell for Irrational Exhibits 8 at Track 16 Gallery in April 2011.
Using strategies of conceptualism, appropriation, photography and painting, the work of Juan Capistran investigates socio-political issues. Through multidisciplinary projects, that question notions of class, identity, power and revolution, Capistran investigates the rejection, assimilation and mutation created from the collision of singular and multiple systems of ideology.
Nathalia Fagundes is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice includes photography, installation, performance, and film. Her work often explores ideas of experimentation, movement, sound, obsession, and nostalgia.
Janice Gomez’s work explores accessibility and self-awareness both in physical and mental space—sometimes manifesting in labyrinth installations that meander through constructed pathways, ultimately revealing a niche for reflection and collective interaction; explorations in performance with intimate recitals for an audience of one, occasionally blurring the line between audience and performer in addition to engaging spectators in larger numbers; and most recently, site specific tableaus with sculptural, photographic and sound elements. As the theme of self-awareness takes shape across many forms, one is often reminded of what the human body is able to endure or unable to achieve.
Adele Han Li is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Through paintings, installations, performances and films, she seeks to investigate the tension between the manmade and natural, entropy and construction, the sublime and mundane. Her work has been exhibited and screened at film festivals, galleries and performance spaces across the US and abroad. She holds a BA from Yale University, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental Animation at CalArts.
Stevenmichaelarts is the creative moniker for Steven Irvin, a visual and performance artist born and raised in Los Angeles. The work has recently been viewed and presented online, in the Los Angeles studio, and residencies and shows in Asia, one upcoming this summer in Singapore. Please visit jessicajolly.us/stevenirvin for more.
Curt LeMieux has shown his artwork nationally and internationally. Exhibition venues and events include: The Santa Monica Museum of Art, Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, Machine Projects at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, The Berkeley Video and Film Festival, SOO Visual Art Center in Minneapolis, and Luna International in Berlin, Germany. LeMieux received an M.F.A. in 2001 from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. He also holds an M.A. in studio art from the University of Wisconsin at Superior.
Thinh Nguyen, a first-generation immigrant from Viet Nam, uses his body and his being as a canvas to explore and expose aspects of race and racism, class and classism, gender, sexuality, and identity, questioning the intersection of oppressive cultural values.
C. Ree’s new genre practice focuses on “everydayness” and monstrous and fantastic forms that trouble arenas of public circulation. Ree launched Drive-By Cinema, a two year experimental mobile art project, and has published articles on art, colonialism, dispossession and haunting. She is 1/3 of the artist group Super Futures Haunt Collective, a film programmer for the San Diego Asian Film Festival, and Associate Faculty of Art at MiraCosta College. Reanne Estrada is Los Angeles-based visual artist whose practice includes individual studio work in drawing, sculpture and installation, as well as collaborative work in performance, video and photography with Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. and socially-engaged art with Public Matters, a social enterprise for which she serves as Creative Director. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and film/video festivals throughout the United States, as well as the Philippines, Italy, Canada and Argentina. Ree + Estrada have known each other since The Smiths were still a band.
Cindy Rehm is a LA based artist and an educator. She is the co-founder of Craftswoman House a project dedicated to presenting feminist works in Southern California, and former Director of the Baltimore installation space spare room. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between the genres of drawing, performance, and video to address the complex relationship between the female body, representation, and myth. Rehm’s work has been shown at national and international venues and can be viewed at cindyrehm.com.
Lara Salmon is a Los Angeles based artist who works primarily in performance. Her pieces use personal biology to create an intersection between physical vulnerability and the politics of connection. She received a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Lara has worked on refugee aid projects both in America and in the Middle East. The paint on the desk she uses for this performance is mixed with sand she brought from Za’atari Syrian Refugee Camp in Jordan. www.LaraSalmon.net
Eduardo Sanchez is an interdisciplinary art student at the University of Irvine, Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Using a variety of material to explore his personal life and expose the strong divide in his life. Trying to cement his identity as a Mexican American.
Alexander Smith is currently pursuing art major and digital arts minor. He is currently in his senior year undergrad at Claire Trevor School of the Arts, UC Irvine. Alexander explores the relationship between sculpture and projection in his interactive works.
Freddy Villalobos is an interdisciplinary visual artist who uses text as an integral part of his practice. A Los Angeles based artist who grew up in the city’s South Central neighborhood, Villalobos combines references of high and low culture to interrogate issues of American social structures, power relations, capitalism, and identity. Villalobos’ work unpacks discourse within a complex narrative; and, is fabricated on the conviction that ideas can impact change within daily lives.
Sichong Xie’s practice deals with issues of identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of her body in the ever – changing environment. Xie’s current body of work explores Chinese culture versus American culture, her female gender versus the patriarchy that is reflected in municipal sculptures in China, and Chinese Communist politics versus the “only one child” generations. Xie’s practice, which is founded in the brief interconnectedness of all things, explores universal questions at the intersection of the cosmos, life, death, reality, spirituality and technology.
Iranian-born artist HK Zamani (Habib Kheradyar Zamani) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work is guided by extreme influences ranging from asceticism to psychedelia. He has exhibited in many cities, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin, London, Vienna, Prague, Seoul, and Saigon. His work is in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Berkeley Museum of Art, and AD&A Museum at UC Santa Barbara. He has received the COLA grant, and the California Community Foundation Getty grant. Zamani is the founder and director of PØST (1995-present), a subversive venue for contemporary art, where nearly five hundred exhibitions have been presented.
SUPPORT
Support for Irrational Exhibits 10: Mapping the Divide is provided by the Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation.