News
For Immediate Release 9-30-06
ATTN: Calendar, Art
Jesse Benson and Becky Koblick in collaboration with Phantom Galleries Los Angeles are pleased to present:
Building
Up
From The
Left
Over
Steven Bankhead, Daniel Mendel-Black, Colin Roberts, Sergio Torres-Torres
Organized by Jesse Benson and Becky Koblick
OPENING RECEPTION DURING DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES ART WALK
THURSDAY 14 SEPTEMBER
ART WALK 11:00am—9:00pm OPENING RECEPTION 6:00pm—9:00pm
Corner of 6th Street and Los Angeles Street, Los Angeles CA, 90014
Produced in collaboration with Phantom Galleries Los Angeles. “Building Up From The Left Over” is a four-artist group exhibition installed in a vacant storefront in downtown Los Angeles’s Gallery Row. The exhibition will be housed in a corner window-front space in the Pacific Electric Lofts building at the intersection of Los Angeles Street and 6th Street.
Keeping in mind the surrounding conditions of the space, Benson and Koblick organized an exhibition that acknowledges the social project of downtown L.A.’s rejuvenation. It does so both in the form of the exhibition and in the subject matter addressed by the artists.
Though the gallery will only be open for entry during the downtown Art Walk on September 14th (and by appointment) all projects in the show will be intentionally installed in a way that makes them accessible through the windows during the weeks following the Art Walk. The projects will be visible through the windows and the exhibition will be designed to reference a sort of deep display case, like those arrangements of furniture and fake plants one often sees in vacant window-front spaces. All project information, such as titles and materials, will be printed on the windows.
The projects in the show will address a range of subject matter, from conversations surrounding the Russian Revolution and the historic movement of Constructivism, to discussions of the building up of form, in architecture, in painting, and in the body. The signs of social revolution are used in relation to the surrounding exhibition site, and the definition of “constructive” as “a beneficiary act” is a primary concept. However, the exhibition also discusses the build-up of unwanted form, of grotesque production or growth. All of this will happen via a sort of punk rock aesthetic.
Bankhead’s “Rubbing Andy’s Marilyn” series is comprised of 3 large charcoal rubbings that Bankhead took of Warhol Marilyn portraits that he came in contact with. The graphic look of the 3 large squares forges through the history of the multiple, going though Conceptualism, Pop, and Constructivism. The ghostly Marilyn silhouettes index certain romantic historical moments several times removed, and therefore appropriately distorted.
Mendel-Black’s black and white collapsing grid paintings reference both intestinal meanderings and a type of over-crowded and poorly manufactured shantytown of cubicles stacked on top of one another. His discussions of a collapsed and/or exploding grid function not as a specific type of political reference, but as a type of sign of resistance to a common or pervasive structure, one which won’t acknowledge that its walls aren’t stable, and that it tends to drip and leak.
Roberts’ wall-sculpture addresses the figure with its parts rearranged in accordance to principles both grotesque and oddly methodical. The sculpture, comprised of cast molds of 8 arms, fans out from a central joint-mass of shoulders. The arms are arranged so that they follow one another in a line, as if they were still images from a Structuralist film of a person raising and lowering his arm. The sculpture is painted so that the arms produce a subtle gradation from black to white.
Torres-Torres will include an installation of his “Banner Project: Part One”, a series of text paintings on un-stretched canvas. Like many of the participants who hoisted the protest banners after which these piles of paintings were modeled, many of the viewers of this work will not be able to literally read the Russian text—the protest banners, in both cases, function as signs of revolution. They are purposefully not translated, leaving most viewers with a semiotic read: color, a foreign language, installation art, and conventions of painting history.
Jesse Benson is an artist whose practice includes attempts at performative exhibition projects. His most recent organizational effort was the Delusionarium series, a series of nomadic exhibitions that addressed the discourse of the Romantic. A catalog for Delusionarium 1-3 was produced by Grand Central Press in July 2006. Becky Koblick is one of three co-founders of Sixteen:One Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. During the three years she co-owned and directed the gallery, Koblick organized 22 exhibitions that included works by over 50 contemporary artists based both in Los Angeles and internationally.
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