Other Scenes

April 21 – May 26, 2007
Opening reception, Saturday, April 21st, 6 – 8pm
Live Performance by No Age

Curated by Aaron Rose

Other Scenes presents an eclectic group of emerging and established artists all of whom share disturbing yet romantic visions. In these artist’s works, a discreet form of protest exists; a desire to find love amongst the ruins, beauty in the shadows. Aaron Rose is an independent curator currently living in Los Angeles. He is co-curator of the museum exhibition, Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art & Street Culture which opened in March 2004 at Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and will tour the world through 2008. Rose is also a publisher, writer and co-editor of ANP Quarterly, a free arts/lifestyle magazine. Special thanks to RVCA Artists Network Project for their generous support.
RITA ACKERMANN
Rita Ackermann (b.1968) is an artist born in Hungary, trained in Budapest and Vienna, and currently working in New York. Her work first became prominent in the mid-1990s as the result of her seductive paintings of semi-autobiographical nymphets and her close association with musical groups such as Sonic Youth. Over the years her style has evolved to include more metaphysical themes, still populated by svelte waifs, fashionable nymphs, and other girlish sprites combined and recombined in an almost serial fashion, albeit with a very contemporary take.

GUSMANO CESARETTI
In 1974 Italian photographer Gusmano Cesaretti embarked on a documentary photography project exploring the streets of East LA. These rarely seen photographs of Chicano life in the ’70s, including images of graffiti filled stores, walls and garages become, in their harsh black and white austerity, almost like abstract paintings. These photos were eventually published in a small run book, ‘Street Writers’ (1975) which included a transcribed audio tour of East Los Angeles and became a pioneer book in Chicano culture.

DANIEL HIGGS
Daniel Higgs (b.1965) is an artist/musician best known as the lead singer for the Baltimore band Lungfish, but in recent years has begun recording and performing as a solo artist with increasing frequency. His rarely-exhibited, highly detailed, visual art is legendary in underground circles for it’s scarcity and has been identified by the artist as “one’s own experience of reality offered in reckless worship.”

BECCA MANN
Becca Mann (b.1980) is a Los Angeles artist who combines abstraction with both found and invented images to create spaces in which the dead may reside. Consistent in her paintings, elements of light and atmosphere emerge as narrative tools. Becca Mann is a recent graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a BFA in painting and critical writing. While living and working in Chicago she organized a series of group shows in “alternative venues,” including a ballroom and a crumbling 19th century mansion.

RYAN McGINLEY
Ryan McGinley’s (b.1977) photographs of his friends exuberantly indulging in irreverent behavior are neither sullen nor saccharine. His early photographs were influenced by subjects such as graffiti, queer culture, skateboarding, and sloppy parties. Since then his work has taken on a more playful approach, featuring young people in various states of undress and abandon, usually interacting with themselves and nature. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, including being the youngest artist in history to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2002.

DAIDO MORIYAMA
The works of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (b.1938) often show everyday people and everyday things in a manner not to be found in the average Tokyo tourist guidebook. Whether by using blur or cropping, Moriyama’s bleak and lonely, highly grained, black-and-white pictures expose a seedy, yet hauntingly beautiful underbelly of 20th Century Japan. His fifty-year photographic career as led him to be considered one of Japan’s great modern photographers.

JOCKUM NORDSTRöM
Swedish artist Jockum Nordström (b.1963) combines naive-folk collages and drawings to become visual streams of consciousness. He makes drawings of ships, tiny dioramas of cities, and men in uncomfortable suits, all rendered in a deliberately crude folk-art style. His compositions are spatially dimensionless, but the figures that populate his odd, rickety landscapes are vividly robust.

RAYMOND PETTIBON
Raymond Pettibon (b.1957) is a cult figure among underground music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock scene, designing logos, flyers and albums for bands such as Black Flag and Circle Jerks. Since then, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books.

GEE VAUCHER
Gee Vaucher (b.1945) is perhaps best known for the extensive body of work she created during the late seventies and early eighties. As designer of albums and propaganda for the renowned English punk band ‘Crass’, she created some of the most disturbing and acclaimed images of the time. her work is generally accepted as having been seminal to the iconography of the ‘Punk Generation.’ When ‘Crass’ disbanded in 1984, Vaucher felt the need to explore other areas of work, abandoning the tightness of her more ‘overt’ political statements in favor of a more loosely expressed personal politic.

Eduardo Abaroa
Imaginary Debris in Project Room

April 21 – May 26, 2007
Opening reception, Saturday, April 21st, 6 – 8pm

Eduardo Abaroa will exhibit a clusters of small paintings, drawings and objects that conform a versatile inventory of ideas and images. The works are products of an ongoing investigation into unlikely topics like the transmission of laughter or the mineral qualities of the living body. Eduardo Abaroa’s work will also be included in Poetics of the Handmade, curated by Alma Ruiz at MOCA Los Angeles, from April 22- August 13, 2007. The exhibition will feature eight artists from Latin America who explore the close relationship that exists between the artist and his or her craft.

  • Robert & Tilton

    • Peter Bonde


    Peter Bonde

    I Know No “Work” As My Work
    – Pissing in Pools, Shitting in Cans

    13. april – 19. maj 2007

  • Asbæk

    • "THE ROUTINES OF RESISTANCE"

    IBON ARANBERRI / JOHANNA BILLING / MARIUS ENGH
    “THE ROUTINES OF RESISTANCE”

    “Impartiality to the utmost, equal treatment of competing and conflicting issues is indeed a basic requirement for decision-making in the democratic process ? it is an equally basic requirement for defining the limits of tolerance. But in a democracy with totalitarian organization, objectivity may fulfil a very different function, namely, to foster a mental attitude which tends to obliterate the difference between true and false, information and indoctrination, right and wrong. In fact, the decision between opposed opinions has been made before the presentation and discussion get under way ? made, not by a conspiracy or a sponsor or a publisher, not by any dictatorship, but rather by the ‘normal course of events’, which is the course of administered events, and by the mentality shaped in this course. [?] The result is a neutralization of opposites, a neutralization, however, which takes place on the firm grounds of the structural limitation of tolerance and within a preformed mentality.”
    Herbert Marcuse: Repressive Tolerance, 1965

    “Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desire about everything in general and nothing in particular. Silence expresses this attitude very well. But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice ? even through he says nothing but “no” ? he begins to desire and to judge.”
    Albert Camus: The Rebel, 1951

    “Copenhagen residents were growing weary of street clashes yesterday after dozens of people were arrested in a third night of unrest. The riots began when an anti-terror squad evicted squatters from the so-called Youth House, a graffiti-sprayed building that for years has served as a popular cultural centre for punk rockers and leftwing groups. Protesters threw stones at police and set fire to bins and barricades, but the violence did not develop into the full-scale riots of the two previous nights. In all, 643 people have been arrested since the clashes started on Thursday.”
    The Guardian / AP Copenhagen, Monday 5th of March 2007

    The exhibition “The Routines of Resistance” combines one work by each of the three participating artists ? Ibon Aranberri (b. 1969, Bilbao), Johanna Billing (b. 1973, Stockholm) and Marius Engh (b. 1974, Oslo) ? equally reflecting on models of resistance and on resistance as non-productive repetition or administration. These works locate certain enterprises and systems of behaviour in civil society that serve as reminders of alternatives to common regulations ? spanning from soft subversions of public space (where street vendors contest the official economy by running their business from unauthorised sales points, selling bootleg products and dodging tax) to the ideologically motivated drafting of manifestos and planning acts of political resistance. Linked with this is an element of resignation; knowing that any position or opposition is subject to neutralization, or that any dissidence or attempts at radical change may be reduced to mere traces, relics and rituals.

  • Standard Oslo