Tag: The Jancar Jones Gallery

David Berezin: Combo

The Jancar Jones Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibit of the work of San
Francisco-based artist David Berezin titled Combo. Through an exploration of
stock images and cultural practices, Berezin combines signs to ultimately
critique the ways in which “pop meaning” can be understood.

In a previous series of photographs, he recreates canonical still lifes from
art history, built with images from the Internet and stock photography. Where
the vanitas still lifes of the 17th century that he references were
symbolically rich, his still lifes do not carry the same specific meaning.
Instead, his interest in the work comes from its construction: historical
images with precise meanings are recreated with collaged low-resolution
images that are free and available through a Google image search. As a
result, the original meaning of the composition is disrupted, through the
interpretation of the contemporary replacement imagery.

In a new series of still lifes, which will be included in Combo, Berezin
removes the historical referent, instead focusing on narrative content. Using
a precise combination of contemporary signifiers, he builds an image which
could evoke the residue of a theatrical plot. Given movie-like titles, he
emphasizes the predictable nature of Hollywood narrativity and how embedded
it has become in American vernacular, while simultaneously confusing this
read through the deliberate use of incongruous yet stereotypical symbols.

Using a similar gesture, Berezin will also construct an installation of
bedroom posters and ephemera. In the same way the arranged items in the still
lifes connote a narrative, the bedroom posters function as a highly legible
building block to a peculiar personal identity; allowing for an extremely
fast read, there is no confusion as to what a FREE TIBET poster means in a
bedroom. In spite of the often easy read, Berezin obscures the signifiers
with which he works, again drawing attention to the language of popular
culture that often is taken for granted or over looked due its over
saturation or over use.

David Berezin received his BFA from the California College of the Arts, San
Francisco.

The exhibit will coincide with a small edition release of “You know, we have
a lot of friends, but there’s something about Mary”, a collaborative book
project by David Berezin and Harsh Patel.

The Jancar Jones Gallery

William Leavitt

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The Jancar Jones Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibit of the work of Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt titled A Show of Cards.

The show will include over 300 ink drawings on index cards. These cards function, for Leavitt, as a bank from which individual images were selected at random to generate a narrative. Subsequently they are incorporated into the text for Leavitt’s play “Pyramid Lens Delta”, thus titled by the first three sequential cards. The script for the play will also be on view.

Leavitt has used similar chance processes to compose elements of the script for the theater piece “The Radio” (2002) and in his photo series “Random Selection” (1969), in which he photographed arrangements of arbitrarily selected objects together. A collection of these photographs was included in the final issue of Landslide, a satirical art journal published by Leavitt and artist Bas Jan Ader in 1969/70.

William Leavitt received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA in 1967. He has been working and exhibiting in Los Angeles since the early 1970s. Recent exhibitions include Molecules and Buildings at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles. An exhibit of three new prints opens at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles on February 6, 2010. In November 2010, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will open Leavitt’s first solo museum exhibition and retrospective.

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Justin Beal, Lena Daly & Kate Owens

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The Jancar Jones Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibit of the work of artists Justin Beal, Lena Daly and Kate Owens.

The exhibit will represent the work of artists from different geographic regions who address both texture and form in a similar manner, while also subtly engaging and referencing popular culture. While both Owens and Beal employ readymade or industrial materials such as cling wrap, soda bottles, mirrors, etc. in their sculptural work, the subdued yet bold values which emerge share a close affinity with those in Daly’s prints of fabric, paper or reflective surfaces. There is a formalism present in all the work, which in the case of Beal can be quite architectonic while the works of Owens and Daly can abstractly iterate the qualities of water-based media. In spite of their use of the everyday, Beal, Owens, and Daly share an attentiveness to perception and how these object-based works can affect an altered presence.

Justin Beal’s work has been exhibited most recently at Small A Projects, D’Amelio Terras, and Taxter & Spengemann in New York and at Sister/Cottage Home, ACME, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles. A solo exhibit of his work was shown at ACME, Los Angeles in 2008. Beal received his MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

A solo exhibit of Kate Owens’ work is currently on view at Dicksmith Gallery, London. Her work has also been exhibited at Showroom Gallery, London, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and at the University of Reading: Central Gallery, Reading, UK. Owens received her MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. Scottish-born, she lives and works in London.

Lena Daly’s work has been exhibited at the Federal Art Project and Five Thirty Three Gallery in Los Angeles and at Queen’s Nails Projects in San Francisco. Daly received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Jancar Jones Gallery