Tag: US

Weight Perception

WeightPerception

Imagined weight can be heavier than real weight, sometimes to the point where our perceptions apply more pressure and gravity than what can actually be accounted for. How does this happen? In today’s world, where environmental disasters of tragic magnitude have practically become the norm, where ongoing wars are being fought simultaneously on multiple fronts, and where we’re in the midst of the worst economic catastrophe since the great depression, it’s apparent that we are living in “heavy times”.  In some way or another, each of us carries the weight of our times, if not in a physically tangible way, at the very least in the mind.  How are we dealing with all of this? What is the current state of contemplation surrounding it? Where does the resulting energy find a resting place? Can bad things actually be transformed into good?

It is not the intent of this exhibition to address any of these issues directly, as much as it is to address the individual’s unconscious and conscious responses to the current state of affairs that dominates our political and social landscape. Oftentimes, we attempt to escape the heaviness, through expressions of laughter, serenity, or even music. Sometimes, we attack the weight head-on, using pent up energy that inevitably needs to find its release somewhere. In this exhibition, eleven artists address this placement, both definitively and abstractly, and in the two-dimensional and the sculptural.  Featuring new work by Ben Venom, Casey Jex Smith, Glen Baldridge, Harley Lafarrah Eaves, Kevin Taylor, Kyle Ranson, Laurie Steelink, N.Dash, Shelter Serra, Thomas Øvlisen, & Vanessa Blaikie.

Guerrero Gallery

Chad Person // Surviving the End of Your World

Chad-Person

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce the first Los Angeles solo exhibition for contemporary artist, Chad Person.

In his newest body of work, Person utilizes his trademark fascination with the confluence of economy and societal power structures through innovative installation, sculpture and performance. Surviving the End of Your World will feature several collages from the artist’s “TaxCut” series, and the debut of “Thirst” – a fifteen-foot inflatable sculpture depicting the Mobil Oil Pegasus lying in a glossy black acrylic pool of its own crude. Person’s use of iconographic signifiers related to American capitalism and consumerism are juxtaposed with notions of sheer Darwinist survival featured in his “RECESS” project, which will be featured in the gallery’s Project Room. In addition to a live video feed of the artist’s performance in his self-made “apocalypse bunker” in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “RECESS” includes functioning installation works to spotlight cultural intervention, critique of corporate enterprise and the myth of self-reliance in the face of essential conservation.

“New Mexico-based multimedia artist Chad Person creates beautifully crafted, ironic indictments on society’s most dangerous flaws.” – Shana Nys Dambrot, Flavorpill (2010)

Chad Person (born 1978, Marinette, WI) received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. His work is included in the public collections of The West Collection (PA), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation Collection (CA) and The University of New Mexico Art Museum (NM). He has had solo exhibitions in Albuquerque, Marfa and River Falls, and been featured in PULSE Miami Contemporary Art Fair.

Mark Moore Gallery

Steve Roden

braskartphone

American artist Steve Roden presents his brand new work blinking lights at night made for the exhibition space Phonebox at the artist-run gallery IMO. Phonebox is located in a phone cabin, which now serves as an intimate exhibition space with room for only one person at a time. Here the public is invited to experience the sound work blinking lights at night June 26 – July 10.
Blinking lights at night by Steve Roden takes as its theme a view over Kobe, Japan, from a balcony which the artist has been visiting for almost 20 years. The rythm of blinking lights in the urban nightscape is transformed into a kind of visual and spatial score for a composition. The sound piece takes as its starting point small ‘beep’ sounds made by Roden while contemplating the «silent music» of the lights. The new work made especially for Phonebox is accompanied by a text written by the artist:
…because i have always experienced the view alone and in relative darkness, i began to think about how this outside visual experience at night might be able to converse with an inside audible experience in a small dark private space. Listening to my voice, i replicated each of the light rhythms on an old glockenspiel, and layered the recordings so that the relationship of the notes would resemble that of the field of blinking lights. I decided to present it as a 7” record because such an object needs to be activated by a visitor, as if one were opening a door to step inside, and closing it upon returning to the outside…

The work of Steve Roden, based in Los Angeles, spans various media. Roden’s work integrates various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) translated through invented systems into scores which in turn inspire the production of painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound composition. The scores are dictated by rigid parameters and rules though also full of cracks and holes that give way to intuitive decisions and left turns. The inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon.
Roden has among others exhibited at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and performed and played at Serpentine Gallery, London, SFMOMA, San Francisco and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Steve Roden’s work is the eleventh in a series of 12 sound-based works presented in Phonebox at IMO in the first half of 2010. The series is titled Sounds Up Close #1-12 and is curated by Kristoffer Akselbo and Rune Søchting. It is the intention of the series to present a number of important artists who work with sound as medium. The series reflects a number of different approaches to sound. Over a period of six months a total of twelve pieces will be presented each for a fortnight. The final artists in Phonebox is the Japanese artist Miki Yui (JP).

Phonebox has earlier served as a phone cabin for the employees at Carlsberg. During the next six months the space, which is acoustically isolated, will function as a unique frame for display and reception of sound-based works. Moreover, the space itself will play an important role in the conceptions of many of the presented works.

IMO