| March 19, 2010 | ||
| 8:00 pm | to | 10:00 pm |
Monthly Archive for February, 2010
| April 8, 2010 | ||
| 6:00 pm | to | 9:00 pm |
Opening April 8th
A burial flag, a warrior princess, an English saddle and an array of Burro brand saw horses are just some of the sites on the larger map of graphite and paper that Iana Quesnell has created for anything to declare? at compactspace Gallery in LA. Each component in this pains-takingly rendered suite of drawings and sculpture draws out personal narratives that are embedded within the represented objects, creating a palimpsest of myth, memory and legend that traverses familial and national identities.
As an American resident of Tijuana, Mexico, Quesnell knows quite a lot about traversing borders – she confronts the same tired set of questions every time she leaves Mexico to teach art in San Diego: Where are you going? What were you doing in Mexico? Where do you live? Do you have anything to declare? The show’s title is an evocation of this crossing rite, but it is also a challenge to the artist, the art and the audience all at once – interrogating us as to our own thoughts, feelings and experiences in and around the complicated landscapes of Manifest Destiny that she so subtly evokes.
Quesnell’s work has always had a strong relationship to questions of space and place – whether she is recreating the barracks she inhabited as an American soldier in Bosnia or rendering every nook and cranny of her well-worn yoga mat, her drawings are a love affair with objects and places that have come to pass. The work she has created specifically for compactspace draws upon and complicates this former work. She now offers us more than the history of her own body’s passage through time and space – she brings along the whole family and even the whole nation – implicating us all in journeys including that of her ancestors New World voyage from Sicily and man’s own flight to the moon.
She offers us no less than a handspun version of Baudrillard’s System of Objects, conjuring narratives and histories that reside in everyday items ranging from heirlooms like crocheted table cloths to public/private documents such as passports and tourist photos. The genius is the work’s ability to match an impressive skill with poignant subject matter, taking us all the way from a grandmother’s place settings to the final frontier of westward expansion that still haunts our culture – the pregnant void of Outer Space.
Iana and artist/curator Glenna Jennings will debut several new pieces joining the collection of the Community In-Sourcing Bureau, an entity working in collaboration with compactspace for the glorification of kitsch and the mass-produced object and the support of other small businesses south of Los Angeles Street.
Iana Quesnell was born in Tampa, Florida in 1969. She earned her BFA from the University of Tampa in Florida in 1991 and her MFA from the University of California San Diego in 2008. In 1996, following in the footsteps of both her parents and three older brothers, Quesnell joined the military (US Army) as a Satellite Communications Maintainer/Operator. In 1999 she moved to Reno, Nevada becoming barn manager for a fox hunting ranch before heading south to San Diego in 2000. Iana has had solo shows and The Museum of Contemporary Art San Deigo and CECUT, Tijuana. She is the recipient of the 2007 San Diego Art Prize in the emerging artist category. Quesnell currently resides in Tijuana, Mx.
| March 6, 2010 | ||
| 7:30 pm | to | 9:30 pm |
Mommy, Mommy! Says WE HEART BIRDS OF LACE
Join us for an evening of performative readings with Birds of Lace authors:
christine v. nguyen
Niina Pollari
Rhani Lee Remedes
Anna Joy Springer
christine v. nguyen loves small houses painted different colors sat on crooked streets in the early morning, and the quiet calm of childhood rooms. she’s been writing since her mother sat with her at tables, molding the shape of her letters. born and raised in the bay area, she lives on the west coast, where she can see the water.
Niina Pollari is a writer, translator, and pony of some few other tricks living in Brooklyn, NY. She recently completed a collaboration with the Finnish search-engine poet Tytti Heikkinen, and has work found or forthcoming in Bitch, Post Road, Bateau, Finery, and other publications.
Rhani Lee Remedes is a sparkly rascal who was raised on psychic televangelists and riot grrrl rants. Her writing has appeared in That’s Revolting; Queers Strategies For Resisting Assimilation, LTTR, BTFA, MGMT, ETC, She is the author of the S.C.U.B. Manifesto and was the front woman the band Veronica Lipgloss & the Evil Eyes. She currently makes posters and plays with the band Bangs of Hunger in Sandy Francisco.
Anna Joy Springer has toured the U.S. and Europe as a singer for punk bands and with the legendary Sister Spit. Her first novel is The Vicious Red Relic, Love. Birds of Lace has just published her novella, The Birdwisher.
Birds of Lace is a feminist press born in 2005 and currently based in San Francisco. Recent publications include Anna Joy Springer’s The Birdwisher, Niina Pollari’s Fabulous Essential, and Christine Vi-Van Nguyen’s Blood and Jasmine When I Dreamed Her, as well as the literary and arts journal Finery. Birds of Lace loves glittering, love-ridden words with sick and saucy centers.
Mommy, Mommy! is curated by LES FIGUES PRESS, hosted by compactspace.
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| February 11, 2010 | ||
| 12:00 pm | to | 9:00 pm |
SHOW OPENING on 2/11 • 12 to 9pm
Gallery closed for installation 2/2 - 2/10
compactspace, Los Angeles is proud to present and the world is ours – new works by Robert Twomey and Tim Schwartz, two artists who navigate the ample and ever-morphing territories of New Media art and culture.
Schwartz’s sculptural work Ruin, a giant stalactite deftly installed in the gallery’s ceiling, is a departure from the artist’s recent works dealing with cultural data analysis. Art writer Lamar Clarkson describes his piece Paris, a data mash-up sculpture forged from retired gadgets that was recently featured in Modern Painter Magazine: “ Paris is a device reminiscent of a temperature gauge whose needle wavers between the words Hilton and France depending on which Paris is more popular on the web at the moment…In commenting on our national attention span in the idiom of the thermostat, Paris renders an abstract data point suddenly, fancifully real.” Though Schwartz borrows a similar idiom for Ruin – one made nostalgic by the dilapidated conditions of its early industrial-age materials – the piece reaches much further back through geological time and space. As a giant iron-coated hunk of fiberglass constantly sprayed with acidic water, the piece has been corroding since its debut at the Oceanside Museum of Art this past winter. compactspace will be Ruin’s second home, gratefully accepting the rusty run-off from this monumental work of fantastically post-monumental sentiment.
Twomey offers up a different concoction of information based signifiers in Human Factors in Computing Systems: Studies and Saccade. The latter, driven with gaze-data from an eye tracking system, will greet its audience at the gallery entrance, offering an experience that re-stages the particular movements and fixations of a viewer’s eye as she considers a series of photos, re-contextualizing (and thus deconstructing) the act of looking at art. For Human Factors, the artist has hand-drawn images culled from photographs taken at the dawn of the computing age –smiling suit-clad technicians negotiate an arena of wires and buttons and big machines, revealing their industry’s initial stages of self-representation and identity formation. Though aesthetically removed, these two pieces mediate overlapping aspects of computer vision, human perception and historical gaze.
Please join our reception for the artists during Art Walk on February 11th from 6 to 9 pm. and the world is ours will be on view at compactspace through the end of March 2010.
- -glenna jennings