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September 26th • November 17th

Opening Reception • September 26th

Downtown Artwalk • October 8th • November 12th

Author Michelle Tea on Julia’s work HERE

compactspace announces “Alien Organic,” an installation of sculptures and site-specific works by Julia Westerbeke.

In her obsessively detailed works, Julia Westerbeke creates terrains that are by turns organic and curiously alien, quiet yet chock-a-block with information. These abstract sculptures covered in crops of cilia-like drawings invite associations that run the gamut from microbes and scientific diagrams to Dr. Seussian flora and fantastical illustrations. For instance, a mountainous spill of white hot-glue adorned with patches of vinyl drawings might be a glacial landscape or Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. A slick, coiling tube that sprouts leaf-like forms could inspire thoughts of tropical vines or venomous creatures. Through a certain indeterminacy, each piece feels at once familiar yet foreign. The artist is interested in these subtle contrasts, tempering the beautiful with elements of the strange or the unexpectedly alluring. In kind, her use of materials could best be described as alchemical: burnt Styrofoam, melted plastic, paper dipped in resin and tiny units of drawings clustering on the surface.

The detail in each work pays homage to the intricacies of natural forms, while the obsessive accretion of elements gives a nod to the process of germination. It could be argued that the artist likes to “grow” these works, building them slowly from the ground up. This installation is filled with sculptures that yield more after closer inspection. While exploring ordered rows of drawings you will discover a neighboring plastic sphere encasing a nest-like form and translucent arches that bend toward delicate filigrees of dripped glue. Here, there are patterns within the patterns. The sum-total creates an eco-system of the artist’s making, one that is grounded in a specific visual vocabulary that has been influenced by cultures of fantasy and science fiction.

Julia Westerbeke has just recently completed her MFA at the University of California, San Diego. This is her first solo show in Los Angeles.

www.juliawesterbeke.com

An Exhibit of University of California, Irvine, 2009 MFA graduates in Studio Art

July 9-July 23, 2009

Arielle Bivas, Marcus Civin, Laurel Frank, kate hers, Dong Hoon Jun, Jared Nielsen Jen Smith, Sean Sullivan, Grant Vetter, Maya Weimer, and Morgan Wells

compactspace is pleased to present “Monster Mongers and Retailers of Other Strange Satellites 2,” a group show which will showcase works by University of California, Irvine, 2009 MFA graduates in Studio Art—Arielle Bivas, Marcus Civin, Laurel Frank, kate hers, Dong Hoon Jun, Jared Nielsen Jen Smith, Sean Sullivan, Grant Vetter, Maya Weimer, and Morgan Wells. “Monster Mongers and Retailers of Other Strange Satellites 2”, a sequel to the very recent exhibition at LAXART, is a chance to see fresh and exciting artwork in an intimate setting in Downtown Los Angeles. The artists in this exhibition work in the disciplines of photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, and painting, and engage with subjects that range from identity, language, and architecture, to the body, institution, and globalization.

Students from unique backgrounds and experiences seek out UCI’s rigorous three-year MFA program, which emphasizes experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to art making within an intellectual and theoretical framework.

Please visit www.mfa2009.org to preview work by the artists exhibiting in ““Monster Mongers and Retailers of Other Strange Satellites2” at compactspace.

Arielle Bivas’ video installations point to the imperfect translation of visceral sensations, recounting embodied memories and exploring intimacy and trauma.

Marcus Civin’s black-and-white photographs, reminiscent of silent film intertitles, express and echo the sympathies of soldiers, the language of officers, and the taunts of thirsty herders and tightfisted farmers. Civin sometimes uses these photographs as props in his new performance, “Bounty”. At compactspace, viewers can spend time with the photographs as an installation of texts.

The sculpture and installation pieces of Laurel Frank rework the use of artifice as it pertains to issues of infectious taste and synthetic pleasures in an economy of excess. Frank’s engagement with rocks as tropes of class position double as a short hand for achieving the American dream, i.e., harnessing the wild frontier, domesticating nature, moving mountains!

kate hers combines Hegel’s notion of Other as it relates to self-perception with Edward Said’s post-colonial Other.  While living in Berlin, hers compels herself to stop speaking any other language besides German, a language she cannot speak fluently. She performs a daily diary in front of her video camera. (This diary was later uploaded to her website.) Das deutschsprachliche Projekt examines aspects of identity, confidence, self-worth, and personality that are bound up in language.

Dong Hoon Jun’s photographs and videos balance humor and melancholy, consider how to be human within institutional architectural gestures, and find brief moments when certain gestures—whether physical or intellectual—can suggest a hidden world of fancy or fantasy.

Jared Nielsen is constructing a postsustainable future from the shit pile of the present.

Jen Smith uses handicraft and domestic materials to re-imagine the pomp and ceremony of wartime banners ─ shuffling the letters of “Mission Accomplished” into new texts such as “Cold Icon Piss Shammie” and “Oh Dismal Cosmic Penis.” In video and photographic work, such as “The Wound and the Voice,” Jen explores the erotics of heroic mythologies, as exemplified in photographs from Abu Ghraib.

Through highly detailed and pristinely rendered drawings, Sean Sullivan, directs the gaze to contemporary nature morte. His work describes the impasse between population explosion and limited resources.

The abstract paintings of Grant Vetter consider American abstraction intertwined with a culture of violence. Vetter uses paint to imitate the look and texture of torn flesh, to allude to the tragic conditions of the current “war on terror,” and to the history of oppression related to the American military industrial complex.

Maya Weimer’s videos create new representations of diasporic and postcolonial identities. “New Seoul Cartographies,” a poetic meditation on South Korea’s national re-addressing initiative, maps memory, history, place and displacement.

Morgan Wells is a multidisciplinary artist who uses a never-ending list of materials that create a unique combination of different artistic ideologies. With a distinct sense of humor, his artworks are built around monumental installations that act as both a constructed space, and as a singular object.