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Author Archive for glenna
artist Barb Choit’s work featured in New York Times, December 4th. Read more HERE
compactspace is pleased to present Feeling Feelings, a group exhibition on view from December 10th 2009 to January 19, 2010. Feeling Feelings will feature performative, time-based and site-specific artworks examining the significance of affect in contemporary culture. Participating artists include Barb Choit, Megan Cotts, Mariechen Danz, Ian James, Andrea Merkx, Julie Orser, Matthew Siegle, Clarissa Tossin and Brica Wilcox. The exhibition is organized by artists Meghann McCrory and Ali Prosch.
Feeling Feelings frames affect as a means to investigate the immediacy of emotive response to cultural production. The exhibition creates a space in which to reconsider the manipulation of feeling on the scale of the personal and the social. Employing a range of strategies, the works address the territory of affect through explorations of Hollywood cinema, religious reverie, pop music, pharmaceuticals and historical monuments.
New York-based artist Andrea Merkx will present her new work “Rio in MIDI” during the opening reception. A performance that takes the shape of a lecture, it attempts to revile the rigid technological restrictions of the MIDI format, standardized in 1983, through the pop hit Rio, by Duran Duran, released in the same year. By highlighting the different affective qualities in several versions of Rio, she explores the role that the MIDI format had in shaping a technological shift to digital sound and its implications on the way we experience music.
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.
work by Tristan Shone and Gretchen Mercedes
August-Sept 2009
curated by Glenna Jennings
Red Requiem (2002) by Gretchen Mercedes • Drone Machines by Tristan Shone
Drone Machines • Saxon S (2007) by Gretchen Mercedes
Tristan Shone and his Dub Machines (2009)
From the Indonesian Archipelago to the local machine shop, we ourselves flash and yearn, presents the work of two artists whose disparate mediums (and pedestals) collide in the white cube of LA’s compactspace. Curator Glenna Jennings takes the title from poet John Berryman’s Dream Song 14 and describes Shone’s work in the show-titled essay: “The skilled machine shop artist has come a long way since the first crucifix he welded as an undergrad back at RPI in Troy, New York. Though his drone ‘sculptures’ are arguably more Marxist-esque than religious in their industrial connotation, their singularity and performative utility mark them as celebrated escape convicts from the world of commodity fetishism – convicts that themselves celebrate a kind of nostalgia for the simplicity of an Enlightenment-era human interface. When Shone performs with his creations, one wonders if Mary Shelly could have at least thrown in a climactic and conciliatory love scene between the doctor and his disgruntled monster.”
Mercedes’ selected videos from her Oceanic series deal with escapes and convergences of a different breed. These de-peopled oceanscapes are presented from the ‘predator’s’ perspective, as Mercedes wields her lens from the hulls of various shipping boats throughout the South Pacific on voyages into the semi-forgotten worlds that bring food to your table. Both Shone’s and Mercedes’ works exist in contemporary dialogs with the Sublime, Boredom and the relationship of these tenuously related territories to man and ‘his’ machines – whether they be hulking vessels roaming the open sea or polished and streamlined instruments housed in the art studio.
Image from Gretchen Merededes’ Red Requiem (2002)
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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.
work by Merve Kayan, Michael Trigilio, Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Gretchen Mercedes, Mauren Brodbeck and Kael Greco
curated by Glenna Jennings
January - March 2009
Hi and Lo (video, 2008) by Ruben Ortiz-Torres • Chocolate (2007) by Mauren Brodbeck
Work (2 channel installaion, 2007) by Merve Kayan • Untitled, Alaska 1 (2008) by Gretchen Mercedes
Chocolate (2007) by Mauren Brodbeck • Untitled, Utopia (2003) by Gretchen Mercedes • 67 Lives (2008) by Kael Greco
The Ends (2008) by Michael Trgilio (in compactspace’s backspace)