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Archive for the 'past shows' Category
CLOSING RECEPTION: Friday June, 25th • 6-10pm
Please join us to celebrate the final days of compactspace’s downtown location, as we will soon be moving on! Artist Iana Quesnell will be present both Friday and Saturday for gallery hours. Please come support this amazing show of works that take you all the way from the kitchen table to outer space!
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.
Gallery Hours • Tues-Sat - 11-6pm or by appointment
show reviewed by Venuszine HERE
Tim Schwartz featured in Modern Painter HERE
design by Carl Burton
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
Click to Enlarge
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.
THE DARK TOWER
curated by Cauleen Smith
May-June 2009
drawing by Louis Schmidt © 2009
Shane Anderson / Susy Bielak / Crystal Z. Campbell
Micha Cárdenas / Mauricio Chernovetsky / Lili Chin
Ted Chung / Leigh Cole / Micki Davis / Monica Duncan
Nico Herbst / Glenna Jennings / Merve Kayan
Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli / Dolissa Medina / Elle Mehrmand
Chuck Miller / Vincent Manganello / Jesse Mockrin
Zac Monday / Clare Parry / Brianna Rigg / Lesha Rodriquez
Louis Schmidt / The Community Insourcing Bureau
Julia Westerbeke / Suzanne Wright / Claire Zitzow
In fairy tales the dark tower imprisons. In poems it taunts and beckons, or shelters and protects. In sci-fi narratives, the dark tower is not so much a destination as a portal-mirror that negotiates slippages in space and time and reflects our latent desires back to us.
The Dark Tower exists.
It is within the tower that, like the works in this show, our bodies may stretch along a sliver of time, tumble within a quantum of space, and warm to the heat that travels to us as light from stars that guide our way. For the purposes of describing the artists that the show’s title seeks to bind, I looked to the imagery of two poems. (“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) by British poet Robert Browning and “From The Dark Tower” (1927) by black gay American poet Countee Cullen) Browning’s poem describes the arduous journey toward The Dark Tower, and Mr. Cullen’s poem leads us away. However, it is the short-lived but seminal American salon, named after Mr. Cullen’s poem, that this show most powerfully invokes.
In Browning’s poem, the Childe (untested knight) Roland, wanders lost in the wastelands that challenge and deceive him as he attempts to reach the dark tower. At one point in his journey, the young knight, must cross a river littered with the bodies of those who have come before him.
By contrast, Countee Cullen describes the artist as an attendant to precious germinations that might one day safely escape the dark tower to be embraced by the broad light of day. In 1928, on the one hundred and thirty-sixth west block of Harlem USA, heiress A’Lelia Walker, daughter of Madame CJ Walker – hair care magnate and first black American woman to become a millionaire, converted a floor of her glorious Brownstone into a salon and named it after Countee Cullens’ poem. She gathered together the raucous and brilliant stalwarts of the Harlem Renaissance, various international gadflies, and Greenwich Village aesthetes like Carl Van Vechten (who had been a constant fixture at Mabel Dodge’s salons in the lower east side). A’Lelia Walker’s Dark Tower was lit for only a year, after which Harlem’s salon lady died at the age of 46. When she passed, Langston Hughes declared that the glory days of Harlem died with her. Indeed, in 1931, the glory days of American industrial power were dying as well.
And so it goes that The Dark Tower with its ability to fold time, compress space, and re-animate the body [so much like the artists presented] finds us today in the flotsam of hedge funds and the wreckage of mortgage-backed securities. One can no longer assume that a Masters of Fine Arts from a reputable institution entitles one to leap form their cramped campus studio into a one-person show at a glistening New York gallery like a debutant in the order of myths. One may leap indeed, but like Browning’s Childe Roland, the landing, even if one arrives at one’s chosen destination, may not hold the promises that looked so tantalizing from afar. What happens, if like Browning’s Childe, we arrive at the tower and discover that it is the end, rather than the beginning? What then? Browning, Cullen, and certainly A’lelia Walker exemplar, all declared that it is the journey that matters- and the dream.
So here we are slipping through time. The year is two thousand and nine. The place is compactspace. The artists are twenty-seven MFA candidates at UCSD who welcomed me into their studios for conversation and shared this slice of their journey with me, one of the more recent additions to the faculty. This salon extends our conversations into the present moment so that we may look through this ephemeral window, lit just long enough for those seeking the tower to join us.
–Cauleen Smith
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)