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.

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 11^th from 6 to 9 pm. and the world is ours will be on view at compactspace through the end of March 2010.

- -glenna jennings

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.

www.juliawesterbeke.com

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.

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

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)

storespace: Through a Glass Darkly by Owen Mundy

October-December 2008

curated by Glenna Jennings

Owen Mundy’s through A Glass Darkly in our storespace

Scott Horsley: YOUR LAND or something like it

by Glenna Jennings

I want to show you something!

But first, here is a helmet to protect you from dangerously high-heeled shoes, impotently toxic candy wrappers, swim fins, plastic bags, jelly fish, the occasional omnipotent octopus and other consumer fall-out.

As we venture forth, watch out for those men in a graphic/graphite circle jerk of post-industrial proportion (rocking out with their cocks out) and try not to fall victim to flying engine parts cast from auto-combusted Hummers. Oh, and you’ll need this Hazmat suit (the fear-based fashion of hazardous-materials-evasion looks good on everyone, hiding

most physical signs of gluttony and/or filling out flat asses!)

As we move along, please don’t be afraid to sit down and check your email on one of those MacBooks — free wireless issues from your body at cellular level here, and this is gonna be a long ride, so you’ll want an empty inbox to fill with all the fantastical floating signifier-souvineers Scott Horsley’s landscape-void so generously offers up.

Dorothy, if we’re not in Kansas anymore, then where are we?

TS Elliot’s Hollow Men issued the post liberal-humanist whimper with which he ended the world. But this is not that world. Scott’s world exists in Perfect Preterite, it has ended, and it accomplished this apocalypse with a bang, then a burst, and 300 more booms that culminate in an orgasmic explosion whose ejaculate has spawned a parallel universe on paper, pain-stakingly rendered with pencil for a contemplation and enjoyment that prompts frequent choruses of “that’s so cool!”

But there is far more at stake here than hipster-cool works on paper. Scott Horsley’s art touches on crisis of many colors: environmental, economic, ecological, linguistic, scientific, gendered, and, of course, the father figure of Art World Angst himself: the Crisis of Representation.

Are you still with me? (this part of the tour is free!)

Scott Horsley’s current show at compactspace Gallery provides the shuttle for our journey, and, conveniently, we are greeted by two galle

ry sitters who characteristically ignore us as we pass by, engaged as they are in their own reproductive contemplations of re-presentation. One uni-sexed, Hazmat-suited figure peers steadily through a tethered video camera while its adjacent twin punches away at a lap-top, attacking the delicate keys with oversized protective hand-gear.

These twinned drawings are carefully nailed to the wall with roughly 3 feet of negative space separating their respective endeavors. But our discerning gazes discover the umbilical — the technologies the twin figures cradle from the comfort of fold-out chairs are working in tandem, with Scott’s conjuring paper picking up where the empiricizing wall has left off. Floating in the jetsam of their gray and white world (plastic bags, rolls of duck tape, a de-magicized carpet), this pair partakes in one of the games rampant throughout Scott’s world: looking at stuff that we can’t see.

It is, after all, what is made invisible in these figurative drawings that creates the space in which we viewers are traveling. This is the landscape that late capitalism has so generously rendered for us; which is to say, there is no landscape at all (so no reservations are necessary).In another of Horsley’s large-scale tandem drawings, a headless figure in street-clothes (remarkably akin to those in which you might see the artist clad on any given day) examines a de-peopled boat through a suspiciously analog pair of binoculars. Is this vessel (also accompanied by its jetsam) abandoned, capsized or afloat? Is the de-capitated spectator a marooned victim or an undercover investigator? Is the line of suited figures in the upper right corner descending to claim territory or fleeing a toxic catastrophe? We will not gain any clues from the absent geography, but as free-born readers we can certainly map-up the space if we so desire.As we traverse this duo-dimension of milky white we can project any number of plots and escapades and desires onto Scott’s seemingly willing paper — but we will, of course, run the risk of anyone whodecides to colonize the invisible through such fancy flights of projection and self-indulgence.

Scott is aware of the connotative powers of his work and passionate about the issues it evokes. But he remains something of a mystery when it comes to its genesis. He does not promote an agenda by peppering the work with cleverly wrought theoretical quips or political statements — after all, one has little control over the effects of Nuclear Fall Out.

I lied earlier. This is not a long ride. In fact, our  fancy flight of projection is almost over. As another Eliot reference tickles my ear, I share it with you (while you take off your Hazmat and show your nakedness to an awed and snickerless crowd and prepare for your return to a world void of the walking headless):

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

But Scott’s men (if that they are) are not so much hollow as constructs of some bio-engineered DNA he picked up from a lost Phd student during an all-nig

hter in his earlier RISDI years.This is not the Wasteland, the post-primordial pit,the Jonestown afterlife, the Disney Holocaust, the peopled Tabula Rasa, the Ground Zero where Melancholic Nostalgia meets War-Time Angst and/or self-congratulation. This is not a Kansas, a Vietnam, an Abu Graib, a Chernobyl, a Main Street, Wall Street, Juarez or any other site specific place of timely loss and tragedy. THIS land is your land, THIS land is my land, from the graphite Target bag shell of an impulse purchase to the blank white stretches of expensive paper that have implicated us in a dance of creation and negation since first we first laid eyes on Scott’s oeuvre.

THIS land was made for you and me.

]]> http://www.compactspace.com/dispatches-from-the-era-of-blue-pants-scott-r-horsley/feed/