LA><ART

CITY OF WEST HOLLYWOOD LIBRARY 

625 N San Vicente Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069

FREE

Join curators Glenn Phillips and Elena Shtromberg for a special screening of States of Crisis, one of the six thematic video programs featured in the exhibition Pacific Standard Time LA/LA: Video Art in Latin America at LAXART. 

States of Crisis is a thematic program that includes videos by artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras and Peru reflecting on political, economic and ecological crises. The videos included are from the 1970s to today and showcase the diversity of artistic reactions to historical as well as contemporary tragedies.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A.  Works include: 

Pavel Aguilar (Honduras), Retransmisión (Retransmission, 2011, 2:23); Gloria Camiruaga (Chile), Popsicles (1984, 4:42); Gabriela Golder (Argentina), La Lógica de la Supervivencia (The Logic of Survival, 2008, 5:54); Carlos Motta (Colombia), September 22, 2005 (2005, 2:40); Anna Bella Geiger (Brazil), Mapas Elementares No. 1 (Elementary Maps No. 1, 1976, 3:12); Charly Nijensohn (Argentina), Dead Forest (2009, 7:06); Nicolas Rupcich (Chile), Big Pool (2009, 6:30); Diego Lama (Peru), The Act (2011, 3:36); Jose Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia), El caballero de la fe (The Knight of Faith, 2011, 7:00); Angie Bonino (Peru), What is Man? (2013, 5:09)

Glenn Phillips is Curator and Head of Modern & Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute, and Elena Shtromberg is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Utah.

Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty with art institutions across Southern California. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America. Major support for this exhibition is provided through a grant from the Getty Foundation. This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute.

This program is also presented with the support of the City of West Hollywood’s WeHo Arts program. For more information, please visit www.weho.org/arts or follow via social media @WeHoArts.

Image Credit: CHARLY NIJENSOHN, Dead Forest, 2009, 7:06, courtesy of the artist. 

At Irwindale Speedway

500 Speedway Dr, Irwindale, CA 91706

Tickets are available through Irwindale Speedway: https://tix.extremetix.com/webtix/3619/event/70045?salesRef=

This performance is a part of an ongoing series of artworks that Mary Ellen Carroll started in 1986. For No.9, Carroll will participate in a demolition derby and drive the 1985 Buick Riviera that she previously crashed into the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Munich, Germany in 2005 for the performance Late. Carroll’s series of works revolving around this Buick emerged from a Rube Goldberg/stream-of-consciousness methodology—a conceptual process where something simple is extracted from a set of complex ideas that continue until the process comes to a complete stop. The demolition derby is that full stop.

For more information and to support the performance and related projects, please visit: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/510980453/no-9a-performance-within-a-demolition-derby-in-la?ref=thanks_share

Mary Ellen Carroll/MEC, studios is a New York City based conceptual artist and design studio. Carroll’s work occupies the disciplines of architecture/design and public policy, writing, performance and film. Her ongoing projects, The Circle Game in Dubai, prototype 180.org and PUBLIC UTILITY 2.0 for example, stand at the intersection of performance, architecture, public policy, and social justice. Carroll frequently works with unsuspecting materials that range from public policy and land use or the lack thereof in Houston, as in the case with prototype 180. Or, the national and non-visible real estate of radio frequency for Public Utility 2.0  as a form of 21st century work of land art. Teaching, lecturing and public presentations in architecture and land use policy are an important part of Carroll’s work and educational institutions have included architecture and public policy programs at Rice University in Houston, Columbia University in New York, University of California at Irvine, Yale University, Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea and the DIA Art Foundation amongst others. Carroll has received numerous awards and honors, and her work is in public and private collections internationally. She is represented by Galerie Hubert Winter in Vienna, Austria. Carroll has been awarded the IASPIS fellowship by the Swedish Government for 2017.

At LAXART

On the occasion of her latest work, No.9, internationally renowned conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll will join Catherine Taft to discuss the final performance in her series My death is pending…  because for which she will participate in a demolition derby.  This discussion will take place in conjunction with the exhibition of Raphael Montanez Ortiz’s recent piano destruction concert at LAXART. 

Mary Ellen Carroll/MEC, studios is a New York City based conceptual artist and design studio. Carroll’s work occupies the disciplines of architecture/design and public policy, writing, performance and film. Her ongoing projects, The Circle Game in Dubai, prototype 180.org and PUBLIC UTILITY 2.0 for example, stand at the intersection of performance, architecture, public policy, and social justice. Carroll frequently works with unsuspecting materials that range from public policy and land use or the lack thereof in Houston, as in the case with prototype 180. Or, the national and non-visible real estate of radio frequency for Public Utility 2.0  as a form of 21st century work of land art. Teaching, lecturing and public presentations in architecture and land use policy are an important part of Carroll’s work and educational institutions have included architecture and public policy programs at Rice University in Houston, Columbia University in New York, University of California at Irvine, Yale University, Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea and the DIA Art Foundation amongst others. Carroll has received numerous awards and honors, and her work is in public and private collections internationally. She is represented by Galerie Hubert Winter in Vienna, Austria. Carroll has been awarded the IASPIS fellowship by the Swedish Government for 2017.

6.30 doors open Reading & Conversation: 7.00 – 8.00 pm

Featuring: 
author Gabriela Torres Olivares in conversation with translator Jennifer Donovan and author Janet Sarbanes

LAXART is proud to host Les Figues Press for the launch of Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares, translated by Jennifer Donovan. Olivares was born in Monterrey, México. She is the author of three collections of short stories: Enfermario (2010), which Reforma named as one of the Best Books of 2010; Incompletario (2007); and Están Muertos (2004). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including Vice, Pic-Nic, Playboy, and Luvina. She received a 2015-16 grant from the National Fund for Culture and Arts to complete a novel.

Jennifer Donovan is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Tijuana-San Diego border. Her work addresses the ontology of boundaries and liminal spaces through presence/absence phenomena. She works between literary (writing and translation) and visual practices to grapple with power relationships embedded in bodies, language, and geography: borders that each of us constantly negotiates.

Janet Sarbanes is the author of the recently released and highly acclaimed short story collection The Protester Has Been Released (C & R Press, 2017). Her previous collection, Army of One(Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, 2008) was hailed by BOMB as a "stingingly funny fiction debut." Recent short fiction appears in Black Clock, P- Queue, Entropy and North Dakota Quarterly. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at CalArts.

Join Catherine Taft and Hamza Walker for a walkthrough of Reconstitution.

The catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, the Till case remains a potent gage for our progress as a society.  Images were key to the event’s ability to go from being a case to being a cause.  As an affront to the imagination, the iconic image of Till’s mutilated body poses questions deeply critical of art.  Please join LAXART’s Director, Hamza Walker and University of Chicago art historian Darby English for an informal discussion surveying visual representations of the Till case.  

Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History  at the University of Chicago and a consulting curator at MoMA.  He has written numerous essays and is the author of two books, How to See a Work of Art In Total Darkness (MIT Press) and 1971; A Year in the Life of Color (University of Chicago Press). 

This show will consist of two solo sets, followed by a set of duos for electric guitar and drums with material from Grubbs's 2016 album Prismrose (Blue Chopsticks) as well as his forthcoming Creep Mission LP.

Co-presented with Zebulon

One and One Less began as a collaborative performance and installation at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2014.  This performance will combine David's reading from his forthcoming book-length poem Now that the audience is assembled with Eli's percussion.  The LP version of One and One Less is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse Records (UDPR) in April 2017.

Co-presented by zebulon.la

Join us for a discussion with four of the original core members of Environmental Communications (Roger Mona Webster, David Greenberg, Ted Tokio Tanaka FAIA, Bernard Perloff). Billed as a talk/listen, the discussion will be in two parts. The first will focus on the counter cultural impulse behind the founding of EC, the means and ends of the project, and the area of expertise (architecture, photography psychology) each member brought to the collective. For the second part of the discussion EC would like to hear from the audience, particularly millennials, about their relationship to the material and what if any relevance it has for today.

The exhibition was first produced by GSAPP Exhibitions for the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University&rsquot;s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation.

This expanded version of the exhibition appears with the assistance of the University of Southern California School of Architecture.

Generous support for research on Environmental Communications was provided by the Graham Foundation.

Curated and designed by Mark Wasiuta, Marcos Sánchez and Adam Bandler

LAXART is pleased to present a dialogue between filmmaker Cauleen Smith and art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. How—right now, today—can we care for everyday social life in the U.S.? In taking up this question in terms of the here and now of practice, Smith and Anastas will discuss two areas of recent work by the filmmaker. A film drawn from Smith’s research on the influence of the music and life of Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) will be discussed alongside Smith’s activist works, presenting a multiplicity of work rooted in Chicago, where Smith has lived since 2011. These works differ in their effects, taking on the locations (public sites, the street, the worldwide web) and functions of activism (being loud, using your body, making informal networks for self-education, and information dissemination). The films include LESSONS IN SEMAPHORE (2013), a digitized 16mm film and HUMAN_3.0 READING LIST (2016), an iphone film of Smith’s essential readings as drawings. Smith’s GWENDOLYN BROOKS BANNERS for The Black Love Procession: Conduct Your Blooming (2016) takes a passage from the eponymous poet’s The Second Sermon on the Warpland and mobilizes it as a renegade procession through Bronzeville, a historically black Chicago neighborhood. Simultaneously a work of performance and activism, Smith’s renegade procession responded to a controversial exhibition presented at a gallery in Bronzeville that staged a scene of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Smith and Anastas will focus on these projects of Smith’s as a way of talking to and along with other modes of praxis, including the Black Lives Matter movement and other efforts to recognize the systemic violence against black lives in the U.S. context; and/or broader initiatives to advance a national discourse and set of policy proposals against race and class oppression.   Smith was awarded the 2016 Alpert Award in visual art and was the first recipient of The Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, given to the artist for Give It Or Leave It, a solo exhibition linked to The Warplands by research and a book. Give It Or Leave It is forthcoming at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania in 2018.

About the Artist:

 Smith is known for a group of influential films and videos, moving image installations and objects with connections to experimental film and third world cinema; structuralism and science fiction. A California native, Smith was born in Riverside, grew up in Sacramento and was educated at San Francisco State University (BA) and the University of California, Los Angeles (MFA, Film). Recent films, such as Crow Requiem and The Way Out Is the Way To, move between Smith’s active study of multiple histories and archives (avant-garde, African-American histories and improvisational music), and Smith’s response to recent and ongoing violence against people of color at the hands of the state.

This program is co-presented with the University Art Galleries, University of California, Irvine, where Cauleen Smith’s exhibition, The Warplands, opens January 14, 2017, curated by Rhea Anastas.