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Rodney McMillan & Olga Koumoundouros
On a Porch Mar 17 - Apr 28, 2007 A collaborative performance by Los Angeles based artists Rodney McMillian and Olga Koumoundouros will explore questions of history, politics and aesthetics through a site- specific wall drawing, movement, sound and sculptural installation.
LA><ART’s programs are made possible with generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, Danielson Foundation, Campari, Uber.com, Eve Steele and Peter Gelles, Avalon and Maison 140, and LA><ART’s founding members and patrons. |
Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT BETTINA KOREK
310-962-0399, LAXARTPRESS@LAXART.ORG
2640 SOUTH LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA 90034
LA><ART CELEBRATES ITS 1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY
LA><ART Presents THOMAS LAWSON History/Painting and On a Porch, a collaborative performance and installation by RODNEY MCMILLIAN and OLGA KOUMOUNDOUROS
March 17- April 28, 2007 Opening Reception March 17h 7-9 PM | Performance at 7 PM
Campari and LA><ART Present Campari Talks
THOMAS CROW IN CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS LAWSON March 17th 5-6 PM | RSVP REQUIRED office@laxart.org
LA><ART is pleased to announce History/Painting, a solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Thomas Lawson, which features a suite of new allegorical paintings.
Lawson is currently the Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts. This marks a critical juncture in Lawson’s local exhibition history in mounting a solo exhibition of new work where he lives and works.
Invested in the discourse on the politics of painting, Lawson creates large-scale works on canvas of impossible world maps marked by vulgar coloration and skewed perspectives. A dissonant palette challenges the viewer’s relationship to the artist’s iconography. Lawson’s corpus problematizes perception of both surface and image. The serial imagery of malleable maps represents shifting, elusive compositions compounded by the transformation of hue from canvas to canvas, calling meaning into question. Accompanying intimate portraits render mythological and recent historical events.
The artist has revealed: I am drawn to the images I use for a variety of reasons. Sympathy can be one. Sometimes it is the resonance of a gesture through history. Sometimes it is an aesthetic response, sometimes the result of a search for an image to flesh out an idea. The work done to these images is then a series of actions designed to create a painting, various representational tactics, optical plays, and experiments with color, mark and texture. A kind of tactile/visual thinking about the image, with no particular goal in mind.
LA><ART Performance Series
On a Porch: Rodney McMillian and Olga Koumoundouros
A collaborative performance by Los Angeles based artists Rodney McMillian and Olga Koumoundouros will explore questions of history, politics and aesthetics through a site- specific wall drawing, movement, sound and sculptural installation. The artists will recite two texts - Emma Goldman’s Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty (1908) and Martin Luther King’s Beyond Vietnam speech (1967). The artists resuscitation of these texts engage their interest in historical memory and what Mcmillian terms - history as a readymade.
The artists will read:
“What is patriotism? .....The usual contention is that we need a standing army to protect the country from foreign invasion. Every intelligent man and woman knows, however, that this is a myth maintained to frighten and coerce the foolish. The governments of the world, knowing each other's interests, do not invade each other. They have learned that they can gain much more by international arbitration of disputes than by war and conquest. Indeed, as Carlyle said, "War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other."
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a 'thing- oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computer, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.... America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.”
LA><ART Publication Series
Rodney McmiIlian: Words are Deeds
LA><ART will produce a monograph with artist Rodney McMillIan. Designed by Richard Massey, this book will include an interview between Rodney McMillan and Andrea Bowers, and newly commissioned texts by Olga Koumoundouros, Malik Gaines, Aimee Chang and Lauri Firstenberg.
About LA><ART
Responding to Los Angeles’ cultural climate, LA><ART questions given contexts for the exhibition of contemporary art, architecture and design. With a renewed vision for the potential of independent art spaces, LA><ART provides a center for interdisciplinary discussion and interaction and for the production and exhibition of new exploratory work. LA><ART offers a space for provocation, dialogue and confrontation by practices on the ground in LA and abroad. LA><ART is a hub for artists based on flexibility, transition, spontaneity and change. The space responds to an urgency and obligation to provide an accessible exhibition space for contemporary artists, architects and designers.
LA><ART’s programs are made possible with generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, Danielson Foundation, Campari, Uber.com, Eve Steele and Peter Gelles, Avalon and Maison 140, and LA><ART’s founding members and patrons.
Forthcoming exhibitions: May-June Vincent Johnson and Matt Lucero
LA><ART is located at 2640 S. La Cienega Los Angeles, CA 90034
T.310.559.0166
LA><ART is open Tuesday through Saturday 11-6. 
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