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Guyton/Walker
Mar 15 - Apr 26, 2008
LA><ART is pleased to present the Los Angeles debut of Guyton\Walker, the collaborative body of New York based artists Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker. For this ambitious project, Guyton\Walker have produced a series of site-specific silk-screened paintings printed on drywall, canvas, and the gallery’s existing interior and exterior surfaces. The artists’ innovative use of new technology updates art historical pop cultural co-option. The artists arrange canvases, 250 one-gallon paint cans, and protruding wall flags among coconuts and light bulbs, creating a multi-level discussion about advertisement, art and technology. The dirty, altered images, however, reclaimed decisively by the artists’ physical touch, adds another layer of commentary on how technology can be used to subvert the power of branding through personalization. |
Press Release | download PDF
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT MELISSA GOLDBERG
323-951-9790, LAXARTPRESS@LAXART.ORG
2640 SOUTH LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA 90034
WWW.LAXART.ORG
LA><ART PRESENTS LOS ANGELES DEBUT AND PUBLIC BILLBOARD BY NEW YORK-BASED COLLABORATION GUYTON\WALKER AND A NEWLY COMMISSIONED SCULPTURAL INSTALLATION BY LOS ANGELES-BASED ARTIST ANNA SEW HOY
Guyton\Walker, Untitled, 2008, stretched vinyl on billboard, 12.3 x 24.6 feet, courtesy of the artists and LA><ART, Los Angeles
March 15 through April 26, 2008
LA><ART is pleased to present the Los Angeles debut of Guyton\Walker, the collaborative body of New York based artists Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker. For this ambitious project, Guyton\Walker have produced a series of site-specific silk-screened paintings printed on drywall, canvas, and the gallery’s existing interior and exterior surfaces. In conjunction with the exhibition that has taken over the gallery’s architecture, a billboard project, mounted on La Cienega Boulevard, and public installation at the gallery’s entryway extend the artists’ densely woven practice of layering into the public spaces of popular media. By recycling an iconographic system that refers to the visual languages of art and design history, as well as the material output of reproductive technologies, the body of work comprising this installation interrogates the material and spatial legibility of images confined by their architectural context. Guyton\Walker’s collaborative output interfaces with the gallery as a framing device through more recent and laborious processes of reproduction, pushing the limits of digital printing technologies to exchange with construction materials, while conflating commercial and art historical strategies of image-making. Employing silk-screen and inkjet printing techniques within a conflated visual field, this most recent iteration of Guyton and Walker’s collaboration experiments with the exchange between digital and analog imagery upon the surfaces of architecture and painting. Guyton\Walker’s practice toes the line between construction and deconstruction by altering, dismantling, and composing the distinct products of intentionality and chance.
The artists’ innovative use of new technology updates art historical pop cultural co-option. The artists arrange canvases, 250 one-gallon paint cans, and protruding wall flags among coconuts and light bulbs, creating a multi-level discussion about advertisement, art and technology. The dirty, altered images, however, reclaimed decisively by the artists’ physical touch, adds another layer of commentary on how technology can be used to subvert the power of branding through personalization. Guyton and Walker resume their collaboration after a two-year hiatus.
Wade Guyton's larger practice attempts to mediate painting, photography and sculpture, examining the intercession and conversion between the mediums. His notorious corpus of drawings ranges from black manual drafts, markings on found material, torn pages from design, home and sculpture publications, largely from the ’60s and ‘70s – a site of obsessive intervention for Guyton. Kelley Walker has collected branding images from advertisements, digitally altered them and simultaneously unified and degradedthem by covering them in chocolate and other foodstuffs. The artists’ newest collaboration takes on propagandist logic and the language of advertising with art historical repercussions. Both Guyton and Walker are interested in the bad word appropriation as well as highly mediated and secondary output. Images are subject to perpetual alteration, replication and dispersal.
Guyton\Walker’s exhibitions include Empire Strikes Back, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University (2006), The Failever of Judgement Part III, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York (2005), and The Failever of Judgement, Rheinschau Cologne Art Projects, Cologne (2004). Notable group exhibitions include Bring the War Home, QED Gallery, Los Angeles, An Ongoing Low-grade Mystery, Paula Cooper, New York, and Uncertain States of America, Reykjavik Art Museum (all 2006).
LA><ART Public Art Initiatives
Guyton\Walker, Untitled, 2008, stretched vinyl on billboard, 12.3 x 24.6 feet, courtesy of the artists and LA><ART, Los Angeles
As part of LA><ART Public Art Initiatives, a public billboard, facing north on La Cienega Boulevard between Venice and Washington Boulevards, accompanies this project.
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 the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Danielson Foundation, Campari, Eileen Harris Norton, Ruth and Jacob Bloom, Eve Steele and Peter Gelles, ForYourArt, Uber.com, and LA><ART board, founding members and patrons.
Upcoming: May 10 – June 21, 2008 Michelle Lopez: Death Star and Vishal Jugdeo: Surplus Room
LA><ART is located at 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90034 T.310.559.0166 F.310.559.0167 office@laxart.org www.laxart.org
LA><ART is open Tuesday through Saturday 11am – 6pm. 
Press Coverage | download all Press (.zip file)
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