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Lisa Sigal
Riverbed Jan 12 - Feb 23, 2013 Lisa Sigal’s recent work delineates the interiors and exteriors found in social spaces by expanding painting beyond the canvas, to include walls and architectural forms. By moving between fleeting registers of scale that capture the mutability of the city itself, Sigal explores the political latency of informal sites existing just outside ordered society. |
Press Release | download PDF
LA><ART IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE FIRST LOS ANGELES SOLO EXHIBITIONS BY LISA SIGAL AND STEFFANI JEMISON
Lisa Sigal: Riverbed
Lisa Sigal’s recent work delineates the interiors and exteriors found in social spaces by expanding painting beyond the canvas, to include walls and architectural forms. By moving between fleeting registers of scale that capture the mutability of the city itself, Sigal explores the political latency of informal sites existing just outside ordered society. “Riverbed” at LA><ART encodes local landscapes in a painterly language inspired by nearly erased and marginal architectures. In particular, Sigal used found sites along the Los Angeles River to record the permanent and temporary structures that dot the river’s edge. Painting in this larger natural and urban framework allows land use to guide this of works. The industrial and the makeshift define the experience of wandering the city. In an effort to slow down the act of seeing, Sigal painted outdoors in oils with a collapsible easel. The point of these encounters was to keep flipping the terms that frame available perspectives of urban space, from the easel to the camera to street views found online. To this end, the work in the exhibition adds variation and distance to the architectural combinations that fill the work by creating its own momentary sense of time elapsing. Comprising real and imagined spaces, the artist investigates established notions about public and private property as they relate to individual containment, survival and freedom.
Lisa Sigal’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum, MoMa PS1, the Sculpture Center, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Albright Knox, the Brooklyn Museum and was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Upcoming Shows include “New York New York” at the Essl Museum, Vienna, “Pushing Painting’s Paradigm” at the Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University and a solo show at Samson Projects in Boston. She received an Art Matters Grant and Creative Capital Grant in 2012, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in 1998. Sigal received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an MFA from the Yale in 1989. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Steffani Jemison: Same Time
Tonight I ask you to assume that an external world exists. An external world that exists independently of us. The second assumption I would like for you to make is that things are in a constant state of change, transformation, or flux. With agreement on these two assumptions we can go on with our discussion.
—Huey P. Newton, Speech at Boston College, November 18, 1970
Steffani Jemison’s Same Time consists of a looped sound piece and a set of abstract prints. The exhibition title refers to the artist’s reprisal of a speech delivered in 1970 by Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton that has been reinterpreted by Brooklyn-based R&B group Sidetrack Boyz as a vocal improvisation. By relaying Newton’s words through popular music tropes, the performers reactivate his call for the transformation of American society through direct action and strategic rebellion. The two-channel sound installation is accompanied by a series of images, both of which extend Jemison’s interest in the general condition of transparency and the rhetorical possibilities revealed in repetition.
Building on a practice that places African American history and culture at the intersection of conceptual art, Jemison’s exhibition considers how inherited visual strategies both limit and expand our access to history more broadly.
Steffani Jemison is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Fore at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Team Gallery, Gallery 400, Real Art Ways, and the Bronx Museum of Art. She has participated in artist residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (2012), Project Row Houses (2010-2011), the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2009-2011), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008). Jemison is a 2012-2013 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Jemison’s solo exhibition at LA><ART marks her first in Los Angeles.
Debuting Steffani Jemison and Lisa Sigal’s editions: for more information, please visit www.laxart.org
Lisa Sigal Sanya Kantarovsky
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ABOUT LA><ART
Founded in 2005, LA><ART is a leading independent nonprofit contemporary art space in Los Angeles, committed to the production of experimental exhibitions and public art initiatives. Responding to Los Angeles’ cultural climate, LA><ART produces and presents new work for all audiences and offers the public access to the next generation of artists and curators. LA><ART supports challenging work, reflecting the diversity of the city and stimulates conversations on contemporary art in Los Angeles, fostering dynamic relationships between art, artists and their audiences. Since 2005, LA><ART has produced and commissioned over 200 exhibitions, public initiatives, and projects.
In 2014, LA><ART will launch its Vision Campaign including The Occasional – a city wide exhibition and public art initiative. This platform for LA continues the organization’s ongoing commitment to supporting artistic and curatorial freedom while focusing on commissioning new work in experimental contexts.
LA><ART’s programs are made possible with the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, Kathi Cyprus, GuestHaus Residency, The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs.
LA><ART is located at 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90034
T.310.559.0166 F.310.559.0167 www.laxart.org
LA><ART is open Tuesday through Saturday 11am – 6pm
Forthcoming Exhibitions:
Alex Israel
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