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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT LAURI FIRSTENBERG,
323-868-5893, PRESS@LAXART.ORG
2640 SOUTH LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA 90034
WWW.LAXART.ORG
LA><ART ANNOUNCES INAUGURAL EXHIBITION:
Daniel Joseph Martinez How I Fell In Love With My Dirty Bomb (Opium des Volks) Flesh Eating Prosthetics (Phagocitage des prostheses)
March 18 through April 29, 2006
Opening reception March18, 2006 7 – 9 pm
The inaugural exhibition to mark the opening of LA><ART – a new nonprofit contemporary arts organization - will feature new work by Los Angels based artist Daniel Joseph Martinez.
Opening on March 18, 2006, LA><ART is located at 2640 S. La Cienega Los Angeles in a space designed by LA based architect Peter Zellner. Martinez will launch the new space with a series of site-specific interventions including a poem painted on the façade of the building, video, photography and sculpture.
Martinez has been instrumental in informing discourses on identity in America through the vehicle of painting, video, sculpture and public works. Martinez’s recent work negotiates politics and poetics, largely through the lens of minimalism. His proposed multimedia project for LA><ART speaks to empire, modernism and difference, yet is rooted in a highly formal language, which examines vulgarity, beauty and the sublime. Martinez brings to bear imperative questions about the palatability of politics through formalism.
Martinez has articulated his interest in painting, mutation, indigestibility, incongruity, modernist tropes and contradictory politics. He has defined his approach to the exhibition as one of social relevance and responsibility. The artist will create a site-specific text-based work to be painted on the side of the façade of the building with an accompanying neighboring billboard. Martinez’s signage stems from both appropriated and composed texts that function in a slippery space between propaganda, advertising and protest.
In dialogue with the skin of the space, Martinez’s work will inhabit both the main and project galleries of LA><ART. A new video projection titled Hollow Men represents a mediation of the artist’s mantra that “mutation is the most radical ideology.” The video features a repetitious gesture of the artist’s hands turning the pages of a monochromatic flip book imaging riot police. Deficient of any index of geo-political specificity, time and place is abstract and the event represented becomes generic. Performed time and again, the artist’s hands alter into monstrous prosthesis.
In addition, Martinez will produce two new photographic works in the context of the LA><ART installation, using iconic photographs from the 1972 Munich Olympics and 1968 Mexico City Olympics as watershed events. Focusing on the modernist architecture of the iconic Black September image, Martinez abstracts space, subjectivity, politics and history. The project rehearses Martinez’s tendency to appropriate modernist tropes in order to contaminate them, creating a rupture of both meaning and context.
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 inaugural exhibiton is made possible with the generous support of Linda Pace, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Danielson Foundation, E-flux, Art Papers and X-tra.
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 10 am – 6pm. 
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