LA><ART

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT MELISSA GOLDBERG, FYAworld                  

323-951-9790, LAXARTPRESS@LAXART.ORG

2640 SOUTH LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD

LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA 90034 WWW.LAXART.ORG

LA><ART PRESENTS A NEW INSTALLATION BY LOS ANGELES-BASED ARTIST WILLIAM LEAVITT AND THE SOLO LOS ANGELES DEBUT OF MEXICAN ARTIST

GUSTAVO ARTIGAS

William Leavitt, study for Warp Engines, 2009, mixed-media installation with sound, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist; LA><ART, Los Angeles; and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; and Gustavo Artigas, Vote for Demolition, 2009, site-specific installation, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist and LA><ART, Los Angeles

William Leavitt: Warp Engines

Curated by Aram Moshayedi

September 12 – October 31, 2009

LA><ART is pleased to present a new installation entitled Warp Engines by Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt. Having investigated narrative structure through installation, theater, sound, and painting since the early 1970s, Leavitt will debut Warp Engines, a recent tableau with sound that revisits the domestic language and artifice of theatrical staging. Organized around a recent musical composition, the accompanying sculptural setting will attempt to spatially situate the dense layers of sound. The central components of the installation suggest an ambiguous narrative set in an unfamiliar domestic space. Warp Engines extends Leavittʼs practice of deconstructing the tropes and viewing relationships particular to traditional theater.

Having first emerged from the traditions of Minimalism and California assemblage, Leavittʼs extended engagement with theater for over four decades has developed into one of the most thorough studies of the relationships between sculptural form and narrative. Warp Engines furthers this trajectory, dealing with the pervasiveness of metaphors related to the theatrical stage that continue to permeate the discourses of painting, sculpture, performance, installation, video/film, and photography. The sculptural components that make up this tableau emphasize the stage-like quality that defines both aesthetic and theatrical experience, creating a viewing scenario that bears the signs of a narrative arc and that lacks the entertainment value of drama.

William Leavitt received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California in 1967, and has since continued to live and work in Los Angeles as an artist, musician, playwright and educator. His work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad since the early 1970s. Recent projects have taken place at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2002) and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles (2009/2007). In 2008, Leavitt was included in the exhibition “Painting Now and Forever Part II” at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York and the California Biennial (CB08) at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach. In November 2010, MOCA will mount Leavittʼs first solo museum exhibition and retrospective.

LA><ART PROJECT SPACE and LAPD – LA Public Domain

Gustavo Artigas: Vote for Demolition

Internationally acclaimed artist Gustavo Artigas will produce his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at LA><ART. For Vote for Demolition, Artigas is developed a survey to compile a selection of buildings in Los Angeles with the least aesthetical values. The project is a study in how locals see their own environment and about the democratic possibilities of changing it. He relates this investigation to Marcel Duchampʼs concept of infrathin – theindescribable conceptual membrane that overlays plastic representation. Artigasʼs highly accessible yet formally and intellectually advanced artistic interventions in Los Angeles expose the thinness of community and the vast tensions that can foreshadow societal breakdown. It is no accident that this city experienced terrible race riots in recent history, making it a perfect site for Artigas to develop his investigation. Artigas has put together a list of buildings in Los Angeles that will be voted on by residents through a website he has designed and in various voting booths that will be located throughout the city. The survey Artigas initiates will be publicized through a postering campaign and results will be translated by the artist in the form of a formal inquiry for demolition of the winning building to the local government. Using this survey as a point of departure, Artigas will create a site- specific incarnation of this project at LA><ART and produce a video simulation of the demolition of the winning building. The exhibition brings together LA><ARTʼs broad-based public art initiatives and efforts to expand across borders and internationalize programming.

Gustavo Artigasʼ broader practice encompasses institutional critique, the exposure of social tensions through artificially devised, game-based platforms, and the exploration of how abstract notions like borders and social contracts affect reality. These provocative interventions progressed to a new level at the cross-border exhibition inSITE 2000, in which Artigas realized his two-part piece Rules of the Game I & II. In Rules of the Game I, the artist installed handball courts on both sides of the United States/Mexico border, which were quickly taken over and utilized by residents. The playful interactions that occurred when a ball would fall on the opposite of the fence only to be congenially returned emphasized the realities of migration and the superficiality of the made-up border space. Artigas further developed this layered social commentary with Rules of the Game II, in which a Mexican football (soccer) team and an American basketball team negotiated for space on the same court in a Tijuana high school. The tensions and jostling, sometimes approaching violence, were ultimately resolved as the players learned to move fluidly around and between one another, living symbiotically but within two very separate frameworks. His work is simultaneously instantly accessible and highly poetic, and he masterfully uses conflict to tease out insights into the real out of a morass of socially abstracted concepts.

Gustavo Artigas currently lives and works in Mexico City. He has shown internationally to great acclaim, and his work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, inSITE 2000, as well as the Venice and Prague Biennials. His recent solo exhibitions include Pintura y Paisaje at Galería Hilario Galguera in Mexico City (2009), Accidentes, ejecuciones y documentos recientes at the Hilario Galguera Gallery in San Rafael, Mexico (2007); Gustavo Artigas – Game, risk and disasters 10 years survey at Te Manawa Art in New Zealand (2007); and Chemical Misunderstanding at the Gallerie Jette Rudolph in Berlin, Germany (2006).

LA><ART PUBLIC BILLBOARD and LAPD – LA Public Domain

Doug Aitken: Fate

Doug Aitken, Fate, 2009, stretched vinyl on billboard, 12.3 x 24.6 feet, courtesy of the artist and LA><ART, Los Angeles Mounted concurrently throughout the month of October will be a billboard project by Doug Aitken, facing north on La Cienega Boulevard between Venice and Washington Boulevards.

About LA><ART

Responding to Los Angelesʼ 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.

LAPD – LA Public Domain features artistic and curatorial collaborations and interventions in experimental contexts.

LA><ARTʼs programs are made possible with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Peter Norton Family Foundation; La Fundación/Colección Jumex; Danielson Foundation; the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP.; Campari; the Standard Hollywood; the Standard Downtown LA; Eve Steele and Peter Gelles; Eileen Harris Norton; the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs; ForYourArt; Richard Massey; Larry Mathews and Brian Saliman; and the LA><ART Board of Directors, Producers Council, Curators Council, founding members, and patrons. This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

Upcoming: November 21, 2009 – January 16, 2010: Arthur Ou and Alice Könitz (Gallery 1) and Samon Takahashi (Gallery 2)

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.