LA><ART

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT BETTINA KOREK

310.962.0399 LAXARTPRESS@LAXART.ORG

2640 SOUTH LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD           

LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA 90034

WWW.LAXART.ORG

LA><ART PRESENTS MICHAEL QUEENLAND’S THE MORL OR NYC-APARTMENT, THE LOS ANGELES DEBUT OF NEW YORK BASED PAINTER FRANCESCA DIMATTIO, AND A SCULPTURAL WINDOW INSTALLATION BY ALEXANDER MAY

Michael Queenland: The MORL or NYC-Apartment

Michael Queenland, studies for The MORL or NYC-Apartment, 2007, courtesy of the artist and LA><ART

September 15 through October 27, 2007

Opening reception September 15, 7-9pm

LA><ART is pleased to present the Los Angeles debut of Michael Queenland’s The MORL or NYC-Apartment. For this ambitious project, Queenland has restaged and examined the logic of museological display and the phenomena of kitsch by transforming the space of the gallery into that of a Wunderkammer. Resembling a wide-ranging accumulation of natural curiosities, cultural ephemera, and decorative sculpture, The MORL or NYC-Apartment functions as both a simulated domestic space and site of resonance and wonder, proposing a sustained interaction with both the refined and the banal. The staging of found and composed objects within this context furthers Queenland’s interrogations of sculptural fixity and the limitations of medium-specific modes of signification, while continuing to engage questions around the cyclical relationship between photography and sculpture in the artist’s practice.

The project references the Museum of Romantic Life, a mansion in Paris that, since 1987, has housed the personal effects of the French novelist George Sand. For The MORL or NYC- Apartment, the floor plan of Queenland’s New York railroad apartment has been installed and presented as a theatricalized set in which domestic, commercial, and cultural spaces reside in tandem. Conceived as a collection in itself, the domestic setting within The MORL or NYC- Apartment becomes a seamlessly integrated space of performance and theatre. By the conflation of this historical institution with the objects and layout that make up Queenland’s New York apartment, the artist’s deployment of a disparate array of cultural artifacts interrogates the relationship between modes of preservation and the symbolic nature of objects.

Michael Queenland received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002, and has since exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions. In 2005, the exhibition Michael Queenland: Photographs, Sculptures, and ShakerClassics traveled to both the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2006, he was named a United States Artists Fellow. From 2004 to 2005, he served as a resident artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent exhibitions include Happenstance at Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York, Civil Restitutions at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Trace at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria in New York, and Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

LA><ART GALLERY TWO

Francesca DiMattio: Unhinged

Curated by Jeffrey Uslip

Francesca DiMattio, Triptych (detail), 2007, courtesy of the artist, LA><ART and Salon 94

September 15 through October 27, 2007

September 15, 6pm CAMPARI and LA><ART present Campari Talks: Francesca DiMattio and Art Critic Jori Finkel in Conversation Please RSVP to 310.943.9236 Must be 21 and over to attend

For Francesca DiMattio’s solo Los Angeles debut, LA><ART is pleased to present Unhinged, a large scale, eight-panel, site-specific painting installation based on Los Angeles’ distinctive modular architecture. Consisting of a 28-foot horizontally configured painting, as well as an additional 12-foot painting in the gallery’s adjacent corner, the monumental scale and dense layers that make up Unhinged move the work beyond the limits of painting to provide a stunning and resonate environment.

Paired with DiMattio’s renderings of a fragmented visual space, the modularity of the canvases that make up the installation heighten the artist’s investigation of surface tension and the anti- decorative. The paintings that make up Unhinged suture modernist architectural spaces with disparate cultural debris. DiMattio reconfigures her subject matter into webs of detritus; human limbs, dead birds, butterfly wings, urban scaffolding, American lace and quilt patterns, derelict architectural frameworks, public and private housing and domestic furniture dynamically collide to comprise her tightly woven compositions.

New York based painter Francesca DiMattio received her BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from Columbia University in 2005. Recent exhibitions include Salon 94 in New York (2006), November at Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York (2006), The Manhattan Project at Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2006), First Look at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York (2005) and Paradise Lost at Marvelli Gallery, New York (2005).

LA><ART WINDOW

Alexander May: Light Echo

Curated by Aram Moshayedi

Alexander May, studies for Light Echo, 2007, courtesy of the artist and LA><ART

LA><ART’s ongoing series of window projects is pleased to present a sculptural installation entitled Light Echo by Los Angeles based artist Alexander May. Culling from interests in geological systems of representation, the occult, and topographic networks, May’s project centers upon a found stained glass window, recently discovered by the artist on the beaches north of Malibu. In the context of LA><ART’s window project, the once decorative and ornamental object is here employed to treat an ominous light as a shifting object within the gallery’s office interior. The window-within-a-window aesthetic performed by this project highlights the function of light within architectural space, and enables the lustrous, discarded object to suggest a dynamic and material presence of natural phenomena.

Alexander May currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006, and has exhibited throughout Chicago since 2004. Light Echo is the artist’s Los Angeles gallery debut.

LA><ART OUTDOOR INSTALLATION BY MARA LONNER

Concurrently on view at LA><ART is a site-specific installation in the gallery’s foyer by Los Angeles based artist Mara Lonner. Conceived as an extension of LA><ART’s Public Art Initiatives, Lonner’s installation uses plaster and binding compound to build upon Mark Bradford’s original intervention entitled Volver that has occupied the gallery’s entranceway since November 2006. As part of an ongoing series, Lonner’s project was selected by Bradford as the first in many to take place within this highly visible and public site.

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, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Campari, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Eileen Harris Norton, Nelson Buxton Collection, Harris Lieberman Gallery, Daniel Hug, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Dennis and Debra Scholl, Lisa Schiff, Karen Ma, Ben Spector, Donanne Kasicki and LA><ART founding patrons and sponsors.

Upcoming: November 4, 2007: LA><ART Live and Silent Auction and Party, presented by Hermès; November 16, 2007 – January 5, 2008: Adrià Julià: A Means of Passing the Time and Michael Rashkow: Circle Pictures

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.