Kori Newkirk: Rank @LAXART (July 19 – September 6, 2008)
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Guyton\Walker and Anna Sew Hoy at LAXART
Guyton\Walker and Anna Sew Hoy: POW! @LAXART (March 15 – April 26, 2008)
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Anna Sew Hoy.
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Guyton\Walker.
Scoli Acosta at LAXART.
Scoli Acosta: Bountiful @LAXART (January 19 – March 1, 2008)
LAXART Benefit Auction.
On Sunday, November 4th, LAXART will throw their annual benefit auction.
Once again the list of participating artists is pretty impressive and inspiring. So, if you have some spare change I suggest that you get the tickets now.
Presale VIP tickets are $150 and regular price tickets $75.
Beside, you know, being able to bring home some pieces, I wish that the preview page they have put up for the auction would be more easily navigable. As it is, it’s pretty user-unfriendly to go from one artist to the next.
(All images from LAXART. Left is Danny Jaureguy, Untitled (zag), 2007, Ash and graphite on paper, 24″ x 24″. Courtesy of the Artist and Acuna Hansen Gallery. Value: $2,000 – Starting Bid: $700. Middle is Evan Holloway, An Essay On Criticism In A Gourd, 2007, Gourd, Concrete, Tape Player, Recording of Evan Holloway Reading Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism”, 19″ x 12″ x 12″. Courtesy of the Artist, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, and Harris Lieberman, New York. Value: $16,000 – Starting Bid: $5000. Right is Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2006, Oil on paper, 10.12″ x 11.5″ (framed). Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Value: $900 – Starting Bid: $450.
Books and Bytes.
Yesterday, I grabbed a bus to Culver City, all enthusiast to flâne along La Cienega on a week day, only to discover that the battery for my camera didn’t follow me on this journey. Ah. And no, I didn’t take another bus back and forth to grab it. I will be back to the neighborhood soon to take some shots.
A lot of video pieces were on display and I was pleased.
The group show at Lizabeth Oliveria with Jen Liu, Bjørn Melhus & Clare Rojas is intriguing and complex. Being only familiar with Clare Rojas’s flying inked line, I enjoyed seeing it take form in time and have such a pugnacious narrative as well. All of the pieces brings light to identity issues and the roles, we, as human being try to hold or try to attribute to the others. Bjørn Melhus’s characters, creepy personas of the artist himself, were performing one of these highly recognizable “face-to-face” dirty TV talk show under the metallic and faux-futuristic lights.
I also made a stop at Taylor de Cordoba, a new gallery which opened last Saturday on La Cienega strip. The atmosphere was all bright and fresh, like an ice cream store. It certainly sounds trivial but it felt right at the moment. The work on display was from the very graphic Long Beach painter Ryan Callis, which was also very bright.
(All images from Lizabeth Oliveria website. Left is Jen Liu, Infinite Jam, video still, 2006. Middle is Bjorn Melhus, The Oral Thing, video still, 2001. Right is Clare Rojas, Untitled, silkscreen print, 2006, unlimited edition)
Another piece I highly enjoyed and didn’t fully appreciate the first time I saw it, back at the opening party, was Hollow Men, from Daniel Joseph Martinez at LAXART. Who wouldn’t appreciate the immense power and cynicism of flipping back an army of cops?
I also remembered that the gallery was carrying an aquatint etching by Edgar Arceneaux (ed. of 30, 36″ x 44″ & published by Paulson Press) and this weekend, while I was wandering around the Hennessey & Ingalls bookstore on Whilshire, I came across the fabulous book 107th St. Watts by Edgar Arceneaux, which is a linear photographic journey on the eponymous street, and presented in an acordeon.
Note that Arceneaux is presently showing at Gallery 400 in Chicago with a video installation The Alchemy of Comedy…Stupid, analyzing comedy and the interpretations of humor.
(Left and middle images from LAXART. Left is Daniel Joseph Martinez. Middle is a detail of the print. Right is Arceneaux’s book from artnet, courtesy of Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica.)
Yet, what undeniably saved the afternoon from the how-can-I-forget-my-damn-battery frustration was the A Gin-Pissing-Raw-Meat-Dual-Caburetor-V8-Son-Of-A-Bitch From Los Angeles, collected poems 1983-2002 by Dan Fante. Michael Napper, who collaborated with the writer on this poems collection with drawings, paintings and sketches, gave me one of the precious book and signed it along with Fante.
Beautiful. Merci mille fois Messieurs.
And the timing is also so delicate as I first talked about this book almost a year from now.
(The book is published by Sun Dog Press)
