Clive Barker: Imagining Man

November 11 – December 19, 2009

Opening Reception Wednesday, November 11, 6–9 pm
Downtown Art Walk Thursday, November 12, 12–6 pm
Catalog Signing Event Saturday, December 12, 2-4 pm

On Display in the Project Windows:
Richard Ankrom: Water and Power
through December 2009

Bert Green Fine Art is pleased to present our third solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Clive Barker, whose fine art is only one of his accomplishments, alongside with his globally successful projects in film
and books. In “Imagining Man”, Barker turns to photography—he has shot many thousands of images of men over several years. For this show 50 images have been selected, in editions of 10 each.

“Imagining Man” highlights Barker’s fascination with manipulating and eroticizing identities and forms,
and creating new characters from the raw material of flesh, light and paint. A full color catalog, published by the gallery, is available for sale for $15, and includes the full selection of all 50 images in the exhibition. A catalog signing event will be held on December 12 from 2 to 4 pm .

In the Project Windows, Richard Ankrom returns to BGFA for the second time with “Water and Power,” a neon installation which uses electricity and light to mimic the movement of water lapping on the shore. Bright and exuberant, Ankrom brings one of Los Angeles’s signature tropes, Owens Valley Water, to a metaphoric central location in the heart of Downtown.

Bert Green Fine Art

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CREWEST

November 7-29th, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 7th, 6-10 pm

In celebration of Dia De Los Muertos, Crewest Gallery brings further excitement through art with it’s newest exhibition “Top of the Dome IV” featuring ceramic skulls designed by Gregg Stone and transformed by the imagination of today’s hottest tattoo artists, painters, sculptors, graffiti artists, muralists, graphic designers and fine artists. This year’s Top of the Dome promises to bring an extreme level of creativity meant to inspire and stir the curious nature of the roaming soul in search of interesting and intriguing artwork to call their own. Top of the Dome is not just an exhibition but rather an experience you do not want to miss.

In conjunction with the exhibition, featured artist and painter Gregg Stone makes an impact with his collection of eerily beautiful multi-media paintings that reveal his travels thru the avenues and byways of border region Hispanic communities. While the socio-economic underbelly of these locales clearly captivates him, Stone is also keenly aware of the cultural and architectural treasures that often incongruously share space alongside the hybrid flotsam of class inequity, urban anarchy and increasing globalization. Stone transposes this uniquely south-of-the-border visual, along with his sensitive portrayal of people inhabiting it, into the vivid tapestry of images that forms the sum total of his art.

CREWEST

828 S. Main Street, Los Angeles CA 90014

Hundreds of fine art pieces will be on display and available for sale!
All proceeds benefit ECF’s Art Center Program, which supports adult artists with developmental disabilities.

Downtown Art Center Gallery

October 8-31, 2009

Reception October 8, 7-9pm

LACDA

It is common knowledge that (for all of the usual reasons) artists often become pigeonholed in a particular style, or that the ever present curatorial “trend,” “theme” or “concept” can become somewhat tyrannical in terms of dictating the way in which artworks take shape. For this exhibit LACDA curator Rex Bruce invited selected artists to try something new or show some un-exhibited work that they would like to have seen. In one sense the exhibit is curated, in that the artists for the show were selected, and in another it is self-governing in that the artists were allowed to choose the works they wish to show. The only influence would be that this choice came with a healthy dose of encouragement to experiment.

In this spirit of experimentation this show is also an inversion of the practice whereby a gallery doles out wall space to the precious few, thus shortchanging artists as well as their audience the experience of the vast wealth of creativity our global culture in fact produces. A very large group exhibit allows more variety and vibrancy and makes a more accurate representation of the massive quantity of art that exists in the contemporary moment. This is especially true for a digital gallery that aligns itself with the electronic free-for-all that constitutes our time; a world replete with social networks, mobile communications, ubiquitous cameras, ubiquitous editing software, uploads, downloads, blogs, vlogs and the extremely open and rapid-fire discourse they engender.

The Artists:

Ela Boyd
Annaliese Varaldiev
Melissa Ann Lambert
Pete Jackson
Simon Blundelll
Barbara Kossy
John F. Walté
Leslie Dwyer
Kathryn Jacobi
Jonathan Bagby
Michael Tyson Murphy
Leslie Tucker
Jeff Alu
Mary Neubauer
Trish Stone
Patrice Elmi
Wally Gilbert
Mel Sant
Diane Arrieta
Meg Madison
Yolanda Klappert
Chris Dunker
Campbell Laird
Johnathan Baldwin
Christi Nielsen
Jun-Jun Sta.Ana

LACDA

Growth Avenue

New Work by Evah Hart

October 8- November 9, 2009

Artist Reception
Saturday October 10th 6-9pm

Hart offers a disquieting, ambiguous and often disconsolate journey into the intimate life of her large Midwestern family. Her multi-year photographic study turns a watchful eye on their prosaic domestic rituals as well as their vertiginous experience of grief, loss and death. As she documents her brother’s terminal illness, Hart’s tense, pressurized detachment bears the psychic weight of great longing and nostalgia. These elegiac portraits convey an eerie excavation – and memorialization – of the awkwardly permanent transience of family.

Evah Hart’s work has been exhibited at the Getty Museum, Santa Monica Museum and in galleries throughout Southern CA. This is Hart’s first solo show of photographic work. Hart received her BFA with department of Art Awards from Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. She is an instructor in photography at Art Center College of design.

Deborah Martin Gallery
209 W. 5th St. Los Angeles, CA

Deborah Martin Gallery

GRAFFITI SPIRITS
A  Solo Exhibition and Retrospective by:
Man One

Featuring
An Amazing Collection of Original and Available Works
From 1992-Present

OCTOBER 3-31, 2009

CREWEST

Crewest

Compactspace

October 1st, 2009
8pm – 11pm

RADAR Productions Presents

Sister Spit- Next Generation U.S. Tour

Sister Spit- Next Generation blows into Los Angeles on Thursday, October 1^st! They land at Compactspace Gallery at 7pm. Just $10 at the door! Featuring special guest Myriam Gurba!

Sister Spit was established in San Francisco in the early 1990’s as a weekly all-female open mic series, co-founded by Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson. The duo launched the first Sister Spit national tour in 1997: 2 vans chock-full with cutting-edge queer female writers and performers. Since its inception, Sister Spit has crossed the country many times and re-merged in 2007 as Sister Spit- Next Generation featuring established writers with young, emerging queer artists of all genders.

radarproductions.org

Compactspace

Compactspace

September 26th-October 31st

Opening reception-
Saturday September 26th, 6-9pm

compactspace announces “Alien Organic,” an installation of sculptures and site-specific works by Julia Westerbeke.

In her obsessively detailed works, Julia Westerbeke creates terrains that are by turns organic and curiously alien, quiet yet chock-a-block with information. These abstract sculptures covered in crops of cilia-like drawings invite associations that run the gamut from microbes and scientific diagrams to Dr. Seussian flora and fantastical illustrations. For instance, a mountainous spill of white hot-glue adorned with patches of vinyl drawings might be a glacial landscape or Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. A slick, coiling tube that sprouts leaf-like forms could inspire thoughts of tropical vines or venomous creatures. Through a certain indeterminacy, each piece feels at once familiar yet foreign. The artist is interested in these subtle contrasts, tempering the beautiful with elements of the strange or the unexpectedly alluring. In kind, her use of materials could best be described as alchemical: burnt Styrofoam, melted plastic, paper dipped in resin and tiny units of drawings clustering on the surface.

The detail in each work pays homage to the intricacies of natural forms, while the obsessive accretion of elements gives a nod to the process of germination. It could be argued that the artist likes to “grow” these works, building them slowly from the ground up. This installation is filled with sculptures that yield more after closer inspection. While exploring ordered rows of drawings you will discover a neighboring plastic sphere encasing a nest-like form and translucent arches that bend toward delicate filigrees of dripped glue. Here, there are patterns within the patterns. The sum-total creates an eco-system of the artist’s making, one that is grounded in a specific visual vocabulary that has been influenced by cultures of fantasy and science fiction.

Julia Westerbeke has just recently completed her MFA at the University of California, San Diego. This is her first solo show in Los Angeles.

Compactspace

TODD / BROWNING GALLERY
Through October 3, 2009

Contemporary photographs by

Jessica Robertson

Kelly Smith

Larry Torno

Tiffany Trenda

Building minature sets inside a three-foot-square box, Australian-based photographer Jessica Robertson creates fictional worlds where dolls act our darkly human impulses.  Using real-life encounters as inspiration, these dioramas expose painful, confronting and compromising moments that are seldom displayed for public consumption. While archiving the Lester Glassner Collection for the Library of Congress in September 1999, Kelly Smith encountered Mr. Glassner’s private collection of antique dolls, figurines and masks from the early 20th century. Seeing the artistic potential in these artifacts, Kelly urged Mr. Glassner to allow him to photograph his collection as portraits.  These works are comprised almost entirely of headshots; the close-ups suggest an unusually scrupulous examination of antiquity, populism, and image. While the dolls themselves generally represent human form, Smith’s colorful and carefully posed portraits of these inanimate objects are surprisingly, and perhaps disturbingly, humanistic in impact. California performance artist Tiffany Trenda’s digital photographs aim to humanize the artificial, substituting the doll or mannequin’s blank features with her own self-portrait. Barbie, created by Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler, was unveiled at the American Toy Fair in New York City on March 9, 1959.  By experimenting with composition and light, St. Louis-based Larry Torno infuses personalities into otherwise lifeless plastic, and the photos of the famous figure evolve from simple documentation to a kind of portraiture.  Through these vivid images of the timeless figure, Torno liberates Barbie from her box and places her again into the realm of the imagination.

JASON CRUZ / AMERIKAN BLACKHEART

September 10 – October 3, 2009

“TEMPORARY MASTERS and RUNAWAY DISASTERS”

Born in Los Angeles in 1974, AmerikanBlackheart is painter and musician Jason Alexander Cruz. Scrawled with apocalyptic odes and enchanting mod-pop iconography, his paintings evoke an ominous nocturnal tension: a clustered menace of Kalashnikov-slung Tuareg warriors, a hauntingly violet-tinted Twiggy, and the patent leather-wrapped talons of an impeccable trench-coated courtesan tidily folding away a bloody pocketbook full of crows.

Cruz’s portraits emerge as a flirtatious, reckless army of the bar, the battlefield, and the urban alleyway. His female figures are fey, enchanting and ferocious within their glossy haute couture – his men ravaged, deranged, and disruptive. Yet within their insouciant violence run threads of sorrow, isolation, and grief.

Deborah Martin Gallery