There Goes the Neighborhood! is a four day event that positions “the neighborhood” as a fluid institution of creative production, critical thinking and intersecting interests. Collaborations between artists, residents, small businesses, universities and local activists will culminate in a series of workshops, talks, installations, performances and tours that center around the North Park neighborhood of San Diego, with satellite events at the UCSD campus and the San Diego Museum of art (in conjunction with the opening night of the Summer Salon Series).

The first iteration of There Goes the Neighborhood! took place in June of 2010 and focused on issues relating to gentrification.  It examined how art can play a role in both neighborhood revitalization as well as also be complicit in the displacement of existing groups by those moving in. This year the focus of the There Goes the Neighborhood is “the neighborhood” as a nexus of global conditions that manifest themselves in local, everyday, situations. These issues range from transportation networks to means of food production to how information (and knowledge) is disseminated publicly.

A rough schedule of the event:

Thursday May 31st

Location: UCSD campus

Event: “Relocating the University” installation and panel discussion

Friday June 1st

Location: The San Diego Museum of Art

Event: “Relocating the University: part II”  performance, workshop and panel discussion

*note: this event is in conjunction with the opening night of the Summer Salon Series:

http://www.sdmart.org/programs-events/summer-salon-series-2012

Saturday June 2nd

Location: North Park (with excursions to South Park and City Heights)

Events: “Breakfast with Strangers” a meal with someone you don’t know; Photography workshop; Thrift Store bike tour; Street-Car Reenactment – talks addressing issues of urbanism accompanied by music on a hired trolley tour car that runs an old street-car line from 1918; Photography exhibition at Agitprop featuring work by artist Shane Anderson; Post Office conversations; Literary Arts and more.

Sunday June 3rd

Location: North Park

Events: Brunch from Santos Market; Multiple workshops examining the proposed park for the lot behind North Park Theater as a potential green space; DIY publication workshop; a procession through the neighborhood; weekend finale reception and more…

All There Goes the Neighborhood events are FREE.  Donations gladly accepted.

For more information check back for schedule updates at http://theregoes.org

Also, Check out our collaboration with the journal PROS*- a publication documenting the last There Goes the Neighborhood in 2010.

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Thursday 7:30 pm at Space4Art

A touring program of recent San Francisco Bay Area Shorts, featuring work by Caitlin Denny, Gregory Kaplowitz, Jen Kirsten, Alex S. Lukas, Jessica Miller, Dan Olsen, Skye Thorstenson, Virtual Pubes, and Nightmare City.

Space 4 Art

Charles Alexander

Charles Alexander is the founder/director of Chax Press, author of five books of poetry, most recently Pushing Water, from Cuneiform Press in 2011; and 9 chapbooks. He is the editor of Talking the Boundless Book (Minnesota Center for Book Arts), and former director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Alexander also is Senior Lecturer at University of Arizona South (where he co-directs the program for English majors), and he teaches at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. In Tucson, he is a co-founder and one of the several directors of the organization POG, which has presented poetry and prose readings, visual art presentations and lectures, musical performances, and more. He is married to the visual artist Cynthia Miller, and has two daughters, Kate and Nora.

Aaron Kunin

Aaron Kunin is recently the author of The Sore Throat and Other Poems. His other books include a poetry collection, Folding Ruler Star, and a novel, The Mandarin. Grace Period, a collection of aphorisms, sketches, and fragments, is forthcoming. He lives in Los Angeles. You can hear several recent recordings on Kunin’s PennSound author page.

There is no cover charge for reading, but libations and donations to the gallery are always welcome. We hope to see you there and for festivities before and after.

Agitprop (Map)
Saturday, May 5, 7pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind where Glenn’s Market used to be)
San Diego, CA 92104
619.384.7989

For more information about the Agitprop Reading Series and Agitprop Art Space, visit our webpage,  join our Facebook group, or sign up to receive email announcements from us.

UPCOMING READINGS

May 5: Charles Alexander & Aaron Kunin
June 2: Zyzzyva Magazine celebration with John Gibler & Oscar Villalon
October 6: Brandon Brown, Alli Warren & Company
November 3: Joseph Harrington

Mujeres Mixtecas, CAFE and Cog•nate collective invite you to share in a night of exchange! Mujeres Mixtecas, a female Mixtec sewing co-op will share their language and culture as they will unveil a sewn mural created in collaboration with cog•nate collective, and give a short talk on their history and culture. The event is a way of inciting dialogue between the various  ethnic and economic groups at the border.

There will be music and the co-op will prepare a Mixtec meal for everyone. $7 donation suggested for lunch. Our hope is that each of us will teach a bit of our own language(s) as we learn a bit more Mixtec, Spanish, or English through conversation and social exchange.

Located between the northbound lanes of traffic at the Mercado de Artesanias, Linea in the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Cog•nate Space/Espacio Cognado has hosted various arts and cultural events since its inception last year.

Directions to Cog•nate Space:

The space is located at the foot of the pedestrian bridge on the Mexican side of the border on the median between border car lanes.

From the US:

Cross the border, continue straight through the turnstiles. There will be a set of turnstiles to your right, DO NOT GO RIGHT. Instead, continue straight ahead until you cross a set of turnstiles that will lead you to “La Concha,” a silvery shell-like building that will be on your left. Walk past the building toward the taxis, which should be in front of you. Before reaching the taxis make a left onto a footbridge that will take you to the port of entry. Cross the bridge and walk down at the first exit point as you walk east on the bridge. The market is the set of red stalls on your right.

From Mexico:

Go to the San Ysidro port of Entry and take the pedestrian bridge that goes over the cars west. Exit the bridge before you get to “La Concha”. The market is the set of red stalls on your left.

For more information about cog•nate collective’s collaboration with Mujeres Mixtecas visit:

http://cognatecollective.tumblr.com/

Tu’un davi / Español / English : Language Exchange at Cognate Space

Saturday April 28

11am – 4pm

LAXART: 2640 S. La Cienega Los Angeles, CA 90034 and CABINET: 300 Nevins Street Brooklyn, NY 11217

A one-night, bicoastal screening of video works by Skowhegan alumni spanning nearly 15 years of Skowhegan alumni.

The Double is primarily a visual phenomenon making video a natural medium for its exploration. The earliest silent films recognized the inherent doubling that occurs through picture, investigating notions of an uncanny second self in films such as the The Golem and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Through doubling or mirroring, one is confronted with the illusion of wholeness, a dispersion of the self, and perhaps revelations or repressions of fears and desires kept hidden within the body. The Double can also represent an alter ego, a copy or forgery, or a false twin or Doppelganger. However, doubles are not exclusively physical in a bodily sense. Doubling may also be traced to the mode of production of the work, reminding us that the replication and dissemination of image is physical in its duplication as well. This lack of the original and multiplication of the double across the screen is exemplified in the bicoastal screening of The Double at LAXART in Los Angeles and Cabinet in New York.

Featuring works by:

Mike Calway-Fagen ’11
Jonathan Ehrenberg ’11
Amy Finkbeiner ’01
Victoria Fu ’06
Meredith James ’11
Andrew Ellis Johnson ’99
Siobhan Landry ’11
Sarah Lasley ’04
Dan Levenson ’09
Ann Oren ’09
Chris Sollars ’98
Cheryl Yun ’03
Bryan Zanisnik ’08

Space 4 Art is a thriving community-designed, volunteer-built art space that provides 37 affordable studios for San Diego’s finest artists, designers, and craftspeople. The facility has an abundance of natural light, spacious galleries, multiple community spaces, a multi-level stage, and performance areas.

Mark Dery

Author Mark Dery will discuss and sign copies of his new book, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, CA on Thursday, April 19th at 11:00 AM in Rm L238.

From the cultural critic Wired called “provocative and cuttingly humorous” comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful collection of drive-by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the new normal. Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self, Dery makes sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century.

“Always provocative, often humorous, Dery has a keen eye for absurdity, tragedy, and everything in between. ” —Publishers Weekly

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts by Mark Dery

Mark Dery has been exploring the shifting sands of American sub-cultural trends for almost twenty years. He has built a reputation as an engaged and voluble critic hailed for his urbane, funny observations delivered with clear-eyed reason.

His new book, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams features thirty-two pungent essays covering a range of topics such as Madonna’s big toe, the link between zombies and white supremacists, the selling of Nazism and the cultural appropriations of Lady Gaga and Jack Chick.

In the introduction to his book Dery invokes as his talisman André Breton’s epitaph, “I seek the gold of time” . Dery explains that Breton refers to “the ineffable mysteries of lost time, of time passing, of things to come” which recalls Dogen Zenji’s description of time as lending a “resplendent brightness” to all phenomena. Dery would reject any comparison to religious thought (Dogen was a thirteenth century Zen Buddhist monk), but because Dery himself searches for gold in the most unlikely of temporal and spatial places the intersection of these two ideas makes an intriguing entry point into the complex matrix of his thought and writing.

I walk out onto the desert floor in the middle of a bright April afternoon. I stand still in the sun, fully exposed, surrounded on all sides by cactus, sand and rocks. I feel the heat all around. I close my eyes long enough for my thoughts to stop their tossing and turning. Gradually, new sensations begin to impress themselves on my senses. I hear the wind. I hear the buzzing of flies and the drone of faraway traffic.

Time passes. After ten minutes in a state of suspension I open my eyes. I am confronted with a stark wavering prickly electric green thing shooting up out of the desert floor. Ten minutes ago it was an ocotillo tree but now all I see is its indescribably glittering essence. In an instant I am vomited beyond the boundaries of language. Beyond the “flaming wind-hairs of thought” where time turns to gold and everything becomes rich and strange. This other shore is where Mark Dery’s writing will take you. Where no thoughts are too alien, to bizarre or too bad to be turned to gold.

**********************************************************************************************************

Mark Dery

AGITPROP: In the introduction to your new book, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, Bruce Sterling calls you a “botanist of the counter-culture” who samples the Kool-Aid carefully but never fails to spit at the end. What are the origins of your thirst for sipping the dregs of human thought-juice?

MARK DERY: I’m not sure the subcultural margins are synonymous with society’s dregs, but that may be my punctilious Inner Felix Unger talking. As a cultural critic, I’m drawn to subcultural ethnography in the Dick Hebdige mode, or what David Brooks called “comic sociology,” although my variation on that theme is more of a black-comedic sociology. (And when I say Brooks, I mean the David Brooks of Bobos in Paradise, not the Neo-Tory Neuroscientist who offers moral homilies from inside the Beltway, via the New York Times [ Dery is referring to different aspects of a single author, David brooks] . I liked Brooks better when he was a conservative comedian, taking the piss out of lactose-intolerant, cruelty-free yuppies, as opposed to Brooks the self-appointed morality wonk.) I’m drawn to cultural extremes—fringe thought, perverse practices, Manson-approved sociopathologies, consumer culture at its most bodaciously depraved, Bizarro-World Web memes—partly because they’re the strange attractors in our chaos culture, so to speak. In the sciences of chaos and complexity, it’s when systems are far from equilibrium that things get interesting. Not necessarily good, mind you, but inarguably fascinating. They mark the gnarly edge, as the chaos theorist (and Phil Dickian SF novelist) Rudy Rucker would say, where one state transitions suddenly into another.

My fascination with edgy phenomena also has a lot to do, I suspect, with having grown up hard by the U.S.-Mexican border, in 1970s Chula Vista—on the edge of America, in two senses: California is “where we run out of continent” in the Westward-migration sense, as Joan Didion famously observed, and San Diego—one of the most hysterically Anglo, impregnably Republican border cities in our fair Republic—is where white America draws a line in the sand between Nixon Country and that Disneyland of donkey-show depravity, Tijuana. (At least, that’s how it loomed in the gabacho unconscious of my day.) Border consciousness is edge consciousness, and even in the circle-the-wagons all-white Chula Vista suburbs of my ’70s youth, there was a percolating fear that America’s Finest City would be sucked into the libidinal attractor of Tijuana or, inversely, be overrun by the brown hordes presumably massing on the other side of the border (for which the much-feared killer bees were a tabloid metaphor), switchblades and shopping bags at the ready.

But my interest in extreme cultural phenomena has equally to do with the fact that they hyperbolize America—caricature it, melodramatize it, push the envelope of the depravity, the sociopathy, the sheer weirdness hiding in plain sight until there’s no way to avoid it. Through exaggeration, they make the subliminal liminal and, ultimately, push it into mainstream consciousness. As I say in the book’s introduction, I believe in the theory of American exceptionalism, just not as my dear friends in the Tea Party and neo-con thinktanks understand it. America is exceptional, which is to say profoundly weird: it reeks to heaven of flat-earth fundamentalism (which makes us the laughingstock of Europe, where most well-educated urbanites view religion with embarrassment); it seethes with glittery-eyed Neighborhood Watch paranoia; it incarcerates and executes more of its own citizens than any other supposedly civilized nation; it elevates radically deregulated capitalism to a state religion; it criminalizes a ridiculous drug like cannabis yet allows the whackjob survivalist fringe to conceal and carry guns in bars; I could go on. It’s gothic, it’s grotesque, it’s over the top, it’s got TruckNutz dangling from its undercarriage, it thinks Obama is a Muslim and the moon landing was faked and 9/11 was an inside job and Darwin is a rotting heap of secular-humanist hooey and anthropogenic warming is a conspiracy theory foisted on us by the Sierra Club. How can you not love this place?

My cultural criticism patrols the borders of the American unconscious because America is extreme, and the only way to understand it is to venture as far as you can, out onto its wild edge, because that’s where the purest expressions of American dread and dreams live.

AGITPROP: Arguably the most hyberbolic legacy of the twentieth century belongs to Adolf Hitler. Your book has two essays dedicated to the appropriation of his image and the impact American advertising had on Nazi propaganda. Can you delve into your findings?

MARK DERY: The essays in question, “The Triumph of the Shill: Fascist Branding” and “Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglourious Return of Der Fuhrer,” look at the Nazis—specifically, Hitler and Goebbels—as pioneers of branding and marketing, fiendishly artful in their use of design and the media to manufacture mass consent through misinformation, disinformation, and potent myths conjured up out of the fog of fear and hatred hanging over the German unconscious. I was struck by the Nazis’ appropriation of market-tested tricks of the P.R. trade, employed by early public-relations Svengalis such as Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays. Goebbels, especially, was a careful student of American advertising and public relations, which had taken the lessons of Freudian—and Pavlovian—psychology to heart. With a little help from Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl, he stage-managed the dream life of the Third Reich, dramatizing the virulent prejudices and half-baked theories that resulted, ultimately, in a Germany-shaped smoking hole in the map of Europe, not to mention the incineration of at least six million people.

Hitler, a failed painter and architect, emerges from the horrors of the 20th century as an Architect of Doom who dreamed the nightmare of Germany’s Gotterdammerung into awful reality and a Murder Artist on a genocidal scale. In using the term “artist,” I’m not mythologizing Hitler, and certainly am not applauding him. I mean, simply, that fascism (as Walter Benjamin argued) represented the aestheticization of politics—with unspeakably horrific results. Hitler’s dream was the dream of an antiseptic, genocidal utopia, a Wagnerian Germania populated by the kitschy Aryans in Nazi propaganda and purged of all ugliness, which is to say the troglodytic “subhumans” who teemed in Hitler’s anxious unconscious. It’s the Bayreuth-opera fantasy of a daydreaming sociopath who failed as an artist but managed to turn all of Europe into the stage for his dreams…and nightmares. And he did so through an unprecedented and, it must be admitted, virtuosic use of propaganda, stagecraft, and a bizarre theatrical talent that to the 21st-century eye looks laughable in newsreels but in its day whipped crowds into a mass orgy of adulation (for the Fuhrer) and ecstatic loathing (for the Other).

Not for nothing did David Bowie call Hitler the first rock star, a penetrating observation that earned him a fusillade of flak but was nonetheless dead-on. Hitler lavished endless thought on the insignias, banners, uniforms, movies, and above all architecture of the Third Reich, and branders and marketers and advertisers ever since have nursed a secret awe, even envy, for the Nazi branding machine. I mean, are Disney’s mouse ears, the McDonald’s golden arches, or the Apple logo as universally recognized as the swastika? Do any of them carry its third-rail jolt of fascinated horror (or is it horrified fascination)? The techniques perfected by Hitler and his henchmen are still used, albeit more subtly, by branders and marketers and advertisers. Long after the “thousand-year Reich” was reduced to rubble, the original mustachioed “Mad Man” continues to cast a swastika-shaped shadow over Madison Avenue, not to mention our political campaigns, reality TV, right-wing radio, and of course the attacking heads on Fox News.

AGITPROP: Two things…First, Hitler’s early life as a failed artist certainly adds a sickening twist to the origins of his need for control. How much should we rely on it as an explanation for his animosity toward the so-called degenerate artists of the Weimar period and marginal members of society in general?

Second, You seem to have a fascination with the intersection of conservative, even reactionary thought, and art. Your essay “The Prophet Margin: Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse” is about the evangelical comic book artist Jack Chick. His “tracts” (pocket-sized comic books for the non-believers) were a staple in the Bible Belt churches of North Carolina where I grew up. Can we draw a direct line between him and the likes of Cotton Mather, or is Chick sui generis?

MARK DERY: I wouldn’t want to reduce Hitler’s moral depravity and psychopathology to an operatic tantrum over the fact that his hand-painted postcards didn’t go viral. I’m more inclined to the argument that sees him as an ectoplasmic manifestation of the uglier aspects of the German cultural psyche, at that historical moment. This isn’t to absolve him of personal responsibility, or to deny his unique evil. But Hitler gave shape to a toxic cloud of economic anxiety, bred-in-the-bone bigotry, right-wing fears of the Red Menace, and pervasive resentment over the punitive reparations demanded of Germany, after WWI, by the Treaty of Versailles. But this is the stuff of another argument. Interested readers will want to dig deep into Ron Rosenbaum’s masterful Explaining Hitler, which looks at the contesting theories about who Hitler was, and why he was.

As for my interest in conservative, even right-wing strains in American society, especially when they bubble up in the form of cultural expression, well, I believe in sleeping with the enemy. Meaning: I like to know what dark dreams trouble the sleep of the Michael Savage-Tea Party-survivalist-Alex Jones fusion-paranoia fringe, the better to understand our national id.

As well, I’m interested in art that’s marginalized by the transnational art economy and the curatorial and critical apparatuses that legitimate that economy. No less than the “lowbrow surrealism” showcased in magazines like Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose or the fan-culture illustrations featured on DeviantArt.com or the sorts of “happy mutant” neo-retro art spotlighted on Boing Boing, the evangelical tracts of Jack Chick can be seen as a form of pop art produced and distributed outside conventional channels of art production, consumption, and critique. I should italicize the point that I’m not necessarily interested in the aesthetic merits of any of the stuff I’ve mentioned, but rather its implicit (and largely unintended) critique of the highbrow artworld and the conspiracy of curatorial and critical opinion that underwrites the market value of certain forms of commodified expression, and not others. Why Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks, and not vernacular taxidermy? Why Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” (which I happen to think is brilliant, by the way), and not some of the fan-culture mash-ups on YouTube? But this isn’t just some Duchampian dialectical move on my part. I’m equally interested in Chick as a mutant cartoonist, appropriating the commercial mass-culture form of the comic book and turning it into a vector of transmission for his virulently hateful strain of evangelical Christianity. At the same time, as you point out, Chick sits not only within the historical continuum of popular media but specifically within the tradition of Christian media, whose earliest forms include the evangelical tract, and which has now appropriated the look and feel of godless consumer culture to produce its own looking-glass world of Christian pop culture, including a defanged, evangelical-friendly take on teen culture replete with heavy metal bands, Lollapalooza-style rock festivals, movies, YA fiction, and the like. What fascinates me about Chick, and about evangelical America’s canny use of the media tropes of consumer culture, is the weird spin they put on this notion of semiotic guerrilla warfare. Critical theorists are enamored of the cultural dynamic exemplified by Situationist and punk detournement, anti-consumerist collage music by bands like Negativland, and politicized appropriation artists like Banksy, all of whom rip off and repurpose, to politically subversive or social-satirical ends, the signs, symbols, and narratives of official power or consumer culture. But by hijacking mass-media forms like the comic book or pop-culture genres like heavy metal and the YA novel, Chick and the rest of the religious right remind us that two can play this game. The irony is delicious.

Sezio & LWP Group are teaming up to present COLLIDE, a one-night take over of a newly-renovated
1912 apartment building on 9th & Broadway in San Diego’s East Village. Art, music, craft beer & cocktails
will fill the hallways and rooms of the five-story Community @ Carnegie building on Saturday, April 14th.

Vintage apartments will be transformed into art installations, pop-up shops, and mini bars. There will be
beer bars from Karl Strauss & Stone Brewing, cocktails from El Dorado, and street-side grub from MIHO.

Here’s the complete artist roster: Exist 1981, Spenser Little (pictured below), Charles Bergquist,
Michael Delaney, Neko, Walker McCullough, DieKuts, James Noland, Angella d’Avignon, Matthew
Bradley, DOUBLE BREAK, Wes Bruce, Morgan Manduley, YELLER, Louis Schmidt, Christina Tsui,
Mike Maxwell, Abel Guzman, Katherine Powers, & FEELIT.

The event will last from 6-10pm and will be open to all ages. There will be a $5 cover charge that will go
directly to Sezio, helping us continue to feature San Diego art & music on our website and at our events.
We hope to see you there!

Brice Bischoff
Matt Sheridan
Maria Walker
Ryan Perez

Opening Reception

A DOUBLE BREAK EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT

Everything, All the Time, Always

New work by Sadie Barnette

Opening Reception: Friday, April 13, 2012 (6-10PM)

Double Break is thrilled to announce Everything, All the Time, Always, a solo exhibition of new work by Sadie Barnette. Using drawing, photography, and objects, Barnette constructs “a visual language system out of sub-culture codes and West Coast vernacular, economic formalism, text, and abstractions.” Her work stems from an investment in place and location, though it is the notion of specificity itself, rather than any specific locale that she is most compelled by. Projecting outwards from a place, say Oakland, California, she is invested in the study of location, the “weight and content of the specificity of the local.” This study begins in one place, but it can go anywhere. Specificity is universal; Barnette’s findings are urgent. The poetics of her gesture and the fineness of her line illuminate this urgency, these fragile yet tenacious binaries. It is within the sumptuousness of brilliant, saturated color in a lush tumble of sneaker-laces; the allure and impossibility of a sky made of glitter; the harsh perfection of the grid, flexible but absolute; and the velvet, tactile softness of graphite that an uncompromising yet generous commitment to the real and the specific lie. In Barnette’s work, what is at stake is “the gravity of the urban as fantasy; extra-legal economies; luxury as drug; counterfeit capitalism; glitter as hypnotic; outer space as head space; the everyday as gold, family, and lived identity experience; and the party.”

For Everything, All the Time, Always, Barnette will take over the entirety of Double Break–from front window to back wall–filling the space with a combination of large-scale graphite drawings, color photographs, site-specific wall-works, editioned multiples, and discreetly altered found objects. Furthering her explorations of place and location through the specificity of the gallery/shop context,Double Break–gallery and shop, local arts venue and regional/national cultural space, microcosm and macrocosm–will serve as an “inset” of focused investigation within the territory of Barnette’s broader personal and cultural purview. In taking over the space entirely, she will highlight and attend to the symbiotic nature of the gallery/shop relationship, creating a unique viewing experience unlike anything yet seen at Double Break.

Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, CA. She received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2006, and is currently an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Recent shows include More Real Than Life at Southwestern College (San Diego), Last Time It Was Gray at Park Life (San Francisco), and Light/Weight at Zughaus Gallery (Berkeley, CA). She was a 2011 artist-in-residence at UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College, and her book Plus Onewas released in 2010 by San Diego-based publisher Gravity and Trajectory.

Opening Reception: Friday, April 13, 2012 (6-10PM)

Exhibition runs through Saturday, May 12, 2012

Free and open to the public!

SAVE-THE-DATE:

Drawing Jam #2: Monday, April 30, 2012 (8PM-Midnight)

Ten local artists, including Sadie Barnette, will be at the Tin Can Alehouse all night drawing, listening to music, chatting with the crowd, and selling their creative labors for affordable prices!

Special Closing Party with Broken Heart Tattoo: Saturday, May 12, 2012

Double Break

1821 5^th Ave

San Diego, CA 92101

619.238.2325

info@doublebreakstore.com

www.doublebreakstore.com

www.facebook.com/DoubleBreak

www.twitter.com/DoubleBreakSD

(Map: http://g.co/maps/ge5x9)

If you teach, please bring, or send, your class.

For more information about Matthew Coolidge and the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI): www.clui.org

Matthew Coolidge is the founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, an education and research organization based in Los Angeles, established in 1994. The CLUI takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of land use, drawing on the natural sciences, sociology, art, architecture, and history in order to increase and diffuse knowledge about how land in the United States is apportioned, utilized, and perceived. The Center produces public programs such as tours, lectures, and events, publishes books, and web resources, including a web site with a searchable database of “unusual and exemplary” land use in the United States. The work of the Center has been presented in museums, universities, and noncommercial exhibit spaces across the United States, and Europe. Coolidge teaches in the curatorial practice program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is the author and editor of several books, including Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to the Nation’s Nuclear Proving Ground.

www.clui.org

Kartik Seshadri

World-renowned sitar master and music faculty member KARTIK SESHADRI performs April 11 at 7 pm at UCSD’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall.

Kartik’s CD “Sublime Ragas” was named one of the Top of the World Top 10 CDs by Songlines magazine. The Washington Post has praised his music for its “expressive beauty, rich tonal sensibility, and rhythmic intricacy.”

Kartik collaborates with world-renowned artists including Philip Glass, and he is dedicated to authentic Indian classical music as introduced to America in the sixties by his mentor Ravi Shankar.
Kartik is a prolific composer whose Concerto #1 for Sitar and Chamber Orchestra received its world premiere in San Diego last October. He heads the Indian Classical Music program in the Department of Music at UCSD.

For tickets to the April 11 concert, call the Department of Music Box Office: (858) 534-3448.

Kelli Anne Noftle

Kelli Anne Noftle grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. She has a B.A. in Visual Art and is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Her first collection of poems, I Was There For Your Somniloquy, was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout for the Omnidawn Book Prize. Her work has appeared in several literary journals including Colorado Review, The Journal, VERSE, Blackbird, Cream City Review, Conduit, and Harvard Summer Review among others.

Both musically and lyrically, Kelli has collaborated and performed with several bands in Southern California. Her singer/songwriter project is Miniature Soap and her debut solo album, I Don’t Like You, is a collection of songs sonically divided into sets of three.

Julia Bloch

Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia,  earned an MFA at Mills College and a PhD at Penn, and is the author most recently of Letters to Kelly Clarkson (Sidebrow Books). She is an editor of  Jacket2 and lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches literature at the  Bard College MAT program.

Architect Luis Aldrete is from Guadalajara, Mexico. He established Luis Aldrete Arquitectos in 2007. His practice comprises of a body of work related to public and residential comissions and international competitions. Particular projects include a public shelter building along the traditional La Ruta del Peregrino pilgrimage in Mexico. The work is series of contemporary concepts taking advantage of traditional materials and methods of construction.

http://www.archdaily.com/184189/pilgrim-route-refuge-luis-aldrete/

Saturday, March 24, 2012

6:00pm until 10:00pm

As an artist working in the field of repurposed electronic devices, I usually work with second-hand or found objects. An old suitcase gets filled with the chopped innards of a boom box and becomes a cold war karaoke machine. A World Atlas with a walkie talkie hidden in it’s hollowed out pages becomes an oversized talking text. While transporting these hand-held devices from place to place, I am often asked to explain my creations to concerned authorities or curious passersby. As one might imagine, reactions range from amusement to alarm. This installation features an array of custom-made gadgets (known as “snuitcases”) and the stories of how they have traveled far and wide to get to where they are now.

fmath lorenz is an educator, veteran, and technologist.

Wines, Snacks. The usge.. ;p

1925 30th st SD CA 92012 ~ unLocation.com

Tuesday March 20, 2012 at 7pm

Art North Room 412, SDSU

https://www.facebook.com/events/201901556581546/

http://art.sdsu.edu/news_and_events/events_calendar/event/2609/

Exhibition Announcement:

Product Etcetera™ Brands, Gangs, Teams & Clans

Opening Reception: March 22, 2012 (6—10pm)

Double Break is very excited to announce an exhibition by San Diego’s own Product Etcetera™.

Showcasing Product Etcetera’s latest in-house brands and products. Brands, Gangs, Teams & Clans investigates branding, its role in society and personal identity. On display will be original paintings of Product Etcetera’s newest marks, as well as a preview of their upcoming line of product. Their influences range from sports pageantry, corporate identity, religious iconography, national symbolism, gang graffiti, and a general study of semiotics.

Product Etcetera™ is a San Diego-based design studio that specializes in full service design and branding. Operating in all forms of visual communication (web, print, broadcast, and the fine arts) their client projects widely range from brand development for small business to institutional identity systems.

When not designing for their clients, Product Etcetera can be caught producing artwork, stirring up passion projects for their San Diego community, and designing merchandise under their PRDTetc™ label.

Originally born in 2004 as a place to house Jordan Stark’s portfolio online, it wasn’t until he teamed up with Tony Martinez in May 2009 that Product Etcetera officially launched as a commercial design studio. A year later, after developing an exclusive project for a high-profile New York boutique retailer, they launched their PRDTetc™ label and first line of graphic T-shirts and hats.

Since launching their first line of product in June of 2010, Product Etcetera has developed pop-up shops in boutique retailers throughout the West Coast and has collaborated with other high profile brands, stores, and organizations to produce exclusive projects and events. In March of 2011, Product Etcetera organized and launched the Bring Back The Brown campaign, which is an ongoing campaign created with the grand objective of fostering a stronger loyalty to San Diego and its sports culture.

Opening reception: March 22, 2012 (6—10pm)

(With music and refreshments)

Show runs March 22—April 7, 2012

Double Break

1821 Fifth Ave

San Diego, CA 92101

619.238.2325

info@doublebreakstore.com

http://www.doublebreakstore.com

http://www.facebook.com/doublebreak

http://twitter.com/DoubleBreakSD

Hours:

Tuesday—Thursday 12pm—8pm

Friday—Saturday 12pm—9pm

Rendering of the current state of the public art program at the Port of San Diego

The Port of San Diego is not historically known for making good decisions related to art. And today they made sure that this reputation was not sullied.  The Board of Commissioners at the Port of San Diego voted 4 to 2 in favor of accepting a permanent copy, to be cast in bronze, of the statue known as “Unconditional Surrender” by Seward Johnson which is to be donated by private interests associated with the Midway Museum. Those donating the piece have a year to raise the nearly one million dollars it will cost to have the fiberglass piece recast in painted bronze. It is a sad day because it again shows, whether in art or not, that if there is one thing you can rely on in San Diego is that monied special interests, especially those related to the military, will always beat out rational arguments made by studied professionals.

For the past year, and beyond, the Public Art Committee, which works in an advisory capacity to the Board of Commissioners at the Port of San Diego, and Port curatorial staff have worked hard to develop a curatorial strategy that, if implemented in its full capacity, has the potential to be one of the most dynamic and interesting public art programs in the country.  Because of the Board’s decision “Unconditional Surrender” will be the first piece of the Port’s new collection- despite the fact that the Public Art Committee voted 6 to 4 not to accept it.  It is difficult not to think that the acceptance of this stolen piece of intellectual property, which has gotten off on a technicality, has set the art program and the new curatorial strategy at the Port back a year, if not years or even indefinitely.  Many of the members of the Public Art Committee who went into this past year feeling hopeful that real change was going to take place at the Port’s art program (changes that included requirements that members of the Public Art Committee actually be credentialed arts professionals), now feel that it may be pointless to continue with a Port Board whose majority essentially stated today during deliberations that the fiduciary standards for art in the Port district should be nothing more than oceanside amusements to attract the masses.

Giant balls of twine, eat your heart out:

A stolen "Kiss"

Below is a letter that I sent to the commissioners this morning.  Additionally, five members of the Public Art Committee (including myself) attended the meeting and read statements against the acceptance of the piece. Two others, who could not attend, sent letters arguing against the piece as well. All of these arguments did everything that you are supposed to do in arguments: cited the Board’s voted upon and approved Curatorial Strategy, argued thoroughly why this work is sub-par and does not meet the Board’s approved standards, referenced precedents, pointed to the derivative nature of the piece, potential problems in its transference to another material, the inability of the donators to raise the money up to this point, and so on.  What is most disturbing in this whole process is that the only argument I can discern that has been levied in favor of the piece is that “it’s popular”.  Well, so is McDonald’s.

Given what this decision implies I think we should be on the look out in case any of the commissioners who voted for this piece, associates of the Midway, or anyone else in favor of this piece ever publish a book.  If they do, I would assume, based on this decision, that they would have no problem with someone resizing it, printing it on a different kind of paper and, as long as it’s popular, selling it as their own work. Maybe that person could co-author with Seward Johnson….

—–

Dear Port Commissioners,

I am a member of the Public Art Committee for the Port of San Diego.  I was in attendance at the last board meeting on February 14, 2012 and am writing to express some concerns regarding “Unconditional Surrender”.  First, I would like to give a brief description of my background so that you can place into context my following comments.  I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from the Ohio State University.  This spring I will be awarded a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego with a focus on Multi-Media and Public Culture. I have shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Children’s Museum, am currently co-curating the Summer Salon Series at the San Diego Museum of Art and was featured in 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.  My work has been cited in international publications such as Wired and ArtForum magazines.  Locally I have been involved with the development of multiple art supporting projects and community events including a local art festival, called “There Goes the Neighborhood”, and spent two and a half years as the Lead Art Instructor at St. Madeleine Sophies’s Center, a day program for adults with developmental disabilities.  I am currently an Adjunct Professor at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in downtown San Diego.

Second, I would like to commend the board on the debate that took place at the meeting on February 14th.  Several times during this deliberation I heard speakers and board members alike make comments or jokes to the effect that they “did not know much about art” etc.  I would say that from the complexity of the argument surrounding this statue, those comments seem self deprecating more than actual.

I fully understand and am in agreement as to why people feel so strongly about what this image stands for in relationship to the original work of art, the photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and the euphoric historical moment he captured on that day in 1945. This is one of the most publicly meaningful images in our nation’s collective memory.  My concern with “Unconditional Surrender” is that it is so derivative from this original, meaningful, photograph that the work raises ethical issues in regard where, exactly the real meaning of this object comes from (item (e) in the Evaluation Criteria).  I would submit that the popularity and meaningfulness that people are responding to in this work reside in the original work of art, the photograph, and recollection from the original historic moment. Seward Johnson’s statue panders to this memory and to the original work of art in order to produce it’s meaning.  By any artistic standards copying the work of another artist as a shorthand for producing a meaningful object of their own is ethically questionable at best, and potentially legally problematic at worst.  This aspect of the production of the piece also raises issues in regard to other Evaluative Criteria approved by the board, especially in regard to innovation (item (c)).  A work of art cannot be considered innovative if it is simply taking the meaningful work of another artist and replicating it in an over-life-size form.

While in attendance at the meeting on February 14th it was clear from comments made by both speakers and board members, many of whom were in favor of the piece becoming permanent, that acknowledgement of the disputable nature of this object as a quality work of art was duly noted (Evaluation Criteria item (c)).  This aspect of “Unconditional Surrender” has also recently been cited in the press by an article in favor of the work remaining permanent (Union Tribune Feb. 11th 2012 UT Editorial Staff).  If it is acknowledged by even those in favor of it becoming permanent that the quality of the piece is in dispute, then this object does not meet the criteria approved by the board regarding the new Curatorial Strategy.  Removing and/or overlooking quality as a standard sets a dangerous precedent if the goal of the new Curatorial Strategy is to produce a world renowned collection for the Port of San Diego and the city of San Diego as a whole.  I feel strongly that the dismissal of these standards in favor of this object’s popularity ultimately does a disservice to the men and women which this monument hopes to commemorate.  If the questionable nature of quality and innovation of this object are recognized by even those in favor of it remaining on site, I would argue that what is ultimately being endorsed is a policy of acceptable mediocrity in favor of popularity. I do not feel that what the sailor and nurse in the original photograph from 1945 were celebrating with that kiss was, in part, the defense of mediocrity in the public sphere and in individual self expression.

In response to comments made at the meeting that accepting works of this nature does not have a detrimental effect on the cultural community of San Diego as a whole I can say from my experiences being embedded in the artistic community that this is not wholly accurate.  Over the last several years I have seen a significant number of very talented artists migrate out of the city based, in part, on the reputation San Diego has as a place that allows for less than the highest quality works to define it’s cultural identity.  I would also venture to say that in terms of international cultural reputations both Los Angeles and Tijuana are thought of in higher critical terms than San Diego regionally.  I think an internationally acclaimed public art program would be a major step in reversing this image and that the criteria and policies outlined in the new Curatorial Strategy are important steps in defining the standards that will accomplish this goal. While it may be true that it will always be possible to find someone to take a large commission, it seems to me that the ultimate goal should be to attract the most original and most innovative artists possible to produce the most innovative and original works of art.

At this time I would like introduce a case study as an argument for fidelity to the curatorial process that the board approved in the Evaluative Criteria and to the new Curatorial Strategy as a whole.  Anyone who is familiar with the history and controversy surrounding the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington D.C. will be familiar with the overwhelming unpopularity of the proposal when it was awarded with the commission in 1981 by a jury of credentialed arts professionals.  If you are not familiar with this history I would highly suggested looking into it for yourself as it is a dramatic story and a fascinating piece of American history. As this controversy unfolded, activists against the Maya Lin monument advocated for a set of figurative sculptures representing images of striding soldiers to be placed adjacent to the black walled memorial proposed by Lin. While the sentiments of this addition are understandable, this grouping of figurative bronze sculptures placed on site to appease popular demands are now all but forgotten in the national mind, while the black granite wall, so much initially reviled by the general public is now recognized as being, arguably, one of the most significant, critically acclaimed, publicly attended and, most importantly, meaningful monuments of the twentieth century.

One of the basic tenets of living in a free society is the right of individual, unique, self expression.  In no other field is this right more symbolically celebrated than in the arts. The un-creative use of another artist’s work by Seward Johnson to derivatively appeal to the legitimate sentiments of the public cheapens this fundamental tenet.  By endorsing non-innovative work simply because it uses the predictably popular formula of appropriating an image of national sentiment from another artist and simply making it monumentally large trivializes the efforts many people have made to allow such important rights, such as innovative free expression, to exist.  The question I would like to leave you with is this: Shouldn’t the ultimate goal of the Public Art program at the Port of San Diego be about advocating for what gets placed in the public sphere be of the highest artistic excellence as a way of honoring the right of free expression defended by those in public service and so fundamental to a democratic society?

Sincerely,

David White
Public Art Committee

—–

Chris Kraus

Thursday, March 8th, 7:00 pm

UC San Diego, Visual Arts Facility Performance Space on Russell Lane, La Jolla, California 92093

Free and Open to the Public.

Chris Kraus will read from her 2011 book WHERE ART BELONGS, that examines recent artistic enterprises that reclaim the use of lived time as a material. Expanding the argument begun in her earlier book, VIDEOGREEN, Kraus argues that “the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it.”

Moving from New York to Berlin to Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within the matrix. For all its faults, she concludes, the art world remains the last frontier for the desire to live differently.

The Glasgow Review of Books describes WHERE ART BELONGS as “an incitement to find art, to read in a heroic way, and to create a moment;” Bookforum has praised its “poeticism and daunting theoretical undercurrents.” “In WHERE ART BELONGS,” Alina Astrova writes, “art theory becomes political philosophy … a means of establishing a way of life outside capitalist conventions.”

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels and two books of art essays. The recipient of a Frank Mather Award in Art Criticism and a Warhol Foundation art writing grant, she has been described by Holland Cotter in the New York Times as “one of our smartest and original writers on art and culture.”

http://lectures.visarts.ucsd.edu/VALS_WI2012/artists/about_kraus.html

For questions, contact VALS Coordinator Jessica Sledge at jsledge@ucsd.edu

“Home” is understood at multiple scales—at the level of the individual, backyard, community, border region, and homeland. The San Diego region is featured prominently and regional issues are explored as exemplars of global phenomena. The exhibition also departs from any strict interpretation of the form that a drone must take; the project expands on the “unmanned” nature of the drone as symbolic of a larger condition–ecologies where the status of the human is called into question, distributed and embedded in a wider field of shared intelligence.

Drones at Home will be presented in three phases. Phase 1 includes an exhibition; Phase 2 consists of panels and a workshop; and Phase 3, which continues through the summer, will include the creation of new drone projects in collaboration with invited artists and research groups at Calit2. Co-curated by Sheldon Brown, Jordan Crandall, and Ricardo Dominguez, this first phase will feature the work of Matthew Battles, Trevor Paglen, The Periscope Project, Alex Rivera and Angel Nevarez, along with additional work drawn from research in the field.

Matthew Battles is a poet, writer, and co-founder of HiLobrow.com. His forthcoming books include Letter by Letter (W. W. Norton), a sentimental and natural history of writing, and a short story collection, The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade). He is a research fellow with metaLAB, an academic and creative collaborative devoted to the exploration of technology in the arts and humanities, hosted by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society .

Alex Rivera is a New York based digital media artist and filmmaker.  His first feature film, SLEEP DEALER premiered at Sundance 2008, and won two awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.  Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses concerns of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor, has also been screened at The Berlin International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, The Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride, and other international venues.

Angel Nevarez is an artist, musician, and DJ. He has produced works which investigate contemporary music, dissent, and public fora, and move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon the projection of political agency through transmission and song. His interests lie in the formation of mobile, performative, and discursive-based social spaces, along with the re-articulation of communicatory systems within such locales. Nevarez is also a faculty member of MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology Program.

Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. Paglen’s visual work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Modern, London; The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the Istanbul Biennial 2009, and numerous other solo and group exhibitions.

The Periscope Project is a space and co-operative based in downtown San Diego committed to the transdisciplinary nexus of art, architecture, and regional urban issues. Operating by the efforts of its resident practitioners; Drone Readymade represents the first discreet project (outside of The Periscope Project itself) undertaken collaboratively. The project’s primary authors are James Enos (M.Arch, NSAD, MFA UCSD, Visiting Assistant Professor, FSU), Molly Enos (M.Arch NSAD, AIA), Charles G. Miller (MFA UCSD), Keith Muller, Andrea Ngan, David Kim, Jon Barth, Jason Durr and Jay Ojeda; with key contributions from Jon Zuppan. For Drones at Home, The Periscope Project is collaborating with Owen Mundy (MFA UCSD, Assistant Professor FSU).

All gallery events are FREE and open to the public.

Please RSVP to Trish Stone, Gallery Coordinator, tstone@ucsd.edu
Media Contact: Tiffany Fox, tfox@ucsd.edu

March 8-April 12 at Southwestern College Art Gallery

This exhibition will present 11 contemporary artists, from California to France, currently using scissors and glue rather than a mouse and a printer to create works that question our perceptions of common reality and provoke discussion about collage’s increased relevance. 
Related Programs:

Public Reception: Thursday, March 8
Artist Talk 6-8 p.m.
Light refreshments provided
 
Public Reception: Tuesday, March 13
Artist Talk 12 p.m., Reception 11-1
Light refreshments provided

Collage in Context: A Symposium: Thursday,  March 22: 11:00-1:00 p.m.

Collage in poetry, Mark Wallace: 11-11:20

Artist Talk, Joshua Tonies: 11:25-11:40

Roundtable Discussion: 11:45-12:15

Q&A with Audience 12:15-12:30

This symposium program will present collage as a strategy both in art and literature, as well as position the practice within a larger context of current analogue approaches in art.  The first presentation, from Mark Wallace, will discuss the collage practices of William S. Burroughs and their continued legacy.  Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays, and won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Temporary Worker Rides A Subway.  The second presentation will feature artist Joshua Tonies speaking about his own collage work.  His contributions to the exhibition highlight some current approaches to utilizing both analog and digital collage within a single work, and how the two differ or complement each other.  The last presentation will consist of a roundtable discussion between Michael Trigilio, Alexander Jarman and May-ling Martinez. May-ling Martinez is featured in the exhibition.  Besides creating analog collage, she has built outdated or impractical machines from old mechanical engineering manuals as part of her art.  Michael Trigilio is a Professor at University of California San Diego and a multi-media artist who has worked extensively with sound.  His independent radio project, Neighborhood Public Radio, has been featured at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Exhibiting Artists:

Sadie Barnette  http://www.sadiebarnette.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.

Mike Calway-Fagen http://mikecalway-fagen.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.

Troy Dugas http://troydugas.com/   Based in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Lola Dupre http://loladupre.com/  Based in Avignon, France.

Chris Kardambikis http://www.kardambikis.com/ Based in San Diego, CA.

Gordon Magnin http://gordonmagnin.com/ Based in Los Angeles, CA. 

Morgan Manduley http://morganmanduley.com/   http://sezio.org/feature/Morgan-Manduley.aspx  Based in San Diego, CA.

May-ling Martinez http://www.maylingmartinez.com/index.html Based in San Diego, CA.  

Arturo Medrano http://convulsive.tumblr.com/  Based in New York City, NY.  

Jason Sherry http://www.jasonsherry.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.

Joshua Tonies http://www.joshtonies.com/ Based in San Diego, CA.

The Southwestern College Art Gallery is located in Rm 710B
900 Otay Lakes Rd, 
Chula Vista, CA 91910.
Gallery Hours 
are Monday through Thursday 10:30am-2:00pm,
Wednesday & Thursday 5:30pm-8:30pm.

Tel. 619-421-6700 x 5568
Fax 619-421-6700 fax 5368

Free parking is available in Lot J on the days of the related events

scott b. davis has earned a national reputation for his night photography. The San Diego Museum of Art is currently exhibiting a survey of his work from the past decade. And a show of recent work opens in March at jdc Fine Art.

A recent profile of davis in the Summerset Review offers a wonderfully detailed account of his process in the field. But it didn’t address what has intrigued me most about his work: namely, the material properties of the work itself. Ordinarily this isn’t something one is concerned with when viewing a photograph. But in davis’s case the material properties of the work seem to embody its content in interesting ways.
 

Your work is noted for its use of platinum printing.  What are the specific properties of this process, and how does it suit your subject matter?

platinum printing is a 19th century photographic process, closely related to traditional printmaking in terms of technical expertise and the choice of materials at one’s disposal. it was heralded by turn of the century photographers, and considered by alfred stieglitz to be “the prince of all media”. it earned this distinction for an ability to render exquisite tones, but also because it was kept as a kind of ‘private reserve’ by master printmakers for their finest work. photographers historically used the process to capitalize on nuanced, delicate tones in their images. as a 21st century artist i’m interested in exploring ideas untouched by previous generations of photographers. night photography, first and foremost, is an act of discovery and one that invites a keen sense of perception. platinum printing, simply put, most closely replicates the experience of how i see at night. the combination of the two opens a minimalist dialog i find important.
 

What about the choice of paper?  In describing your work the New York Times noted how the “grainy, velvety quality makes them seem almost painterly.”  As a viewer I’m fascinated by this textural quality—which is strongest in the areas of “pure” dark that frame the imagery—but  I’m unable to determine whether the texture is a product of the paper, or the process.

the texture you see is platinum. it is the process drawing you in to a physical experience. i don’t say this to be facetious, more so to reference the fact that platinum prints appear three dimensional when compared to other photographic process (anaglyphs notwithstanding). in essence the physical work of a platinum print is painterly—it is applied as a wash, really—since every print is hand coated one at a time using a brush. the pure dark areas you refer to are the ones i’m most concerned with, the negative space that defines each image and challenges viewers perception. both the paper and the process are idiosyncratic from a maker’s standpoint… they are victim to heat, humidity, age, and a half dozen other things that would plague the average photographer/printmaker. what i’m left with, and what you see, is a unique print that holds its own surface quality, which is, of course, part of the image itself.
 

Related to the previous question—the work in the SDMA show exhibits significant variation in the visual homogeneity of the dark skies that frame your landscapes. For me this is where the complexity set in, as I realized the texture of the sky was potentially due not just to paper or process, but to the very source imagery itself: the low lumpiness of a coastal marine layer, or the silken purity of a desert night sky. And yet some of your desert images appear to have low clouds overhead!  Why?

simply put, they might. but what you’re responding to is an edge i’m consciously working with every time i exhibit the work. viewers bring their own connection to visual art, this much is a given. by taking the medium to its physical and literal limit (printing pure black), the work takes on its own physical life, responding to light as much as anything else. it’s a wonderful oxymoron, though it can be a bit vexing for my work as an artist, i’ll admit. to create a tally of our conversation, we’re up to one nuanced photographic process, an artist exploring the limits of that process, the state of the physical environment the work was made in, the lighting the prints are shown under, and the viewers own capacity to look carefully. the latter being one of my primary motivations… to have people engage with the work as a physical object.
 

The source imagery in your night work seems lit entirely by dusk or human light.  Since you’ve worked in the desert, you know moonlight. Can you use it?  Or is there some formal reason why it doesn’t appear in your work?

photographers can use moonlight with great success, but for me it’s something of a gimmick. when i was a kid our neighbor had one of those framed posters with a black and white image in it. the image showed boats on the chesapeake bay by moonlight, but it was clearly a daytime shot made to look like the night. it was obvious to me then, but is a good analogy to your question. if you accept the fact moonlight tells us about a world we already know (one that kind of looks like the day but with deeper shadows, less color, and a little more mystery) then i’m not much interested in it. i’m most interested in looking at what we can’t see and what we choose to not look at, then figuring out a way to make others take note. while i’ve worked a lot in the desert at night, it is more often than not that human light defines each image, and increasingly images made in urban environments. it is this intersection that has, above all else, defined my work. working at night—moonlight or otherwise—was a starting place to expand a view of vernacular landscapes and in the process engage with the act of looking. 
 

The typical lighting in a museum or gallery seems antithetical to what you’re trying to achieve—when this work gets exhibited, do you specify any nonstandard lighting requirements?

not really. i’ve found there’s a magic light level that makes the work pop, probably around 7 foot-candles. too much light kills the experience of negative space, too little light doesn’t allow the prints to glow as they should.
 

Edison to Kodachrome to Vegas: bright light is deeply embedded in the American psyche. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the foremost apostles of darkness are a Japanese writer (Junichiro Tanizaki) and a Hungarian film director (Bela Tarr). Have either of them influenced your work in any way?  Do you have an affinity for theirs?

i’ve only scratched the surface of each artist, and i’ll be honest in saying they haven’t influenced me directly… which isn’t to say they’re not vastly influential! it may appear a strange practice from the outside but i often work in a kind of artistic celibacy. early in my career i found i was drawn to emulate the work of other artists i admired, consciously or unconsciously. once i tapped into a language that felt like my own it freed me in a way, and allowed me to focus more on the work itself and less looking for inspiration from beyond. it was a bit like sand through an hourglass… as i concentrated more and more on what i was doing it eventually opened an entirely new world for me. today, when i look at the work of bela tarr, joan didion, eric orr (the list could go on) it’s an enriching experience to ‘see’ and engage with other, wonderful dialogs i was never aware of.
 

Any last words?

turn off the computer. there’s a big world to discover.
 
 

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 @ 5:33 – 7:06 PM
CAMINO HALL 153

Hasan Elahi (born 1972, Rangpur, Bangladesh) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers.

His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sundance Film Festival, Kassel Kulturbahnhof, and at the Venice Biennale. Elahi recently was invited to speak about his work at the Tate Modern, TED Global, The Einstein Forum, and at at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. His work has been supported with grants and sponsorships from the Creative Capital Foundation, Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain. His work is frequently in the media and has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, CNN, ABC, CBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, Fox, and has also appeared on The Colbert Report.

Currently, he is Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Digital Cultures and Creativity Program at the University of Maryland. In 2010, he was an Alpert/ MacDowell Fellow and in 2009, he was Resident Faculty and Nancy G. MacGrath Endowed Chair at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

This event is co-sponsored by USD’s Social Justice Living and Learning Community

On Saturday the U-T San Diego editorialized on the impending removal of a public artwork from the San Diego waterfront.

The editorial begins with a full paragraph quoting former U-T art critic Robert Pincus on his response to the artwork in question. It then states the following: “These criticisms discount the undeniable reality that, from the day the 6,000-pound sculpture was unveiled at the park at Tuna Harbor, it has been hugely popular with real people.”

The clear implication — that the artwork was disliked by Pincus, but popular with “real people” — is that Robert Pincus is not a real person.

Such casual dehumanization of an an arts professional is newsworthy, and merits the attention of anyone with a personal commitment to the arts in San Diego. When contemplating the U-T they must now ask themselves:

The Center for Urban Ecologies (CUE) at UCSD and
the FWF Science Fund research project ‘Other Markets’
present

INFORMAL MARKET WORLDS

an international research forum on the trading places of urban informalities

Thursday, February 16, 2012, 10am-7pm
Friday, February 17, 2012, 10am-7pm

at Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall
University of California San Diego

——————————————————————————-

Informal markets have emerged as a vital part of cities around the world, from the new mega-cities of the Global South to the old centers of political and economic power. Spurred by deregulation and accelerating global flows, they are commonly tolerated as shock-absorbers of widening social divisions. Yet, whenever these markets show signs of establishing realms of their own official rhetoric paints them as threat to social and economic order, often followed by governmental actions of demolition, re-location or privatization.

Debating the spatial culture of informal markets as an arena of negotiation between multiple political demands, social actors and environmental constraints, ‘Informal Market Worlds’ departs from the question of how we can build more equal participation in the space of economy vis-à-vis the economy of space. In what ways can the spatial practices and cultural mechanisms that sustain informal markets help us in articulating progressive policies more adapt to the transnational realities of today’s populations?

A two-day event of presentations and discussions, ‘Informal Market Worlds’ will bring together research on the architecture and visual culture of informal markets with a range of case studies from across the Americas and beyond. In addition to input from theorists in the fields of urbanism and political economy, the meeting will include presentations by architects, artists and activists on a range of markets such as the La Salada market in Buenos Aires, the Tri Border Area of Ciudad del Este, the Dominican border markets, street markets in the US or the informaleconomies of El Tepito in Mexico City.

Speakers include:
Raul Cardenas, Teddy Cruz, Julian D’Angiolillo, Laurent Gutierrez, Alfonso Hernandez, Hou Hanru, Rick Lowe, Peter Mőrtenbőck, Helge Mooshammer, Alfonso Morales, Gerald Murray, Valerie Portefaix, Fernando Rabossi, Ananya Roy, Ignacio Valero, Matias Viegener, and others.

This research gathering at UCSD is part of an itinerant series of conferences world-wide and will be followed by meetings in Hong Kong/Shanghai (fall 2012) and Istanbul (spring 2013). Outcomes of these gatherings will be published in an atlas and a textbook by NAi Publishers, Rotterdam in 2013.

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For a detailed program please refer to: www.othermarkets.org

This event is free and open to the public.
No registration required.

Supported by
UCSD – Visual Arts Department, Calit2 & Center for Global Justice
Goldsmiths College London
FWF Science Fund

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The Center for Urban Ecologies, CUE, at UCSD has been recently co-founded by Teddy Cruz and Kyong Park, seeking new critical interfaces between top-down urban policies and bottom-up community activism, while enabling new forms of public culture through urban pedagogy and the visualization of socio-political and economic processes. CUE is affiliated with the Division of Arts and Humanities and Visual Art Department. Because it just began operations, there is currently no accessible website. For more information, though, CUE was responsible for The Political Equator 3, an itinerant event across the San Diego-Tijuana border: www.politicalequator.org

The international research project ‘Other Markets: Networked Ecologies in 21st Century Urban Transformation’ investigates the architectures and cultural logics of informal markets as a decisive yet often overlooked theatre of urban transformation. By engaging directly with the modalities of spatial production of informal economies it seeks to expand the debate currently divided along the question whether informal structures are first and foremost the low-cost equivalent of global deregulation or whether they provide the space for the emergence of alternative social formations. ‘Other Markets’ is led by Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mőrtenbőck, based at Vienna University of Technology and Goldsmiths College, London and is funded by the FWF Science Fund. For further information please visit the project website: www.othermarkets.org

If a sign painter could paint my texts, why not ask somebody to paint a picture according to my indications? Every year my father and I used to visit county fairs. Despite the fact that he loved looking at tractors and farm equipment and I hated it, I developed a fondness for Sunday painters there that I shared with David Antin. I’d write down their names on my visits to the fair. Eventually, for the “Commissioned Paintings” I called some of them up…

— John Baldessari

Anita Storck

 
With the blessing and support of her four grown sons, Anita Storck took off in her van to paint and draw the world, saying goodbye to family and friends from her home base in California. She lived, as she described it, “a gypsy life,” traveling and making friends wherever she went. She spent four years on the road, traversing Europe and North Africa, going as far east as Turkey.

Feeling the tug to be closer to family, she moved to California in 2001 but never lost touch with her friends in Guatemala. From her memoirs, More than a Thousand Words, she sums up: “A happy life with sparkling hills of good memories of family and friends — of my childhood — and the joys of my own sons. True, there are some sad valleys — as in all of life — but thus we appreciate the daily happiness of being alive and healthy and sharing the pleasures of life with family and friends.”

— Terry Kovick Biskovich

Anita Storck studio

Photos metmuseum.org, Lois Stecker

Goya’s Disasters of War: A Legacy in Print

Between 1810 and 1820 Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) created the Disasters of War series, a set of 80 prints created through the etching and aquatint processes. Often arresting and horrific, the subjects for these prints arose from Goya’s direct encounter with the effects of the Peninsular War in Spain. Due to the disturbing nature of these prints and their tacit challenge to authority, the series was not published until 1863, thirty-five years after the artist’s death. Thanks to a generous gift from Robert and Karen Hoehn, this landmark in the history of printmaking serves as a cornerstone of USD’s permanent collection.

Goya’s Disasters series participates in a tradition of the visual representations of the horrors and traumas, as well as the glories and triumphs, associated with war. Following the precedent of seventeenth-century French etcher Jacques Callot, who depicted in unflinching detail the destruction and human cost of war, Goya documented the violence of war and, at times, its more gruesome aftermath.

Artists working today continue to develop the themes that Callot and Goya so dramatically engaged. The current exhibition features invited student responses to Goya that testify in their different ways to the power of Goya’s legacy. Goya’s subtle use of printmaking techniques, his combination of text and image, and his innovative treatment of the subject of war all continue to provoke and challenge the artists and art enthusiasts of today.

  Andrea Cutlip | acutlip@sandiego.edu | 4261 www.sandiego.edu/artgalleries

University of San Diego

5998 Alcalá Park

San Diego, CA 92110

(619) 260-4600 ]]> http://agitpropspace.org/2012/02/2912-goyas-disasters-of-war-a-legacy-in-print-usd/feed/ 0 http://agitpropspace.org/2012/01/2312-opening-reception-recollection-at-the-sdsu-downtown-gallery/ http://agitpropspace.org/2012/01/2312-opening-reception-recollection-at-the-sdsu-downtown-gallery/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:21:54 +0000 David White http://agitpropspace.org/?p=5241

RECOLLECTION is an art exhibition that includes the video installation GULF (2009-2012) by Anna O’Cain and Richard Keely
Reception will be this Friday, February 3, 2012 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm
Phone: 619-501-6370
http://downtowngallery.sdsu.edu/
This exhibition will be on view though July 30, 2012.

SDSU Downtown Gallery, 725 West Broadway, San Diego, CA 92101

We hope you can join us for our very first reading of 2012 on Saturday, February 4 at 7pm for a reading at Agitprop by Washington, DC poet Dan Gutstein and San Diego poet Taylor Mardis Katz.

Dan Gutstein is the author of non/fiction (stories, Edge Books, 2010) and Bloodcoal & Honey (poems, Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2011). His writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, American Scholar, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and Best American Poetry. He directs the Writing Studio and Learning Resource Center at Maryland Institute College of Art, and teaches creative writing at the Writer’s Center, in Bethesda, Md., and at George Washington University. Recently, the web site Rate My Professors named him the 2010-2011 No. 1 “hottest” professor in America, and his body temperature has risen, as a result. He has received grants and awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (Md.), and University of Michigan, among others. In past lives, he worked as an international economist, theatre arts educator, editor-in-chief, tae kwon do instructor, and farm hand.

Taylor Mardis Katz was born by the Hudson River. Her work appears in various journals, as well as in handmade chapbooks and postmarked envelopes. She is assistant editor at Cooper Dillon, an independent San Diego poetry press, as well as an associate editor at Poetry International. She is also a part-time farmer for Suzie’s Farm, an organic vegetable farm in Imperial Beach. As a native New Yorker, what most delights her about San Diego is the names of fruits available, and the fruits themselves. After finishing her MFA at San Diego State, she hopes to start an artist’s colony and residency on the east coast with her partner. Her little space on the internet can be found at intimeweallfly.wordpress.com.

Agitprop readings are free, but libations and donations to the gallery are very welcome.

We hope to see you there and for festivities before and after.

For more information about the Agitprop Reading Series and Agitprop Art Space, visit our webpage, join our Facebook group, and sign up to receive email announcements from us:

Web page : http://agitpropspace.org/category/reading-series/
Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/149903861746355/
Email Announcements: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/agitprop-series

Agitprop
Saturday, February 4, 7pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn’s Market)
San Diego, CA 92104
619.384.7989

MAPPING OCCUPATIONS

Opening reception:
Thursday, February 2, 4-7pm

Free and open to the public
February 2-March 31, 2012
Monday-Friday, 8am-4pm
ARTifact gallery, housed in the public spaces in and around the offices of Academic Programs at UCSD’s Sixth College, showcases artwork conceptually related to the courses in the Culture, Art & Technology program.

This winter, ARTifact presents Mapping Occupations, an exhibit that explores our preoccupations with space through the practices of mapping, diagramming, modelling and speculating. Curated by Eliza Slavet, the exhibit features the work of cog•nate collective, Teddy Cruz, David Kim, Matt Hebert, Stephanie Lie, Charles Miller, The Periscope Project, Hermione Spriggs, and Patricia Stone.

All are invited to the opening reception on February 2, 2012, 4-7pm, featuring the work of students from High Tech High Media Arts: “Complexcity” will be projected onto the walls inside and outside the exhibit on the 2nd floor of Pepper Canyon Hall on the campus of University of California, San Diego.

**Make it a double feature!: Tactical Bio-artist, Gail Wright, speaks at CalIT2 Auditorium, 7-9pm, as part of the Visual Arts Lecture Series and gallery@calit2 series.**

Movement by Rob Duarte (book release party) with musical performances by Author & Punisher and starvelab/EVERYTHING IS UP.

Friday, January 27, 2012 (6-10pm)

Please join us this coming Friday, January 27, 2012 (6-10pm) as we celebrate the release of Movement, a limited-edition artist book by San Diego-based artist Rob Duarte. The evening will also feature exhilarating performances by San Diego –based artists/musicians Author & Punisher and starvelab/EVERYTHING IS UP.

MOVEMENT is a machine performance that documents the activities of a heap of small contraptions and mundane mechanical movements, in an effort to remind its audience of the wonder to be found in the physical, the tactile, the small and the overlooked. The accompanying catalog documents moments from the performance as well as other related works by artist Rob Duarte. The text of the catalog expands on the issues embedded in these works, from the relationships between technology and culture to the increasing distance between art and the human body.

Rob Duarte is a sculptor currently obsessed with the sleight of hand, half-truths, and disinformation that blur the lines between fact and fiction in the history of culture and technology. His work takes place at the intersection of artistic production, pseudo-scientific research and lighthearted terrorism. Rob earned a BFA in Sculpture from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, a BS in Information Systems and Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego.

Author & Punisher (Tristan Shone) is an industrial doom and drone metal, one man band utilizing primarily custom fabricated machines/controllers and speakers. He has performed and shown these machines in festivals and exhibitions in the United States and abroad extensively, releasing his 4th album entitled “Ursus Americanus” in April, 2012 on Seventh Rule Records, played exclusively on his most recent creations, Dub Machines.

Michael Trigilio is starvelab/EVERYTHING IS UP. Trigilio describes his project like this: long-form analog-modular synthesis performance soundING like orbiting satellites celebrating an acid-orgy. Who wouldn’t want to check THAT out?

All this is happening amidst our current exhibition of works on paper by Ruben Ortiz-Torres, which runs through February 12, 2012 and features over 70 new and old drawings by the critically acclaimed conceptual artist.

Great Art, Great Music, Ample Refreshments. Please join us!

Double Break

1821 5^th Avenue

San Diego, CA 92101

619.238.2325

info@doublebreakstore.com

www.doublebreakstore.com           

www.facebook.com/doublebreak           

www.twitter.com/doublebreaksd

The Urban Ecologies of Global Justice

Paulo Nazareth is an artist who has been walking from Brazil and the rest of Latin America to bring the dust of these places to the United States where upon arrival Paulo sold bananas from Guatemala out of a van at the Art Basel Fair in Miami Beach, 2011.  Paulo Nazareth´s work occurs through his exploration of cities and subsequent translation of social issues through observing and enacting social experiments, which create trans-cultural connections between distinct societies.  His processes are participatory as he walks, establishing himself for a short time within a space. Through his process, artistic contemplation takes place at any moment of the day. “I clean your bathroom for a fair trade” is a sign that Paulo Nazareth has been carrying with him, to which he says –“It is true, It is my business, I am a business man”- he has carried this sign throughout the city, beaches, as well as art shows. The result: looks of disappointment – Acting as a mirror to those around him, Paulo begins to connect, in our minds, to an image of a unique portion of this society- the unemployed and those without resources.   Represented by a sign, poverty holds a very negative connotation here in Southern California, where being poor brings with it a  “Guilt” – A guilt held by those who live it sent from the eyes of others and the blindness from those who intend not see it. It is true, poverty exists in the United States and it is devastating because there is no structure of support or rehabilitation to change this reality. The individual that is poor is alone and he or she wears “guilt” for their decisions.

Sala de Espera reactivates its activities with Paulo Nazareth – first artist in residence

Paulo Nazareth (Governador Valadares, 1977) lives and works in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte/Minas Gerais/ Brazil.  Graduate in Drawing and Engraving at Escola de Belas Artes da UFMG/2003. Student of Linguistics at the Facudade de Letras, UFMG.  Student  of Mestre Orlando artist and popular professor from Bahia, located in Belo Horizonte. Listening to his mother and talking with friends is part of his process. Awards and exhibits include: JACA residence in Canada, Jardim Art Center and Technology Nova, 2010, Member of collective Kaza Vazia Traveling Art Gallery. Art Basel Miami Beach 10^th Edition Art Fair 2011 participant with the piece“Banana Market/Art Market”. Currently, he is developing the project:  “Noticias de America”, which consists of his route and travel from Brazil to the United States.

Taller zona Imaginaria residence 2011 Buenos Aires / AR

Familia Calel  residence 2011 San Juan Comalapa/GUATEMALA

Taller Multinacional  residence 2011 DF/MEX

 Sala de Espera residence 2012 San Diego/ USA

“Banana Market/Art Market”/ New York Times

Sala de Espera

Judith Pedroza

Sala de Espera

1515 Ninth Ave Apt E

San DIego CA 92101

Opening Receptions
Thursday January 26
11-1 & 6-8
SWC Art Gallery

Artist Talks
Sponsored by the SWC Foundation
Thursday January 26
12 PM
featuring
Matthew Bourbon & Vincent Falsetta

The Southwestern College Art Gallery presents “Big and Bright: New Work from Texas”, curated by Jessica McCambly . With the title taken from the song, “Deep in the Heart of Texas”, this exhibition is a regional survey that highlights the diverse range of work being created in Texas today.

Despite the massive size of the state of Texas, there is a close community that exists amongst the artists who live and work across the state. They know each other.. or of each other.. and are usually fans of each other.
The strength of this community of artists and the scene that they contribute to seems to defy the obvious geography that physically isolates them from the LA/NY art centers. With the presence of strong academic programs along with the support of regional cultural institutions, artist-run spaces, commercial galleries and virtual, cultural outlets that bridge the distance, these artists work and interact within unique and fertile conditions. This, along with the prevailing ethos, results in a vibrant and important art scene filled with complex and distinct work that stretches across Texas.

Featuring work by:

John Adelman * Susan Barnett * Iris Bechtol * Christine Bisetto
Paul Booker * Matthew Bourbon * Candace Briceno * Jim Burton
Rodolfo Choperena * Matt Clark * Shelby Cunningham * C.J. Davis
Eric Eley * Vincent Falsetta * Thomas Feulmer * Garland Fielder
Anna Fritzel)Shows * John Frost * Lily Hanson * Stephen Lapthisophon
Annette Lawrence * Dameon Lester * M * Margaret Meehan
Renee Nunez * Kim Cadmus Owens * Harmony Padgett * John Pomara
Ryder Richards * Rusty Scruby * Noah Simblist * Charlotte Smith
Terri Thornton * David Willburn * Sarah WIlliams
Curated by: Jessica McCambly

A graduate of the University of North Texas, College of Visual Arts and Design and former Texas artist, Curator Jessica McCambly is an artist currently living and working in San Diego, California. She also serves as Assistant Professor of Art at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California.

New Queer Perspectives on the Western Edge
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A Pacific Standard Time Participating Gallery Exhibition

CURATED BY DARIN KLEIN & FRIENDS

JANUARY 28 – FEBRUARY 25, 2012

Artists Reception: Saturday, January 28, from 6 – 9 PM

Opening-Night Performance by OUR LADY J 

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PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Brandon Andrew | Zackary Drucker = A. L. Steiner | Deanna Erdmann | Matt Greene

Abel Baker Gutierrez | Lia Halloran | Danny Jauregui

Matt Lipps | prvtdncr & bodega vendetta | Christopher Russell & Halle Tate

George Stoll | Suzanne Wright 

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Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to present TILT-SHIFT LA: New Queer Perspectives on the Western Edge, a Pacific Standard Time Participating Gallery Exhibition.  Curated by Darin Klein & Friends, the exhibition features 15 local Los Angeles contemporary queer artists and will be on view at the Gallery from January 28 through February 25, 2012.  An artists’ reception will be held on Saturday, January 28, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., and a series of free programs will be presented at the gallery during the run of the exhibition, including an opening-night performance by Our Lady J, followed by ‘Zine Fest 2012!, Sunday, February 12^th; anditch dance, Saturday, February 18th.

“Tilt-shift” refers to the use of camera movements typically employed in creating a simulated environment or miniature scene.  The term in this context is well suited to Los Angeles-based queer artists who do not shy away from exploring and exploiting the visibility of a specific timeframe and geographic location, skewing and adjusting concepts of queerness to illuminate individual ideals. Acknowledging the ongoing “gay vs. queer” dialogue, this exhibition comprises artists and artworks that resist the boundaries and representations of confrontational “in your face” sexuality in favor of a broad range of ideas concerning the politics and aesthetics of marginalized bodies, cultures and identities.

In his introduction to the exhibition, Darin Klein writes:

As queer artists, we navigate a city that may have been built on illusion but is being held together by individualized histories.  Our bodies and our intellects seek harmony with or rebel against the disparate confluences of our surroundings while gleaning information and inspiration.  Our art proposes pragmatic solutions to, fantastic alternatives for, or straightforward documentation of the world as we experience it at the western edge of western civilization. …Because the ground we stand on is unstable – literally and metaphorically – the fortification of our psychological landscape is of utmost importance.  There is no singular viewpoint on important issues that are certain to affect entire communities where nature and man threaten to wipe out the bedrock of our collective and varied efforts and hopes.  Piece by piece we work to ensure that each of our voices is heard, confident that our contributions must strengthen the foundation of a future historical dialogue as it will pertain to queer artists living and working in Los Angeles right now.

Much of the art in Tilt-Shift LA has been created specifically for this exhibition, while key pieces from the past half-decade were sourced from the artists’ studios, and several recent works not exhibited previously will now be on view for the first time.

A symbolic representation of celebration, play, andrituals that punctuate the passing of time, Brandon Andrew’s neon sculpture points to the precariousness of the human experience and references exuberant moments of the absurd.  Zackary Drucker and A. L. Steiner collaborate (Zackary Drucker = A. L. Steiner) to produce staged photographic tableaux wherein their bodies are positioned in opposition of traditional gendered representations.  The digital video animations ofDeanna Erdmann collapse time by weaving together found and original footage in specific sequences.  In her latest work, a tranquil river voyage shot on a trip to Southeast Asia unfolds as a mesmerizing Rorschach test.  Folklore, cultures of fluid or interchangeable gender, self-representation and psychedelia are threads connecting Matt Greene’s earlier paintings to the new work on view here, featuring stark ghoulish figures set against dark fields.

Abel Baker Gutierrez’s work is concerned  with the overlapping systems that shape perceptions  about the archetypal male.  Inspired by rock music’s aesthetic trends, Scout culture and Old Master paintings, Gutierrez mined his diverse archive of source material to create the two new paintings presented in this exhibition.  Painter, photographer and skateboarder Lia Halloranplumbs the depths of her subjects of interest to the fullest extent of research and personal submersion.  Science, nature and sexuality are explored and represented as poetic manifestations in her latest suite of works in custom ink on Duralene.  Danny Jauregui’s paintings of long-shuttered Silverlake bathhouses propose new forms of “documenting” or “recording”-deeming traditional documentary film and photography insufficient at capturing loss, absence, marginalization and invisibility.  Matt Lippsdescribes his practice as being “in, with and alongside photography,” as he encounters found historical and popular images and appropriates them into three-dimensional compositions to be re-photographed and recontextualized.

Highlighting gaps in queer representation, intentional or unintentional homoerotic pop references, and the obvious but unspoken in mainstream media, prvtdncr & bodega vendetta will present a site-specific installation of mixed media works and personal objects from their homes and studios.  Christopher Russell and Halle Tate will present a unique hand-made collaborative artist book of short texts as well as a call-and-response photographic installation that plays on the traditional mentor/protégé relationship.  George Stollrenders everyday objects as deliberately handcrafted works of art.  Source materials such as fast food wrappers, toilet paper, sponges and Tupperware are carefully recast and imbued with his unique sense of humor.  Suzanne Wright’s sculptures and works on paper incorporate explicit queer concepts and rainbow hues while critiquing cultural standards with their placement of the female body in positions that question power and control.
TILT-SHIFT LA: New Queer Perspectives on the Western Edge is part of the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980. This unprecedented collaboration brings together more than sixty cultural institutions and selected private galleries from across Southern California for six months to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.

About the curator:

With an ever-expanding network of friends, Darin Klein curates and organizes exhibitions and arts programming, simultaneously creating, collecting and promoting artists’ publications and independent media.  Recent and upcoming endeavors include the traveling film programs Dirty Looks: Long Distance Love Affairs (with Bradford Nordeen) and New Skin for the Old Ceremony (with Lorca Cohen); a series of exhibitions and related public programs at Amy Adler’s Echo Park Studio, Los Angeles; and Hammer Projects: Christopher Russell at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Schedule of Special Programs:

Saturday, January 28, 2012, 6 to 9 pm: Opening artists reception and performance by Our Lady J

Sunday, February 12, 2012, 2 to 6 pm: ‘Zine Fest 2012!

Saturday, February 18, 2012, 6 to 8 pm: itch dance performance

For further information, please call the Gallery at 310-838-6000, or email: gallery@luisdejesus.com.

IMAGES, top to bottom:

Suzanne Wright, Galactic Glory Hole (Red), detail, 2010-2011, acrylic paint on birch plywood, 86 x 24 x 2 in.

LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES

2685 S LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD / LOS ANGELES, CA 90034

T 310 838 6000 / GALLERY@LUISDEJESUS.COM

“Every life has its tipping points–those moments when multiple future paths are laid out and decisions must be made. In an anthology curated by Colin Farstad and filled with writing by Tom Spanbauer and alums of his Dangerous Writers workshops, local writers confront The Frozen Moments of their lives in essays, fiction, poetry and non-fiction.”

–MARIANNA HANE WILES

The Frozen Moment: Contemporary Writers on the Choices that Change Our Lives, is a short story anthology involving fiction, poetry, essays and narrative non-fiction by emerging and established writers exploring the pivotal moments and choices that change the direction of our lives.

The Frozen Moment features twenty seven stories from authors such as award winning novelist Tom Spanbauer, Push Cart Prize winning essayist Akhim Yuseff Cabey, Push Cart Nominated writers Liz Prato, Tori Malcangio and Nora Robertson, Literary Fellowship recipients David Hernandez and Margaret Malone, Lamda Literary Fellowship winner David Ciminello, along with writers Gigi Little, Judy Reeves, Mitchell Jackson, and Michael Sage Ricci. The collected stories will make you laugh and break your heart as each writer explores their frozen moment.

San Diego Writers who will be reading from their stories in the anthology:

Nicole Vollrath earned her MFA at Emerson College in Boston. Her recent short fiction can be found in A Year in Ink and San Diego City Beat. She teaches Creative Writing at UCSD Extension and cohosts “Room To Write” at San Diego Writers, Ink.www.sandiegowriters.org is her favorite website.

Judy Reeves is a writer, teacher and writing practice provocateur who has published four books on the craft including A Writer’s Book of Days, which won Best Nonfiction in the 2011 San Diego Book Awards. She lives in San Diego and is cofounder of San Diego Writers, Ink. Find her at http://judyreeveswriter.com/

Tori Malcangio is a freelance advertising copywriter, mom, etc. in San Diego. Winner of 2010 Waasmode Fiction Prize her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA; Passages North; Smokelong Quarterly; Pearl Magazine; Literary Mama; The San Diego Reader; VerbSap; the 2010 anthology, A Year in Ink. She has a story forthcoming in Cream City Review and is a MFA candidate at Bennington College. Oh, the blog: halfassedmom.com.

Andrew Printer is a British artist and writer now based in San Diego. Printer’s videos and photographs have been exhibited internationally and his work is included in several collections. Printer is currently working on several projects including a short novel. http://www.andrewprinter.com/

Looking down on Esteban Villa. Photo by Todd Stands.

Todd Stands is a multi-skilled artist with 30 years of public art experience. He was invited to be a part of million dollar restoration project of the murals at Chicano Park. Lucky for history he is also an excellent photographer. While working on the murals Todd would bring along his camera and document the painstaking process.

The murals of Chicano Park tell the vibrant history of Barrio Logan and the Chicano community in San Diego. Born in 1970, as the result of a non-violent grassroots land takeover, Chicano Park officially became an Historical Site in 1980 and in 1987 the murals were recognized as public art. Over the years there have been several restoration projects funded by public sources to restore the murals to their original status as ageing and vandalism have taken a toll.

Chicano Park has grown an international reputation as the largest collection of outdoor murals in the world. Today, the Park is frequently promoted by the city as a part of its diverse and colorful cultural heritage. Tourists from around the globe visit San Diego to glimpse the impressive large scale murals painted on the pylons of the Coronado Bridge. But it was not always so.

Strategically located near the waterfront, Barrio Logan has suffered encroachment after encroachment by the military, Anglo-American businesses and autocratic city officials. In 1963, the construction of Interstate 5 bisected the neighborhood, pushing out families and business under the shield of eminent domain. In an act of appeasement the city promised that the land beneath the bridge could be preserved for a park, instead the city reversed course and attempted to build a Highway Patrol Station.

In April 1970, Barrio Logan rose up immediately and decisively, blocking the bulldozers with their bodies, occupying the land and forcing a halt to construction. Leaders organized and beat back city hall, forcing the transfer of the land to the community. By 1973 artists Salvador Torres and Victor Ochoa provided the artistic vision and leadership to make the murals a reality.

Given the enormity of the task and the cultural importance of the Park, I asked Todd to share some of his photos and talk about his experiences.

April 1970, Chicanos Protesting. Pictured from the “The Journal of San Diego History” website.

AGITPROP: Currently you are documenting the restoration of murals in Chicano Park. How did you get involved with this project?

TODD STANDS: My involvement with the Chicano Park Mural restoration project started in June of this year. It was the beginning of a year-long Cal Trans project that will include the restoration of 18 murals on the pillars under the Coronado Bridge. Five murals were begun in June and the other thirteen were scheduled for later in the year or the first half of 2012. I helped restore Michael Schnorr’s mural titled “Undocumented Workers”. I formed relationships with all the artists that were working at that time and was given access to the work in progress. When I could break from painting I often photographed the other four artists and their crews. When “Undocumented Workers” was completed I felt an affinity to the park and the project so I continued to photograph the artists as they completed the first set of murals.

The second set of murals included some of the artists from the first set but several were unknown to me. My connection to the project and the relationships I had developed, opened doors for me to have access to the new artists and their mural’s restoration. It seemed to be a natural path for me to follow.

AGITPROP: Can you please tell us about some of the artists whose work you’ve been documenting?

Whenever possible, the murals are being restored by the original artists that painted them in the 1970’s and 80’s. I mentioned my work with Michael Schnorr. Also included in the first set were Victor Ochoa, Felipe Adame, Guillermo Rosete, Carlos Lopez and Norma Montoya. The second set of artists are based around the Sacramento area Esteban Villa, Juanishi Orozco, Jose Montoya. All of these artists have continued to be very influential in the Chicano movement throughout their careers.

Each artists has very different techniques from watercolor to oil paint and even airbrush.. Their skills have been honed over thirty years of art making. They have worked as traditional muralists or even as commercial billboard painters. It is inspiring and educational to spend long hours photographing and watching these masters of mural painting.

Felipe Adame and Guillermo Rosette working together closely on the scaffold. Photo by Todd Stands.

AGITPROP: What are the challenges of documenting such large scale work?

The main challenge is access. I needed insurance to be able to be on the scaffolding and lifts. There is very limited space to back up and move around. I need to stay out of people’s way. I’m trying to show the artists in their working environment so I have worked mainly with very wide angle lenses.

AGITPROP: Is there anything you’d like to say about this project as it relates to your own career?

I feel privileged to have been able to paint in Chicano Park. As a mural artist it is humbling to be part of such a great collection of history and to be included in the impressive roster of artists that have worked there.

AGITPROP: Have you thought about what you will do with these images one the documentation is complete?

At this time I do not have a plan for the photographic work I am doing. Now is it the time to make the images while the work is being done. I think it will find it’s significance in the future.

AGITPROP: When will the restoration be complete?

TODD STANDS: No opening event is planned as of yet.. there is the annual Chicano Park Day celebration in april.. it will be around the time that most of the murals are done… they should be officially done by June if i remember correctly.

AGITPROP: Thanks for talking to us and letting us publish your photos!

Left to right, Frank Galindo,Victor Ochoa,Stephanie Cervantes,Glory Galindo Sanchez, Hector Villegas...seated Felipe Adame. Photo by Todd Stands.

Mario Chacon on the scaffolding. Photo by Todd Stands.

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