In All Sincerity

In all Sincerity

Sierra Harris, Josh Kawahata, 
Helena Martinez, Danny Shapiro, 
Amy Zapata, Tirsa Delate, Caitlin Mullally & Abriel Gardner

Reception: December 15th 7-10pm
Performance at 8pm

Open Hours: Wednesday, December 13th - Sunday, December 17th, 12-5pm

1206 Maple Ave., 5th floor, suite 523
Los Angeles, CA 90053

In all Sincerity is a group exhibition that speaks to the interactions of parallel realities and contradictions featuring work by Sierra Harris, Josh Kawahata, Helena Martinez, Danny Shapiro, Amy Zapata, Tirsa Delante, Caitlin Mullally, and Abriel Gardner.

Sierra Harris and Danny Shapiro explore the nature of reality as a manifestation of consciousness where both everything and nothing are real. Working through the digital and the corporeal as parallel and superimposed realities, these artists investigate the blurring boundaries between cyberspace and the IRL.

In the process of learning how to sail, Sierra Harris records the audio and GPS coordinates of each endeavor. She created a 3D animation to correlate with the audio. Her work examines how an experience occurs firsthand versus the representation of that experience in a virtual world. She is based in Long Beach, CA and is currently pursuing a BFA in photography at California State University Long Beach.

Danny Shapiro’s paintings use a collage sensibility to grapple with the influx of imagery we experience in our day to day lives. Through the use of translucent fabric the artist is able to form an open space for the viewer to navigate new relationships between images. He earned his BFA from Columbia College Chicago in the spring of 2017 and is based in Los Angeles.

Tirsa Delate grew up in New York City and recently moved to Los Angeles to pursue her MFA at California State University, Northridge. She uses performance, photography, and video to explore relationships among the body, the construction of identity, and nature. In this performance, dance, rhythm, and spontaneous movement are accompanied by and respond to live, electronically produced music in a quest to experience and understand unconstrained dance in institutional spaces? Does live music erase or reinforce the boundary between mind and body, and for whom? The accompanying video, Flashes, compiles of still images documenting past performances. The strobe-like flashing in the video provides a rhythmic, stable pulse that acknowledges the intuitive, primal movements of my body. Displayed on a tablet, Flashes emphasizes technology’s effect on the nuanced relationship between performer and viewer.

Exploring reality through negation and affirmation, the works of Josh Kawahata, Abriel Gardner and Caitlin Mullally are understood through discovering contradictions in our relationships to memories.

Josh Kawahata’s paintings are images based on memories he’d like to relive, or imagined events he wishes had happened or would happen. He explores the blurred lines of memories, the way the mind can paint a picture of things that never occurred and make them seem as true as reality. He is based in Hacienda Heights, California and is studying drawing & painting at California State University Long Beach.

In their collaborative piece titled “In all Sincerity,” Caitlin Mullally and Abriel Gardner actively understand the process of neglect through installation and performance. Through the form of dance scores, they explore the tension of representing something that can only be shown through contrast and negation. Caitlin Mullally is an installation artist and Abriel Gardner is a dancer/ choreographer; both based in Los Angeles. Caitlin Mullally and Abriel Gardner are earning their BFAs from California Institute of the Arts.

Helena Martinez’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Demonic Possession” is a study of schizophrenia interpreted as demonic possession. Because of the misunderstandings and
underrepresentation of schizophrenia, it has become more fictionalized than real. The work identifies parallels between symptoms of schizophrenia and representations of exorcisms in horror. Helena Martinez is an artist exploring mental illness, healing, and the occult through performance and installation. They are based in Los Angeles and earning their BFA at California Institute of the Arts.

Amy Zapata has been a part of the Downtown Los Angeles Drag scene for the past 2 years. It has transformed her preconceived notions of identity and gender. Primarily photographing Queens in Los Angeles has turned her focus not just on the entertainers but the city itself. Each influences the other and are an integral backdrop to the work. Using both digital and film cameras Amy attempts to blur the lines of gender, to highlight the avant-garde, and to document the changing performers their lives and the landscape.

LAndscape

LAndscape
November 4th - 26th
Opening Reception: November 4th, 7-10pm

Monte Vista Projects presents the group show LAndscape. LAndscape looks at the subject of otherness and authenticity, through the lens of the living landscape. LA is a patchwork city of gardens, parks, and vast wild spaces including everything from rare native plants and imported exotics to garden gnomes and greenhouses. For this show LA artists will be invited to either work outside their comfort zones and explore our landscape with traditional painting/ drawing or to make more conceptual/ political work pointing towards the numerous ecological issues facing our city.

LAndscape features the work of Evan apRoberts, Nurit Avesar, Carl Baratta, Arezoo Bharthania, Danny Escalante, Samantha Fields, Nicole Guerrera, Kellan King, John T. Lange, Amanda Mears, Naomi Nadreau, Next of Kin Studio, Christine Nguyen, Erika Ostrander, Kristine Schomaker, Christian Tedeschi, Andre Woodward

Mother Ditch Film Screening

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles and Monte Vista Projects present an evening of film and video works by members of Mother Ditch, a critique group and skills-sharing community for experimental media artists in LA. Mother Ditch formed in summer 2016 to support the artistic process of making experimental/leftside/weirdo/art film in the ultimate industry town.

Join us at 7pm on Sunday, October 29, 2017 for a screening of short works by Mother Ditch members:

Trevor Byrne                                                                                           
Yelena Zhelezov
Chris Adler and Ali Adler
D.S. Chun
Sarah Beeby
Susanna Battin
John Emison
J. Makary
Amanda Kramer and Noel Taylor
Sarah Greenleaf
Jenny Herrick
Theresa Sterner and Zach Trow
Alex Tyson

Above stills clockwise from left: John Emison's "Untitled," Theresa Sterner and Zach Trow's "Point Break Dance," J. Makary's "This Is Where Wool Comes From, and Chris Adler and Ali Adler's "Seabands and Tummydrops" 

Mutate - Leonardo González, Marton Robinson, Paul Rosero Contreras

Mutate - Leonardo González, Marton Robinson, Paul Rosero Contreras
Curated by Beatriz Cortez

Preview: Saturday, September 16, 7-10pm
Opening: Sunday, September 17 from 5-8pm
Show runs from September 16 - October 18, 2017

For Mutate Leonardo González's Cabbages and Kings, Martón Robinson's Eat Me / Bite Me, and Paul Rosero Contreras's Fresh, merge into a collaborative installation that offers the public a variety of products made with coffee, chocolate, and bananas. The selection of specialty drinks includes a type of coffee that may be impacted by the Chevron oil spill in the Amazon region in Ecuador, and a variety of cocktails once offered by the Untied Fruit Company to its investors in locations removed from the Honduran bananas plantations, mainly, London, New York, and New Orleans, as well as a variety of figures that engage with the practice of consuming dark immigrant bodies as part of the Major League Soccer spectacle.

Leonardo González (Honduras, 1982) graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in Honduras (2001). His work was included in the X Central American Biennial (2016), the 56th Venice Biennial (2015), and the XXXI Pontevedra Biennial, among others. He lives and works in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Marton Robinson (Costa Rica, 1979) has an interdisciplinary background with studies in Physical Education and Art, and is completing his MFA at the Roski Schol of Art at USC (2018). He has shown his work at the X Bienal Centroamericana; el Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC) and Fundación Ars TEOR/éTica in San José Costa Rica; as well as the Getty Center and Eastside International in Los Ángeles, among others.

Paul Rosero Contreras (Ecuador, 1982) holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2015). His work was included in the Moscow Biennial (2016), the Venice Architecture Biennial (2014), and the XI Cuenca Biennial (2011), among others. He lives and works in Quito, Ecuador.

PST LA/LA shows that these works relate to: 

This exhibition relates to several of the exhibitions in PST LA/LA, particularly Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas at UCR ARTSblock; Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin at the Huntington Library; and A Universal History of Infamy at LACMA and other venues.

Matthew Usinowicz - Foul Ball!

June 30- July 23, 2017

Foul Ball! Is an exhibition of new works by Matthew Usinowicz that use baseball as a metaphor to describe the American social and political landscape. The body of work draws it's context from the 2016 election results to current, and the ongoing exploits of this presidential catastrophe. Using the spectator experience of baseball parallel to political theater, results in a satirical narrative through work focusing on objects and materials that embody the game of baseball.

The conceptual inspirations for Matthew's work are the layers of human experience and spatial existence - the relationship between humans and obects. Matthew works and lives in San Francisco and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. He received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from UCSB.

Kelly Loudenberg - Foam Sweet Foam

May 27- June 18, 2017

Please join us for the opening of Kelly Loudenberg’s solo show, “Foam Sweet Foam” at Monte Vista Projects new location. With materials and actual props used by The Reality Based Training Association (RBTA), Loudenberg assembled a living space that can completely absorb bullets.

This bullet-absorbent still life, constructed of foam furniture, is a replica of a replica. The RBTA, an advocacy group, proposes that these foam simulations are the best way to prepare officers for shooter scenarios, arguing that they allow “the brain and body to process the experience as if it were actually occurring.”

By moving these props from the shoot-house to the gallery, the artist casts a critical eye on the kind of society that requires such training. With gun violence ever-present and rising, might we all be safer with this “soft-object” domestic design?

Kelly Loudenberg is a filmmaker & artist who has been exploring the physical and emotional landscapes of American justice for over a decade. This project has grown out of her work exploring the fine line between fact and fiction, and how that bleeds into the contemporary world.

She has recently completed production on a new documentary series for Netflix about wrongful convictions based on false confessions using the interrogation tapes to contextualize six separate cases (set to premiere in August 2017).

Her work has been shown at the Maryland Institute College of Art, SXSW Film Festival, and the Guggenheim Labs. She has been artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.

Foam Sweet Foam was supported in part by Borscht Corp.

j.frede & AMBER JEAN YOUNG - This Land

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April 22- May 14, 2017

This Land explores landscapes through photos of both known and unknown origins. Transcribed through the quilted works of Amber Jean Young and the arrangements of j.frede. 

Amber Jean Young constructs fractured images using photographs of the land and the sky joined together as quilted fiber based art. Matriarchs of rural communities have a long tradition of documenting their family’s history, triumphs and hardships, through quilt making. Using photographs taken on and around the land she grew up on in Northern California, Young continues this tradition, adapting it through abstraction, with finished quilts containing familiar rolling hills, blue skies and quiet clouds that are synonymous with California landscapes but also hold a deeper, personal history for her as she recalls her memories of childhood that played out on that very land and beneath such skies. 

complete CV and additional images can be seen at amberjeanyoung.com

In contrast and harmony the Fiction Landscape work of j.frede combines found photographs together creating imagined landscapes that contain the secret memories of those who originally took the photos but have since lost or discarded them. This series addresses the ephemeral nature of documentation and memory. All of the photographs used are purchased at flea markets and carefully constructed into believable landscapes spanning both geography and time that is evident visually in land and the film stock used at the time the photograph was taken.

complete CV and additional images can be seen at jfrede.com

Small Things - Member Show

WE HAVE MOVED!

After a long run in Highland Park, Monte Vista Projects has moved locations! We're now on the 5th floor of the beautiful Bendix Building in the Fashion District. We have joined forces with Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles and Post Gallery, who are both on the same floor. All three spaces will coordinate openings to be on the same night, so there's much to see!

Our new address:
1206 Maple Avenue, 5th floor, #523
Los Angeles, CA 90015

To celebrate our move and all the hard work by our members along with the members of TSA LA, we're having a group show of our past and current member's work. "Small Things" opens Saturday, March 25th, from 7-10 pm. 

Some notes about our new location:

Street parking in the Fashion District where we are now located opens up around 6pm. There is plenty of metered parking, some of which is free after 6pm. There is also parking under The Bendix Building if you’d rather.

The entrance of the building is on 12th and Maple. Take the elevator up to the 5th floor and head left where you will see our galleries.

Come check out the new space and help us ring in a new era of MVP!

Joshua Petker - Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun

Joshua Petker - Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun

Opening reception is February 11, 2017 6-9 pm
Exhibition runs until March 5th

Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Joshua Petker. The works in Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun are a continuation of Petker’s tussle between waywardness and structure in popular enlightenment. Floral bouquets of retro-patterned flowers blend a mixture of ephemerality and aesthetics. Amid them is a reference to the use of botanical imagery in painting: a tradition of portraying objects from the natural world with a purpose that is twofold. Depicted amongst the flowers are an infusion of the decorative European fashion that followed the Thirty Years’ War and the bohemian youth of the 1960s. Both periods were characterized by rapid change and inspired by moments of peaceful and relaxed living. In one painting, a hippie in flower dress stares East towards the rising Sun. The hippie’s gaze sets a trance-like mode of viewing that is useful for accessing Petker’s paintings. From such a state of looking, Here Comes the Waiting for the Sun considers generative possibilities of how relationships between history and patterning repeat themselves.

Joshua Petker lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including, Some Hippies and A Hobo at ASHES/ASHES, Los Angeles, CA (2015), Incognito at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2014), and About Face at ACME. Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Petker received his BA from The Evergreen State College and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2015.

Zach Bucek - Acrobat & The Sneaker Deal

ZACH BUCEK - ACROBAT & THE SNEAKER DEAL

Opening reception is Saturday Jan 7. from 6 - 9 pm.

Exhibition runs until Jan 29.

Max Beckmann’s Acrobat on trapeze features a body in motion, but flattened and paused. This body is observed by the circus spectators depicted in the painting far below, and it is observed without the obstruction of distance by any viewer of the painting. This exhibition features paintings of similarly paused bodies, pressed flatly to the surface. The viewer's gaze has been confined further to details of the bodies, such as hands, feet, or bare limbs. The image cropping used in the paintings evokes the compression of space and movement seen in the televised sports spectacle. The sneaker deal is the inscription of athletic success upon the public's physical space, to be shared through mass consumption. Endorsement deals displace and quantify the achievements of these spectral, celebrity bodies. With the power of purchase, we are able to celebrate their elevated status and wear it too. However, within the imaginative world of these paintings, this act of worship is enveloped by erotic play, a trembling of desire and possibility.

ZACH BUCEK received his BFA from The University of Texas at Austin, and currently lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. Acrobat features a body of work created in Los Angeles, where the artist was based 2010-2016. He has been featured in group exhibitions, including Gravity (2013) at the Long Beach City College Art Gallery, New Works Salon (2013) at the Echo Park Film Center, and a solo exhibition Mysterious Traveler as part of the Kamikaze Exhibitions, #25 (2012) at PØST.

Caitlin Mullally - Arrangement Against Content

Opening reception is on December 11th from 6-8 pm. 
This exhibition runs from December 11th to December 18th.

Monte Vista Projects presents Arrangement Against Content by Caitlin Mullally. Arrangement Against Content is a sculptural sound installation that addresses domestic beauty and its relationship with conceptual art. Caitlin Mullally has been researching the art of arrangement in relation to sound, china and floral combinations, exploring the tropes of comfort and safety of the “feminine” as a quality of these formats as the containers of meaning. The artist is interested in the atmospheres and feelings created by domestic spaces, as well as regarding them as poetic experiences, and how we consciously and unconsciously construct notions of comfort. The piece discusses the presumed absence of content or aesthetic value of those environments, questioning the lack of need for interpretation in domestic spaces. The installation is inspired by the atmospherics of paintings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Caitlin Mullally is a sound artist who specializes in collaborative installation work. Her work revolves around collaged ideas. She has previously shown her work at C.A.V.E. Gallery (2016), California Institute of the Arts (2016),  Tiger Strikes Asteroid, (2016), Ranney (2015) and the American Red Cross in Tinton Falls New Jersey (2014). She was raised in New Jersey and lived in the United Kingdom. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California and is earning her BFA at California Institute of the Arts.

2016 Holiday Raffle

Season's Greetings!!!

Monte Vista Projects would like you to participate in our annual Holiday Raffle event on December 10th from 4 - 6 pm. If you would like to participate this year, you can drop off artwork at Monte Vista Projects on:

Tuesday, December 6th, 6-9pm

Wednesday, December 7th, 6-9pm

Thursday, December 8th, 6-9pm

Friday, December 9th, 6-9pm

Please have work ready to hang.

All of the proceeds go towards maintaining Monte Vista Projects, including preparing for future exhibitions by Zac Bucek, Kelly Loudenberg, Bessie Kunath and Nick Loewen and many more.

Music and food will be provided during the raffle. Please feel free to spread the word and invite other artists, friends, or family to the event. Raffle tickets will be $10 per ticket.

We are very appreciative for the ongoing support we have had over the last nine years and we hope to continue providing a space for underrepresented artists.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, and we hope to see you soon!!!!

Steven Putz - The Hanging Garden

The Hanging Garden by Steven Putz

Oct. 30th to Nov 20th, 2016.
 
Steven Putz’s most recent work,(The Hanging Garden) an installation using props, sculpture, and set design techniques,  pays homage to the notorious Aokigahara Forest in Japan(also known as The Suicide Forest) . The artist discovered The Suicide Forest during a recent exhibition where he displayed works that addressed the issue of suicide in Japanese culture. The forest was used as part of a practice called Ubasute during the famines in the Edo period (1603-­‐1868). In which, family members would abandon their ill and elderly there in an effort to better ration dwindling food supplies. A majority would have certainly perished due to exposure, inadvertently making Aokigahara Forest Japans most haunted location. 
More recently (1950-­‐present) the forest has become Japans number one suicide location.  Presently the authorities no longer post the number of suicides occurring within the forest in an effort to avoid attracting negative publicity and romanticizing the deaths. However, the popularity of this location continues to increase in the media; Vice Documentaries, New York Times, Japan Times and numerous online sources have all reported on The Aokigahara Forest. And by the time Steven’s installation is presented, MTV will have released The Forest, a film using Aokigahara as a backdrop. Furthermore, several well received books have been published regarding the forest.     

Steven Putz’s Hanging Garden balances between a sense of mystical horror and historical fact, between knowing what is present and what is the past. His installation invites viewers to step beyond what they might recognize as their own mortality.
 
 
Steven Putz received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has exhibited in group shows like I Heart Japan, Duke Gallery, Azusa , CA,. and Ghost Show VI, Borderline Gallery, Milwaukee, WI. He has received international awards for his printmaking.  Steven has completed one novel and coauthored a novella, both unpublished. Though rarely exhibiting throughout his career, his works appear in private collections and have been purchased by such institutions as The Haggerty Museum. Steven resides in Los Angeles where his studio practice continues. 

The No Show Museum

The No Show Museum – Nothing Is Impossible
 This one day event will take place from 6-8 pm along with a curatorial talk at 7pm.
 
"A breathtaking journey to the most remote regions of thinking“
 
Following the success of last year‘s European tour with around 30 exhibitions in 20 countries and a closing show at the 56. Biennale di Venezia, the NO SHOW MUSEUM is on tour across America
from August to October 2016, including pop-up exhibitions in art venues and galleries.
 
In Los Angeles, the No Show Museum is hosted by Monte Vista Projects. At the opening on the October 30 at 7 pm, Andreas Heusser, Curator of No Show Museum, will guide through the exhibition and give an illuminating introduction (lecture performance) to the art of nothing.

The NO SHOW MUSEUM is the world’s first museum devoted to nothing and its various manifestations throughout the history of art. Its collection includes works and documents from over 120 renowned international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, among them, Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Maurizio Cattelan, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Haacke, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Gianni Motti, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Santiago
Sierra, Andy Warhol and Rémy Zaugg.
 
The NO SHOW MUSEUM has a mobile presentation space in a converted postal car. It currently hosts a special exhibition entitled „Nothing is impossible“ with a selection of impossible artworks by 22 international artists. The mobile museum has been shipped from Europe to America and will be installed in front of Monte Vista Projects.
 
For more information please visit  www.noshowmuseum.com
 
Andreas Heusser is a conceptual artist and curator, born in 1976 in Zurich. He currently lives and works in Zurich and Johannesburg. He is mainly known for large scale projects that bridge the gap between art and activism. He is the director of the OPENAIR LITERATUR FESTIVAL ZÜRICH, an international literary festival which annually takes place for the duration of week in Zurich, since 2011. Between 1999 and 2003 he studied Philosophy, Literature and Psychology at the University of Zurich. From 2011 to 2013 he studied again part time and completed a master's degree in Contemporary Arts Practice (Fine Arts) at the Bern University of the
Arts (HKB).
 

Jenn Berger - Hillary as a Child

 Saturday Oct. 22 from 5-9pm and Sunday Oct 23 from 1-5pm, 
Monte Vista Projects presents:
 
Hillary Clinton As A Child by Jenn Berger
 
Combining half of a child size doll, drawing replacing the doll's front, and video eyes sourced from the Benghazi hearing, Hillary Clinton As A Child speaks to the construction of a larger than life identity over time. The mention of just the name Hillary Clinton brings an immediate response. From where do we form an opinion of our politicians? Based on a childhood photo of Hillary, HCAAC stands as a reminder of Hillary’s history, that she was not always the Hillary Clinton we think we know today.
 
"For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of [herself], as offer [herself] as an image of the audience."
-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death, 1985
 
Jenn Berger is a Los Angeles based artist. She earned an MFA in art from the University of California, Irvine and undergraduate degrees from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. Recent exhibitions and performances include The Quiet After 10 curated by Emily O, Violence, Nudes, and Grandmas at The Situation Room, and Another Cats Show at 356 Mission. She recently completed a teaching artist fellowship at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA.
 

Rochele Gomez - Giacometti In My Head

Rochele Gomez

Giacometti In My Head

Opening Reception is Sunday September 25, 4-7pm
September 25 – October 16, 2016

“Slab!” -Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, 1953)

Maybe more than with most materials, you come to know brick as a barrier but also as something that gets built up, laid, one by one in successive rows of red rectangles and grey mortar. It goes up. Imagine laying slabs of brick in a perfect circle around your body up to your entire height, layer by layer. That might grow to feel dark and claustrophobic. Or even more unlikely, imagine pushing a Giacometti sculpture, the big bronze recognizable tall ones, across a floor. That might feel heavy or injure you.

This hypothetical forming is the closest to what I can describe Rochele Gomez’ new body of works, and it does so in intentional and political terms. Gomez asks, “What kind of living situation does not allow for light?” By way of entrance rather than by barrier, she plays with the image of a brick wall in the form of stained glass. Bricks is made up of eight sections of meticulously assembled red and brown stained glass placed over the existing gallery windows, allowing in only their hot red glow to illuminate the space. This glow bleeds onto the same wall where Gomez has projected a video featuring the re-imagination of Swiss sculptor, Alberto Giacometti’s, most iconic figures. Framed in Flowers is made from cardboard and a single frame shot, where an elongated figure is pushed across a living room floor and is at once recognizable in it’s Giacometti esque form but then slowly becomes more squiggly, more long, more abstracted. Bordering this scene are fiber optic flowers. Normally borders are used as devices for containing, corralling, or refining. Again, Gomez flops this orientation. The flowers, presumably relics of her childhood which you might find on a nightstand, do not contain but instead open up to humor and obscurity.

What are the relationships between Giacometti and a living room floor, between Gomez and Giacometti, between fiber optic flowers and brick? These bodies, these things, bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of languages (as taxonomies, as methods, as systems, as vernaculars, as images, as histories) is part of an activity, or a form of life, which gives language meaning. They force us to think about what we are seeing (something taken for granted even in art) and to celebrate a marriage of ideas and records of experience, which are magical and meaningful in their difference.

-Amanda McGough

Rochele Gomez received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine (2014) and BFA from California State University, Long Beach (2006).  Recent exhibitions include, Caza: Rochele Gomez, Margaret Lee, Alejandra Seeber at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (2016), and A Fireplace and Its Mirror at LAXART (2015).  She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present new work by Rochele Gomez. Organized by Amanda McGough.

Opening Reception is Sunday September 25, 4-7pm
September 25 – October 16, 2016

Manny Krakowski - A Simple Chemistry Experiment Explained as a Monument

Manny Krakowski: A Simple Chemistry Experiment Explained as a Monument

August 20, 2016 – September 11, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 20, 2016, 7-10pm

(Los Angeles) – Monte Vista Projects is excited to announce A Simple Chemistry Experiment Explained as a Monument by Manny Krakowski.  On exhibit will be a sculpture that appears to be a monument, complete with virtual space, and a surveillance system.  

Some things need to be physically diagramed. To describe in a way words cannot.
 

A diagram is a symbolic representation of information according to some visualization technique. Diagrams have been used since ancient times, but became more prevalent during the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism along with increased questioning of religious hegemony.  This period marked a shift of how knowledge was perceived as truth through the use of scientific methodology and objects (experiments) to describe virtuality. This virtuality is a kind of potentiality that becomes fulfilled in the actual. It is still not material, but it is real (according to Delueze).

This exhibition measures how the monument, surveillance, and virtual space affect our experience of place.

Distance                    Between                Here                    and               There.           

Freezlume                 Between                Freezer               and               Volume.

Virtual Space viewing is available @ http://www.dbhat.com/freezlume

Some things need to be physically diagramed. To describe in a way words cannot.

“But if you want to know if a piece of yellow metal in your hand is gold (if it is the referent of the word ‘gold’) you do not consult your dictionary, you pour a certain acid on the chunk of stuff and if it melts it is gold, if not it’s fool’s gold.” Manuel Delanda

Gallery Hours are 12 - 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday or by appointment.

To schedule an appointment, please email at: infomvpmail@gmail.com

Manny Krakowski is obsessed with Minecraft, chemistry, and sports through the lens of desire.  Krakowski received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Art at California State University (2016), Long Beach. Over the past 10 years Krakowski has served as Artist in Residence and staff member at the Pilchuck Glass School, WA. His work has been published in New Glass Review through the Corning Museum of Glass, NY. He has exhibited at Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, University Art Museum, Long Beach, City of Brea Art Gallery, Brea. In addition, he has given lectures and demonstrations nationally and internationally at such institutions as Australian National University, California State University, Fullerton, Ohio State University, and Santa Monica College. Krakowski co-organizes WINNING/LOOSING a project space in Los Angeles. Programing focuses on performance and site-specific exhibitions.

Beatriz Cortez - Los Angeles Vernacular: Space Capsule Interior

July 16 – August 7, 2016

Opening Reception is Saturday July 16, 7-10pm

Los Angeles Vernacular: Space Capsule Interior evokes a multiplicity of temporalities and aesthetics. Among them, it references the Back-to-the-Land-Movement that over different generations flourished in the United States, and had important iterations in the outskirts of Los Angeles, in places like Tujunga. Stone builders such as George Harris settled there in the early twentieth-century, and began building with local materials, including river rock from the Tujunga wash. By taking industrial sheet metal and turning it into rocks, this installation also makes reference to the anti-industrialization philosophy of the early craftsman movement, which made a commitment to unique, hand crafted domestic architecture. Furthermore, it continues a syncretic tradition of construction in Los Angeles that has long served as a metaphor for multicultural coexistence, particularly as builders such as Dan Montelongo, an Apache Mescalero, mastered in the early decades of the twentieth-century the construction of homes that brought together an indigenous way of building with river rock in combination with the craftsman aesthetic. This came to be known as a vernacular style of construction that flourished in local neighborhoods such as Sunland, San Fernando, Tujunga, La Crescenta, and Pasadena. In addition, this installation evokes the hippie communes of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Drop City in Colorado, where structures were built in the form of geodesic domes with diverse materials, including recycled sheet metal, following the patented designs by Buckminster Fuller that were made available to the general public in 1966 through a publication of Popular Science magazine. It is also inspired by the design of the spacecraft Dragon series that Space-X has advertised as manned orbit vehicles for the near future. Los Angeles Vernacular: Space Capsule Interior slides back and forth from a past of local materials to a future of extinction, taking place at once within different versions of modernity, being both obsolete and innovative, a relic of the past, a model for the present, a nostalgic dream for the future.

Beatriz Cortez: is a visual artist and a cultural critic. She was born in El Salvador and migrated to the United States in 1989. She holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate in Latin American literature from Arizona State University. Her work explores simultaneity, the existence in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of immigration, and in exploration of possible futures. She has shown her work nationally in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, and internationally in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. She teaches in the Department of Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Organized by Rebecca Bennett Duke.

Tom Trudgeon - Das Neue Werk

June 11 – July 3, 2016

Interior of Ford Explorer Sport; Aliso Canyon Wire Markers; Mats; Northridge, CA 91325; Fly Fishing; and EDC. A thought in a car.

“Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos, which leaves one free to choose the meaning one wants to give it. But, over and above agricultural considerations, geographical irregularities and the various accidents of history and prehistory, the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. A pale blurred line, or an often almost imperceptible difference in the shape and consistency of rock fragments, are evidence of the fact that two oceans once succeeded each other where, today, I can see nothing but barren soil. As I follow the traces of their age-old stagnation despite all obstacles - sheer cliff faces, landslides, scrub or cultivated land - and disregarding paths and fences, I seem to be proceeding in meaningless fashion. But the sole aim of this contrariness is to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition.”
Claude Levi-Strauss

“There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic.”
Erving Goffman

Greg Curtis - Event October Horizon

 

May 7th - May 29th

“Lens flare” is a phenomena in photography and cinema that occurs when non-image forming light enters and refracts within the glass components of a camera lens before reaching the camera’s film or digital sensor. The visible artifacts typically manifest themselves as starbursts, rings, or geometric shapes in a row across the image. These artifacts are a common obstacle in photography, usually suppressed through the use of coated lenses, hoods, and lighting technologies. However, the use of lens flare as a signifier of the presence of a documenting camera is suffuse within filmic culture today as a tool for lending reality to an otherwise fabricated digital world; in CGI sequences lens flare gives the illusion of a camera filming a scene that was digitally fabricated inside a computer.

Greg Curtis’ exhibition Event October Horizon at Monte Vista Projects is an installation of framed chromogenic prints wherein the mechanics of the camera lens itself are the sole object. With a camera pointed at a black backdrop in the artist’s studio, a light was pointed into various lenses to produce and record isolated lens flares. The resulting images are at once diminutive and expansive: portraits of the camera’s own machinations presented as vast extraterrestrial events. The images are paired with identically sized black monochromatic chromogenic prints that contain no information from the camera, pointing to the spaces between still images that construct cinematic sequences. The installed panorama consists of self-reflexive operations made with the fundamental apparatus of the entertainment industry, isolating and foregrounding what is usually considered at best an aesthetic flourish, and at worst an error on the part of the photographer. 

Greg Curtis’ works in photography, video, and animation have recently been exhibited at the Conley Gallery at CSU Fresno; The Institute of Jamais Vu, London UK; Elephant, Los Angeles CA; Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University; Concord, Los Angeles CA; Weekend, Los Angeles CA; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles CA; Land of Tomorrow, Lexington KY; and Dan Graham, Los Angeles CA, among others. He received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is based in Los Angeles.