Nicole Nadeau
Nicole Nadeau
a flower by another name (fiberglass_01, fiberglass_02, fiberglass_03), 2019
Non-toxic fiberglass, wire and car paint
Artist Statement
“Flower By Another Name” started as a sculptural interpretation of a drawing Nicole Nadeau made as a child, is a conversation between present and past. The fiberglass sculptures, initially studied in ceramic, are the artist’s interpretations of the drawing and her form explorations. Nadeau became interested in the flowers and how they rendered as iconographic symbols in their anthropomorphic form; their gestural postures conveying different personalities. In order to better understand the subconscious messages embedded in the flowers, Nadeau had her twin sister, Coryn Nadeau, a clinical art therapist, psychoanalyze the original drawing using assessment symbology. She suggested the flowers were an abstract representation of the members of Nadeau’s family. Noting we have a capacity for symbolization in art, whereby we unconsciously project transitional objects or the family dyad onto the work.
The artist intention is for the viewer to identify with their own personalities or characteristics in the gestural forms of the varying sculptures.
Nicole Nadeau
a flower by another name (fiberglass_01, fiberglass_02, fiberglass_03), 2019
Non-toxic fiberglass, wire and car paint
Biography
Through a range of mediums, artist Nadeau explores the notions of ritual and identity, even going so far as to ritualize many elements of her practice. Her perspective is influenced by her role as a fraternal twin; granting a heightened awareness of similarity and distinction. Trained in industrial design, her work blends the manufactured with natural materials and techniques to create uncanny installations & sculptures. This implicit tension is indicative of her ongoing work. Informing Nadeau’s study of objects, she implements design language in her art like a tool or material. Nadeau often uses these structures as themes relating to the body & nature, exhibiting their perceived strength and fragility. Nadeau’s heritage of generational craftsmanship makes her a 5th generation maker.
Nicole Nadeau (b. 1984, Cromwell, CT) currently lives between New York and Los Angeles. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2007, and has studied at Rochester Institute of Technology (2002-2005) and Wesleyan University (1998). Nadeau’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Portraits of Origin, Y Gallery (2012). Her work was included in Tool, at Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (2014); Design Autopsy, Rochester Institute of Technology (2014); Littlest Sister, Spinello Projects (2015); Spring Break Art Fair NYC (2016, 2020); Fact and Fiction, Spring Break Art Fair LA (2019); site specific installation, Everyone Thought I Was You, Collective Design fair (2016); Velvet Elvis, Christy’s Art Center (2017); Reimagine the Domestic, Salomon Contemporary (2019); and solo show curated by Kyle DeWoody, “A Flower by Another Name”, That That Gallery (2018). Her art objects can be found at The Whitney Museum shop, Hammer Museum shop, The Street & The Shop, and 56 Henry Gallery.
Dave Muller
Dave Muller
Enthusiast
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Biography
Dave Muller (b. 1964, San Francisco, CA) creates paintings and installations that are rooted in his deep fascination with music, how it infiltrates and shapes our identities, and the communal dialogue it generates across cultures. Tapping into shared poetic moments and a collective dialogue, Muller depicts the myriad iconographies of his musical obsessions—album covers and spines, vinyl records, tapes, CDs, bootlegs, B-sides, disco balls, record labels, set lists, rare and popular instruments—sounds of all stripes, musicians, and singers, both beloved and unknown.
Muller appropriates album art in a painterly style that is both whimsical and factual. The paintings are autobiographical and expressive; adoring as well as historically referential. He is careful to include details such as hype stickers, anachronistic price tags, and extinct record shop labels, always attending to age, use, wear, and tear. These paintings tell idiosyncratic stories of politics, subculture, and atmosphere that have morphed through eras and cultures.
Muller’s engagement with a widespread sonic landscape offers
Chandler McWilliams
Chandler McWilliams
The whole sky and the map behind, without end, 2020
sound, radio
Artist Statement
My practice extends from my philosophical interests and my political and personal realities; negotiating ethics, parenthood, humor, and anxiety. I use poetic constructions to cross back and forth from linguistic to material signs, attacking the stability of language while leveraging and subverting unconsidered, yet nevertheless present, beliefs.
Chandler McWilliams
The whole sky and the map behind, without end, 2020
sound, radio
Biography
Chandler McWilliams has exhibited internationally in non-profit and commercial galleries and art institutions such as the The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, Commonwealth and Council, Wilding Cran, LTD Los Angeles, Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Machine Project. McWilliams has a MA in Philosophy from The New School For Social Research in New York City and an MFA from the Program in Art at the California Institute of the Arts.
Marisa Mandler (day + night)
Marisa Mandler
The Small Space Between Of and From, 2020
Neon (viewable day and night)
Marisa Mandler
The Small Space Between Of and From, 2020
Neon
Marisa Mandler
The Small Space Between Of and From, 2020
Neon
Biography
Marisa Mandler is a multidisciplinary artist working across the mediums of drawing, sculptural installation, sound, writing and performance. Through mark making, transcription and recording, everyday events and actions become documented gestures which speak to a larger narrative about the impossible human desire for control and perfection. Culling from a multitude of imagery and reference material, Mandler finds associative meaning and draws comparisons between the personal quotidian and a larger collective experience. Repetitive processes of investigation reveal the peripheral, conceptual and emotional underpinnings of Mandler’s subject matter. It is through these revelations that the significance of this “negative space” becomes apparent.
Mandler was born in Los Angeles, CA. and is currently living and working in Los Angeles. She received a Bachelor of Science in painting from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts from University of Southern California. She has exhibited in both Europe and North America and participated in various residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing in 2010 and Kunsttraject in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2009. In 2009 and 2010 Mandler was awarded with the Willard Grant in Berlin, Germany and in 2014 and 2016, she did residencies at the Druckwerkstatt im Kulterwerk at the BBK in Berlin, Germany. Her work can be seen in various public collections, including the Kupferstichkabinett at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.
Currently, Mandler is a full time professor at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design.
Karen Lofgren
Karen Lofgren
La plaza desplazada (Broken Column, Social Space), 2018-2020
Pulling Through (a softer index) #9, #11, #13, 2018 - 2019 (Four sculptures in driveway)
Artist Statement
On Pulling Through Series: Works are part of an ongoing multi-year project, Curse and the Cure, and index space related to the scale and measures of the human body in relation to natural (plant and animal) forms and emotional space, as well as ancient medical objects. The pieces, some sand-cast in aluminum and others hand built in mixed mediums, are nearly geometric although gloopy, flawed, and fleshy—rounding off the square forms with unmistakably organic attributes. The measurements of the projecting segments of each piece relate to scale of human bodies, limbs and orifices, and of plants, and to the ancient rituals of “passing through” or “pulling through”, where the patient is physically pulled through another object to create a magical barrier between them and their ailment, and “measuring and plugging”, in which objects are measured to the scale of the body, then filled (with nails, hair, and other objects) to transfer the disease to the object. Physically appearing as geometric “trees”, some of the objects point to taxonomy, or the rules applied to categorize wild systems (including physiology, nature, language, emotion), which occupy other dimensions. Instead of attempting to directly categorize, the works try to permit wild systems to remain so in a state of multiplicity or shifting identity and fluctuating rules, intuitively feeling out spaces that outline historic ritual movements.
Background: I was influenced by my childhood within a utopian back-to-the land island community, and at a Tibetan dharma center. Raised by an alternative medicine practitioner and in experimental social structures, I was born into countercultural participation. Fundamentally centered on belief structures and systems, my practice mediates space by linking the history of ritual and belief throughout various cultures and time periods, and placing this material in relationship through the approach of “radical subjectivity” in the studio.
Karen Lofgren
La plaza desplazada (Broken Column, Social Space), 2018-2020
Pulling Through (a softer index) #9, #11, #13, 2018 – 2019 (Four sculptures in driveway)
Biography
Karen Lofgren is a Los Angeles-based artist working primarily in sculpture and artist books from a feminist and decolonial perspective, and holds an MFA from CalArts. Her research centers on ritual, history, mythology, and the construction of consciousness over time, forming relationships between cultural systems and other wild systems. She is a 2019 Pollock-Krasner grant recipient; receives Canada Council Grant support; and was Fulbright Core Scholar at UAL, Central St. Martins College in 2017/2018. Solo exhibitions include What is To Cure at Royale Projects Contemporary Art; Trajectory Object c. 2000-2050 with High Desert Test Sites, as well as solo shows at LACE; Pitzer Art Galleries; and Machine Project. Group exhibitions include PRISKA PASQUER; Palm Springs Art Museum; Commonwealth & Council; MASS Gallery; LACMA; Human Resources; Bank of America; Royal College of Art; Nicodim Gallery; and OCAD University. Her projects have also received support from Mike Kelley Foundation; Durfee Foundation; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Ranch Projects; and West of Rome Public Art.
Rebecca Levinson
Rebecca Levinson
Balance, 2020
Oil on canvas
12 x 12 inches
Artist Statement
The anonymous female subject of Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance stands before an open window, possibly pregnant, holding a delicate silver scale on a chain between her fingers. The scale, hovering nearly-balanced in midair, is a breathtaking pictorial moment: the illusion of barely-perceptible weight on the scale’s tiny plates is stunningly precise, depicting something seemingly impossible to capture. At the same time, it’s a metaphor for painting itself: carefully rendered, the illusion awes us not because we mistake it for the real thing, but because we acknowledge how nearly it approaches reality without actually arriving there. Minute formal decisions and intimate knowledge of the medium allow for a relationship between painter and subject that hangs in the air like this scale.
At the Mulholland Overlook, we’re crossing from the city to a fast-snaking road that eventually will lead us to Topanga. Phone service drops as we approach a curve that also drops, on the passenger side, down a steep mountain-face that frames a panoramic view of Los Angeles. The sprawl is picturesque, but we stare straight ahead. Distraction could literally pitch us off a cliff. Slowing down will not slow down the SUV careening from a blind turn just beyond us. Suspense holds up the curve like Vermeer’s balance: the astonishment of a view also contains the spectre of a crash; the euphoria of speed in a car acknowledges a danger just evaded.
In the confines of my house, the difference between today and yesterday is as small as whatever we’ve talked about. My face and my hands could make you sick; our groceries are shapes swaddled in plastic wrap and ammonia. Outside, the freedom of sunlight is a touch that feels as loving as nutrition. The passage of a month is marked by outgoing birthday calls, how many children in the street, how many bodies in the freezer truck. The line between boredom and anxiety is one I walk along holding a balance: what I know will harm me weighs on one silver tray, what I don’t know starts to gently tip the other. What I love more than before weighs on one tiny plate, the terror of loss shifts the other.
Rebecca Levinson
Balance, 2020
Oil on canvas
12 x 12 inches
Rebecca Levinson
Balance, 2020
Oil on canvas
12 x 12 inches
Biography
Rebecca Levinson is an artist based in Los Angeles, where she also was born and raised. She has a BA in history from Brown University and studied painting at the New York Studio School. Twin fascinations with the human need for narrative and the illusory nature of memory have driven all creative and academic pursuits. Her current work explores the possibility of a painting’s setting – landscape, cityscape, and interior – as its primary narrative force.
Thomas Lawson
Thomas Lawson
Nobody Treated Worse, 2020
Paint on unstretched canvas
60 x 48 inches
Artist Statement
I am drawn to the images I use for a variety of reasons. Sympathy can be one, revulsion another. Sometimes it is the resonance of a gesture through history. Sometimes it is an aesthetic response, sometimes the result of a search for an image to flesh out an idea. The work done to these images is then a series of actions designed to create a painting, various representational tactics, optical plays, and experiments with color, mark and texture. A kind of tactile/visual thinking about the image.
Thomas Lawson
Nobody Treated Worse, 2020
Paint on unstretched canvas
60 x 48 inches
Biography
Associated with the Pictures Generation, Thomas Lawson (b. 1951, Glasgow) is invested in the politics of painting. His painterly experiments disrupting image, perception, palette, temporality calls meaning into question. Portraits render mythological and recent historical events and figures in Neo-Surrealist ways. He has shown paintings at Metro Pictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London, and David Kordansky Gallery (2012), Richard Kuhlenschmidt and Rosamund Felsen galleries in Los Angeles. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions that include the Dallas Biennial (2014); Participant Inc (2009); LAXART, Los Angeles (2007); Third Eye Centre, Glasgow and Battersea Arts Centre, London (1990); and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California (1987). Recent group exhibitions include Ends and Exits: Contemporary Art from the Collections of LACMA and The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013); Made in L.A. 2012, organized by the Hammer Museum and LAXART, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); and The Pictures Generation: 1974 – 1984, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009).
John Knuth
John Knuth
Big Black, 2018
Polyethethylene, mirrored Mylar, grommets, acrylic on canvas
5½ x 14 feet
Artist Statement
The work is positioned on the fence running along the Silver Lake Reservoir path so the viewer can see the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance, the Silver Lake hills in the middle ground and the man made concrete Silver Lake Reservoir directly behind the artwork. Knuth continues to reinvent how images are made, and how that process informs the meaning of his work. He is deeply invested in an ongoing exploration of how depictions of our rapidly changing landscape are rendered and presented. Knuth has employed Mylar and plastic in recent works, repurposing the highly reflective, and jet black surface to create an abstracted mountain shape possibly blacked by a wildfire or a crashing black wave.
John Knuth
Big Black, 2018
Polyethethylene, mirrored Mylar, grommets, acrylic on canvas
5½ x 14 feet
Biography
John Knuth was born in 1978 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received an MFA from University of Southern California and a BFA from the University of Minnesota. Knuth’s recent solo exhibitions include The Origin of The New World at Hollis Taggart, NYC; Elevated Uncertainty at Marie Kirkegaard, Copenhagen, Denmark; Powerplant at Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy; Base Alchemy at 5 Car Garage, Santa Monica, CA; Master Plan at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Fading Horizon at Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA. His works has recently been included in group shows at International Print Center, New York, NY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; MassArt, Boston, MA; Self-Titled, Tilburg, NL; Loudhailer, Greene Exhibitions, China Art Objects and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Mak Kern
Mak Kern
Intimate Loop
Mak Kern
Intimate Loop
Biography
Mak was born in New York and lives in Los Angeles. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the New York State College of Ceramics and Art and Design. As an artist Mak creates works that are both sculptural and functional. Her work ranges in scale and scope from Sculptural Sound Pieces that are shown in Galleries and Public Art Spaces to functional furniture made for the Home and Commercial Spaces.