Theodore Boyer
Theodore Boyer
Ascending Goddess, 2019
Grout, acrylic, oil, foam, jade, bone, coral, turquoise and carnelian
36 x 9 x 10 inches
Theodore Boyer
Ascending Goddess, 2019
Grout, acrylic, oil, foam, jade, bone, coral, turquoise and carnelian
36 x 9 x 10 inches
Biography
Theodore Boyer is a multi-disciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California. He creates images that at first seem to reference landscapes, geography or outer space. Upon closer inspection the artworks reveal a mix of dense textured materials and techniques. Exploring a range of subjects and narratives including cartography, astrology, astronomy, geology, anthropology and mysticism, Boyer’s oeuvre responds to humanity’s connection to nature.
Receiving a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in 2012, Boyer studied under renowned artists Jack Whitten, Alice Aycock, Sue Williams and Andrea Belag. Since then, Boyer has exhibited his work in Solo and two person exhibitions at Shulamit Nazarian, LA, Hilde, LA and Patrick Painter Inc. Group shows and benefits, at the Museum of Mexico City, MX, The Underground Museum, and ICA, LA. Boyer has participated in the international exchange program at the ZhDK in Zurich, Switzerland, 2011, Carpe Diem Residency in Kerala India, 2016, and Residency 108, Cleremont, NY, 2016. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, FLAUNT, Modern Painters, Forbes, Cultured and L’Optimum.
Olivia Booth
Olivia Booth
A Glass Economy, 2020
Paper, paint, chalk, plastic, glass
Two drawings 8x4 ft
Artist Statement
Notes on the work for this show: How opaque and reflective our glass world is right now, and how much more “dark , salt, clear, moving, utterly free”* it could be when we return. We’d be better off returning to a billet or boro economy after this pandemic is over, an economy in which the unit of exchange is glass, either billet (the glass blocks that get melted down to be cast into forms) or borosilicate tube (the glass lampworkers use to create forms) so that the currency is in itself filled with endless potential for form. Neither billet nor boro is a limp stand-in for action, but a latent expression of action; and recycled action no less! I like the play on associations of bills and borrowing these words bring up and I like how there is no dearth of bling to either material. They are by no means austere. So these drawings of sparkling glass billets and boro tubes of various shapes and sizes, with some quotes and notes sprinkled in, are a rough early campaign for A Glass Economy. *pinched from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses”
Olivia Booth
A Glass Economy, 2020
Paper, paint, chalk, plastic, glass
Two drawings 8×4 ft
Olivia Booth
A Glass Economy, 2020
Paper, paint, chalk, plastic, glass
Two drawings 8×4 ft
Olivia Booth
A Glass Economy, 2020
Paper, paint, chalk, plastic, glass
Two drawings 8×4 ft
Biography
Olivia Booth lives, makes art, and teaches in Los Angeles and has done so since 2000. Her work could most recently be seen at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, Goldfinch Gallery in Chicago, Pilchuck Gallery in Seattle, and Queens Gallery here in LA. Before that her work was shown at LAMAG, Sculpture Center, The Finley, LAMOA at the Armory Center for the Arts, The Pit, MAK Center for Art and Architecture at The Schindler House, Mandarin Gallery and Mark Foxx, and has been written about in Art Forum, The New York Times and the LA Times among other publications. She received her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2003 and her BFA and BA with honors from Cornell University before that. At the heart of Booth’s practice is the question of clarity and transparency; what the two have to do with one another and what they can tell us about how to live in, or, conversely, use the world around and within us.
Scott Benzel (night only)
Scott Benzel (night only)
Kleksografienprojektion, 2020
Video projection, generative adversarial net trained on the work of Justinus Kerner, Victor Hugo, George Sand and Hermann Rorschach
Artist Statement
Justinus Kerner’s mid-late 19th C Kleksographien, ‘automatic’ drawings derived from inkblots, relied on the projection of the artist’s and viewers’ imagination onto forms ‘revealed’ in the ink. Similar techniques were employed by the artists and writers Victor Hugo and George Sand, today considered proto-abstractionists. Kerner’s quasi-mystical interpretation of the process was superseded in the 1890’s by the psychologists Alfred Binet and Victor Henri’s ‘scientific’ interpretation, which suggested that the presence of recognizable images in the blots was the result of ‘involuntary imagination’. Hermann Rorschach, then a medical student training under Jung’s teacher, the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, fully operationalized the process with the creation of his inkblot test as a tool to uncover a subject’s unconscious desires and ‘projections’.
In Kleksografienprojektion, 2020, a Machine Learning model trained on the work of Kerner, Hugo, Sand, and Rorschach generates a flowing field of interpolated imagery. Figures and images emerge and recede as a process of projection occurs both in the algorithm- a StyleGAN derivation designed to seek out relationships between images- and the human viewer watching the projected image.
Scott Benzel, Kleksografienprojektion, 2020, video projection, generative adversarial net trained on the work of Justinus Kerner, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Hermann Rorschach
Scott Benzel, Kleksografienprojektion, 2020, video projection, generative adversarial net trained on the work of Justinus Kerner, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Hermann Rorschach
Scott Benzel, Kleksografienprojektion, 2020, video projection, generative adversarial net trained on the work of Justinus Kerner, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Hermann Rorschach
Scott Benzel, Kleksografienprojektion, 2020, video projection, generative adversarial net trained on the work of Justinus Kerner, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Hermann Rorschach
Scott Benzel, Kleksografienprojektion, 2020, video projection, generative adversarial net trained on the work of Justinus Kerner, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Hermann Rorschach
Biography
Scott Benzel’s sculptures, photographs, projections, performances, and installations function both as deep investigations of cultural histories and as pieces in a coded game of chance. Benzel’s work has been shown or performed at The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum Of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; LA><ART, Los Angeles; The MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; The Palm Springs Art Museum; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and was featured in Made in LA 2012 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Benzel has curated shows at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Schindler House), Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Archive; and the Welcome Inn in Eagle Rock, CA as part of Pacific Standard Time, among others. Benzel is a member of the Faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts.
StyleGAN training by Dongpu Ling Produced by Olivia Mole Thank you Asha Bukojemsky, Hailey Loman, Michael Slenske, and Warren Neidich
Sharon Barnes
Sharon Barnes
Inside window: Tomorrow Won't Be Like Today, 2020
Panels, acrylic and cardboard on canvas
Diptych (each panel 36 inches x 36 inches)
Sidewalk In Situ: Sit This One Out, 2020
Acrylic and plastic bags on salvaged chair
40 x 15 x 15 inches
Artist Statement
The pieces exhibited in Drive-By-Art Los Angeles were all created outside of my studio in a makeshift area of my home. Artists all over continue to create through the world’s challenges. It’s what we’ve always done.
Sharon Barnes
Inside window: Tomorrow Won’t Be Like Today, 2020
Panels, acrylic and cardboard on canvas
Diptych (each panel 36 inches x 36 inches)
Sidewalk In Situ: Sit This One Out, 2020
Acrylic and plastic bags on salvaged chair
40 x 15 x 15 inches
Biography
Sharon Barnes is an interdisciplinary visual artist, born in Sacramento, CA and raised in South Los Angeles. She has exhibited widely including the California African American Museum, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Aqua Art Miami, and the Arco Chato in Panama. Her work explores cultural memory, struggle, and resilience through the use of process and materials.
Elena Bajo (day + night)
Elena Bajo (day + night)
Cosmic Distress Series – A Garden of Air and Water, 2020
Found plastic bags, plant, soil
Cosmic Distress Series" r.p.m (Respirations per minute), 2020
Video 4k, color, sound, 3m 50s
I am presenting two artworks that are related though one is an installation on a tree (visible both days) and the second one is a video projection only visible on Saturday night.
Artist Statement
Elena Bajo’s artistic practice weaves in both personal and political narratives into materials and movements that generate new compositions. Her multidisciplinary practice occurs at the intersection of anarchist thought, social ecology and metaphysics,engaging ideas of nature, and the body as a political and social entity questioning its relationship to ecologies of capital. She works both individually and collectively, using choreography, sculpture, performance, architecture, life sciences, text and video. Concept-generated and research based is concerned with the ecological, social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. Exhibition spaces become art laboratories, where an experimental, performed work unfolds. The resulting works are both conceptual and poetic, they are linked to cognitive labor, a labor that has no limits cannot be valued as it is the condition of precarious work in today’s neoliberal economy generated amidst ecosophical moments of fracture, in an attempt to entertain fissures in a world of crystallized sensibility.
Elena Bajo
Cosmic Distress Series – A Garden of Air and Water, 2020
Found plastic bags, plant, soil
Cosmic Distress Series” r.p.m (Respirations per minute), 2020
Video 4k, color, sound, 3m 50s
Biography
Elena Bajo is a Spanish-American artist, choreographer and cofounder of the LA collective D’CLUB dedicated to climate action. She has an MFA from Central Saint Martins, London, a Master in Genetic Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona, and a degree in Pharmacology, Complutense University, Madrid. She studied Laban & Bartenieff Movement at TanzFabrik, Center for Contemporary Dance, Berlin. She was a co-founder of the temporary art project EXHIBITION, 2009, NY. She has taught and lectured at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, Berlin; Goldsmith’s College, London; Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, Providence; and Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield among other institutions. She has exhibited and performed internationally: EFA, NY; Movement Research, NY; APA, Brussels; LAMAG, LA; Blue Project Foundation, Barcelona; Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico; Garcia Galeria, Madrid; Kunsthalle Sao Paulo; Stacion, Pristina, Kosovo; Artium Museum of Contemporary Art, Vitoria; 44th Salon Nacional de Artistas, Colombia; Annex14, Zurich; Kai 10 Arthena Foundation, Dusseldorf; DRAF, London; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; 3rd Mardin Biennial, Turkey, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Performa Biennial, NY; Sculpture Center, NY; She has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan, Maine; ISCP, NY; Ratti Foundation,Como IT; Goldrausch Berlin, DE. She received a New York Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency grant award in 2019; the Audemars Piguet award, ArcoMadrid 2017; the Botin Foundation International Visual Arts Grant award 2018. She has recently released an artist monograph Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Art 2019
Joshua Aster
Joshua Aster
patterninginplace, 2020
Egg oil tempera on linen
Artist Statement
For this project, my wife and I each decided to make a painting for opposite sides of a sandwich board. Somewhat like a kaleidoscopic image, my painting is a gridded magnification of a distorted view.
Joshua Aster
patterninginplace, 2020
Egg oil tempera on linen
Biography
Joshua Aster is a Los Angeles based artist and abstract painter who received his MFA from UCLA in 2007. We live in an insane world. Paintings are challenges on a more intimate scale. Joshua Aster engages in a rigorous daily painting practice, finding meaning through simple shapes with an experimental mindset. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions including solo painting exhibitions at Edward Cella Art, Karl Hutter Fine Art, Carl Berg Gallery, and LAXART. His work has been featured in the LA Weekly and The Los Angeles Times amongst other publications. He was awarded a MacDowell Residency in September 2014. He is also a founding member of the artist collective OJO, and has presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles and LACE in Hollywood, CA. His 26 ft long painting can be seen at the W Hotel in Hollywood.
Shagha Ariannia
Shagha Ariannia
Biography
Born and raised in Iran, Shagha Ariannia is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work explores the complex landscape of nationhood through questions of citizenship, national identity, global power relations and the fantasy of immigration. Her works have been exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum, University of California Irvine; LAXART; 18th Street Art Center; Commonwealth and Council; the Torrance Art Museum; Galarie der Hochschule, Braunschweig, Germany; and Gallery MOMO, Capetown. She received her MFA from CalArts and BA from the University of California, Irvine. She is a 2016 recipient for the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists and was recently a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
Tanya Minhas
Tanya Minhas
www.tanyaminhasstudio.com
http://www.secondstreetgallery.org/index.php/exhibitions/detail/nature-tells-its-own-story
IG @tanyaminhasstudio
Reflections
My paintings, installations, and drawings focus entirely on exploring the invisible forces of nature and the imprint they leave as tangible evidence of their existence on and in our lives. A sunny day and its importance for agriculture, that will be our sustenance. A tsunami – water stirred by wind – that can devastate our material belongings. The pandemic for me has drawn to the forefront the strong destructive force in nature that some say has been evoked by our disregard for the balance of nature, and our disrespect for its creatures. I am even more convinced that there is a method to nature’s beauty and also to its potentially chaotic madness, and that we as human beings have been forcefully overstepping our boundaries. Most days I am scared, as I imagine these microscopic bits threatening possible death coming uninvited, to mingle with the air we breathe. The reason I chose the paintings that I am planning to show this weekend is that they represent invisible nature. Wildflower seeds take from nature -completely devoid of human intention and interaction- germinate and ultimately blossom, showing up in fields and in the cracks of urban pavement. Life goes on in the natural world around us. This reminder of nature’s resilience fills me with optimism that this disruption will introduce us to a new path where we can live in greater, and more thoughtful harmony with nature, than we did before the pandemic.
Artist Statement
Tanya Minhas grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and moved to the United States to attend Princeton University. She subsequently attended graduate school at Columbia University, and the Art Students League where she painted portraits in oil.
Minhas ventured away from figurative painting, making repetitive drawings using ink, paint, and yarn about the unseen miniscule energies that subtly direct our lives. Her recent art practice explores the state of harmony between the internal and the external, the visible and the invisible, and how the strength of one’s intrinsic life force affects this harmony, offering an impetus to balance our internal lives with an increasingly tempestuous external world.
Minhas says of her work, “Each painting is about an invisible memory or impression left by the myriad different forces in nature – a leaf falling to the earth displaces air as it falls, tracing an invisible pattern, that I can see with my heart, or my imagination, or whatever it is in myself that finds these moments important, and yet I am unable to express the awe of it precisely with words. Sand ripples are another example, that fossilized tell stories of environmental history, and that can immediately tell you about yesterday’s storm. Snowflakes as they melt transform states of existence; the movement from solid to liquid is a geometric change visible under a microscope. Thus each painting, drawing, or wall installation, is a story of a moment in nature that is historical, material, and ethereal, all at the same time.
Tanya Minhas
The Universal Language of Wildflowers, 2018
Acrylic on Canvas
36 x 24 inches
Tanya Minhas
The Universal Language of Wildflowers, 2018
Acrylic on Canvas
36 x 24 inches
Tanya Minhas
Diving Under Triptych (I, II, III), 2019
Acrylic on Canvas
9 x 12 inches
Biography
Tanya Minhas is a visual artist living and working in New York and Long Island. Minhas grew up in Pakistan and originally moved to the United States to attend Princeton University. Variably using ink, paint, and yarn, her intricate artwork explores the unseen components of nature, originating from transformation, dislocation, entanglement, resuscitation, forced separation, the contrasting and varied faces of beauty, destruction and rebirth. She is fascinated by the composition and states of matter that transform, direct and redirect those forces unapparent to the human eye.
Due to the detailed and contemplative nature of her paintings and repetitive wall drawings, Minhas’ production is small. Her current solo exhibition “Nature Tells Its Own Story” remains on view at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia through June 2020. Her wall drawing commission for Joseph Editions in Nashville, Tennessee, is scheduled for installation in October 2020. In 2019, her paintings were exhibited at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton and at Walter Arader Himalayan Art in New York City.
An extended exhibition and commission history is available on request.