LA East

Artist Statement
This is a site specific dance/video for performance in Cipher: A Temporary Project by architect
Andrew Zago. Cipher is a three-dimensional grid occupying nearly the entire gallery void. Formed of dyed, construction grade studs, Cipher consists of narrow, closely packed corridors and stairways doubling back on themselves to form a single volume.
“I make a correlation between a cage built for confinement and a village square built to encourage communal gathering,” explains Anita Pace. Les Fenêtres (the windows) (1863) is a poem by Stephane Mallarme, whose poetry was a catalyst for Symbolist movement of the 19th century. The performers will be confined in the large architectural structure but have freedom to move in their defined areas, as in the poem, “Are there ways, O Self who know asperity to break the crystal outraged by this monster and to escape, on these wings without feathers- at risk of falling throughout eternity?”
The video projection turns the structure back on itself through representation of the documentation of building it as well as the use of other found structures that serve to juxtapose and complement the architecture. Social interaction between the audience and the performers will happen in the confined space in and around the architecture. Les Fenêtres explores the freedoms and limitations that can exist for the performers as well as the audience.

Biography
Anita Pace is a choreographer, videographer and performer.  Since 1989 she has created over 30 works, presented in Europe, Asia, Mexico and the U.S.  She has collaborated with numerous visual artists, composers and writers, including Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Christian Marclay, Tony Oursler, Stephen Prina, Carl Stone, Kevin Stultz, Mayo Thompson and Benjamin Weissman.
The work ranges from the examination of popular and counterculture, to closely focused dialogues with specific texts, drawings or other visual forms and deep engagement with different musical idioms to the use of the materials and forms of technologies as creative support.

www.erikaostrander.com
IG @erikaostrander

Biography
Erika Ostrander’s sculptures and installations reflect her engagement with the ephemerality of materials and the tactile and performative aspects of her work process. Incorporating materials such as human hair, salvaged print media, and animal tissue, Ostrander engages in the production of visceral objects that invoke the body’s phenomenological relationship to the transformation of the organic materials with which she works. Ostrander received her MFA from the UC San Diego in 2016; her MA in 2013 and BA in 2011 from California Sate University, Northridge. Her work has been exhibited at The Brand Library, Torrance Art Museum, Reserve Ames, Eastside International, Open Mind Art Space,  and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Currently, Ostrander is the Exhibitions Coordinator for the CSUN Art Galleries.

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

www.chandlermcwilliams.com
IG @chandlermcwilliams

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.

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.

www.shanalutker.com
IG @shashashananana

Biography
Shana Lutker is Los Angeles-based artist. Shaped by the archives of psychoanalysis and surrealism, her interdisciplinary work in sculpture, performance, writing and installation foregrounds an uncanny relationship between memory and history. Solo exhibitions and performance include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Cabaret Voltaire. Lutker’s work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Performa 13 and many US and international venues including the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Transformer Station at Cleveland Museum of Art, Hauser & Wirth, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Orange County Museum of Art, and SculptureCenter. Her work has been covered in Art in America, Artforum, Artillery, Blouin ArtInfo, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, among others. Lutker is the Executive Director of Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism and an editor of X-TRA. She received her MFA from UCLA and BA from Brown University. Lutker is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles.

www.karenlofgren.net
IG @karenlofgren

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.

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.

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.

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).

www.johnknuth.com
IG @knuthstudio

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.

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.

www.objectsforothers.com

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.

www.HubbyCo.com
IG @HubbyCo.com

Artist Statement
This neon painted text piece viewable from the street, depicts this recognizable, but perhaps not fully understood word: “ABRACADABRA,” originally used to ward off illness in the second century AD.  With the pandemic in mind, I painted the word repeatedly in its traditional triangular form, with one letter dropped from each successive line. The intention: as the word is repeated and reduced, so is the illness.

Biography
Bettina Hubby (b. 1968, New York City) earned her MFA in 1995 from the School of Visual Arts in New York and moved to Los Angeles in 1999, where she currently lives and works.

Hubby’s practice is wide-ranging, including collage, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video, VR and photography. While humor is what grounds her practice, she explores themes of ritual, construction, identity, community, and the constantly changing notion of self and other within all of those interrelated categories. In addition to her individual practice, Hubby is known for her extensive collaborative projects and curatorial work—engaging diverse communities and often existing in settings that challenge the conventions of exhibition spaces, celebrating collaboration and resisting easy categorization.

Hubby’s work has been widely exhibited including solo exhibitions at Klowden Mann (Los Angeles), The Erotic Heritage Museum (Las Vegas), and Lora Reynold Gallery (Austin). Group exhibitions in Los Angeles include Klowden Mann, Santa Monica Museum of Art, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), ForYourArt, Side Street Projects, and The Center for the Arts Eagle Rock. Hubby and her projects have been featured in numerous media outlets including ARTFORUM, The New York Times, T Style Magazine, W Magazine, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Curbed, and LAWeekly.