LA East

www.oliviabooth.net
IG @oabooth

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”

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.

www.scottbenzel.net

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 Kerner’s quasi-mystical interpretation of the process was superseded in the 1890’s by the psychologists Alfred Binet and Victor Henri’s ‘scientific’ interpretation, which suggested that the presence of recognizable images in the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.

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

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.