LA West

www.18thstreet.org/artists/jeff-beall/
IG @jeffbeallstudio

Artist Statement
The best way to make positive change in these uncertain times is to look deeply, with compassion and curiosity, and to embrace the reality before us.

Small gestures matter.

Biography
Jeff Beall is an artist whose work has taken a variety of forms over the years, exhibiting in an irregularly regular fashion since 1987. While formally varied, Beall’s conceptually driven work consistently uses techniques of veiling/revealing to heighten the experience of looking.

Beall’s most recent solo exhibition was entitled Unsolved: LA Uprising @ 25 Years. Its presentation, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the LA riots in April 2017 at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica, CA, served as a memorial honoring the 23 unsolved homicide victims who lost their lives during the uprising. Carolina Miranda wrote about this work for the LA Times.

Public collections include the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Berkeley Art Museum, Carnegie Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Oakland Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art and Portland Museum of Art. 

Beall is co-publisher of X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal and has served on the board of Project X Foundation for Art and Criticism since 2002. He also currently serves on the Advisory Council of social justice organization, Liberty Hill Foundation. He earned an MFA at CalArts, and a BA in Architecture from UC Berkeley.

www.lucianaabait.com
IG @Luciana Abait

The space for Luciana Abait’s work was provided by The Sallas Foundation

About the work:
I am specifically presenting this idyllic mountain landscape as a way to provide spectators a moment of wonder and peace in the face of the worldwide catastrophic pandemic we are all living in. I chose this location because the contrast between the romantic Mountain View and the deserted industrial/ warehouse typical Los Angeles location creates an extremely unexpected and interesting dialogue about urban civilization and its relationship with nature.

Artist Statement
My work invites viewers to reimagine nature through manipulated photographic landscapes, installations and photo-sculptures. Natural landscapes and human-made utilitarian objects or structures are twisted, scaled out of proportion, or impossibly adapted to new roles where they coexist in a magical reality. These eerie, hyper-real psychological landscapes range from sci-fi to storybook, encompassing parables that critically reflect upon human beings and their fraught relationship with the natural environment. These intricate interrelations portray the aggressive intrusion of humans into nature, but also imagine alternate (or perhaps future) realities marked by adaptation and assimilation, isolation and displacement.

Images are sourced from personal photographs, shots of snowfields and mountain sides, textbooks, encyclopedias, and stock imagery, connecting personal experience to a collective geographic history. I work over the surface with pencils and pastels erasing the photographic quality beneath, and lending urgency to these emotionally charged images.

Biography
Luciana Abait was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She lives and works in Los Angeles. She is a resident artist of 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica. Abait’s work has been shown in galleries, museums, and international art fairs throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. Some of these are: A Letter to the Future at Los Angeles International Airport, Flow, Blue at Rockford College Art Museum, Illinois and Sur Biennial in California. She has also completed numerous public art commissions. Abait’s works are held by private, public and corporate collectors from the United States, Europe, Latin America and East Asia.

www.peterzellner.com
IG @peterzellner

Artist Statement
This work is inspired by Herman Melville’s contemplations of the unknowable in nature and, by extension, what remains unknown to us about our own natures.

Biography
Peter Zellner (b. 1969, Manhattan, New York) is an architect, painter, and educator. As an architect he has designed numerous art galleries on both coasts including Matthew Marks Los Angeles (with Ellsworth Kelly), Maccarone and Night Gallery. His recent paintings are characterized by an insistent and obsessive fashioning and refashioning of families of marks and symbols. Often making his works on the ground or floor, Zellner employs non-traditional instruments and devices to spread, scrape, apply and “…synthesize layers of ecstatically colored mottled fields, thickly painted segmented hexagrids, brush-drawn figures, and moments of atmospheric interruption.” (Christopher Michlig.)

www.jodyzellen.com
IG @jzother

Biography
Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist who works in many media simultaneously.
She makes interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artists’ books.

www.why-site.com
IG @whyheywhynot

Artist Statement
Kulapat’s Kare Wash is more an act of engagement and gratitude towards artists, art professionals and medical professionals so they have clean cars to drive towards their destinations. Even without human contact, with the guests remain savagely within their vehicles, the artists of the Kare Wash hope to serve and convey the sense of care and gratitude as they do their best to cleanse. Guests will leave with shiny vehicle and specially made Bumper Sticker Decal as a memory of the Kare Wash in May 2020.

Biography
Kulapat Yantrasast (born in Bangkok) is a thinker and designer in architecture, art and design. He is the founding partner and creative director of wHY, a design practice with focus in multiple disciplines, organized into dedicated workshops – architecture, landscape, museums, objects, and ideas. In 2007 Yantrasast’s studio designed the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the first new art museum building in the world to receive the LEED certification (Gold).Yantrasast talks and lectures around the globe on creativity, food, and architecture.

www.henryvincentart.com 
IG @10Hank10

Artist Statement
This is a mini retrospective of my work that spans the years. The works will be hanging in the alley behind my studio which I have been at for 25 years.

Biography
Henry Vincent was born in East Detroit, Michigan and moved to Los Angeles in 1989 after getting his MFA at Columbia University. Over the past three decades his work has been exhibited in numerous institutions and biennials including Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Ludwig Museum outside of Cologne, the MAK Center (in Vienna and Los Angeles), the 1993 Sevilla Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann and the 2019 Bombay Beach Biennale. He has had solo gallery shows at Patrick Painter, Inc., Niels Kantor Gallery, Burnett Miller Gallery and group shows at Wilding Cran Gallery, Desert Center, and Gabriele Senn Galerie in Paris. Vincent is also the CEO and founder of O.K. Creek Mining and Exploration, which is an industrialized total work of art centered around an ongoing placer gold excavation operation run out of Dawson City in northern Canada’s Yukon Territory.

www.victoriavesna.com
IG @victoriavesna
https://www.facebook.com/victoriavesna

Three weeks ago, there were 74,000 people who died in the USA. Based on the graphs, the estimate was that it would get to a staggering 100,000 by the end of the month, or the days of the drive by art exhibition. It unfortunately came true + another 5,000 — this was an underestimate! The three signs were positioned from the area of the UCLA hospital to the Veteran’s home and the beach — that is about seven miles which would be 18,480 dead bodies.

Artist Statement
100,000 people will be dead in the USA by May 30th and the number is increasing daily with no end in sight. It is hard to wrap one’s head around this statistic and even more difficult in Los Angeles where we are already spread about and mostly move around in our cars. Every single person dying unexpectedly is a tragedy. We do however daily think and consider our movement in space and time based on the status roads / traffic and miles to our destinations. If we calculate the number of bodies that died, using the width of a burial casket, shoulder to shoulder in a mass grave, one mile would be equivalent to 2640 bodies or almost 40 miles across the USA.

As the Crow Flies is an expression used to show a straight line from point A to B. The crow is often a symbol of bad luck and death but also may be considered as a sign of transformation and many cultures consider them keepers of the sacred laws that go beyond linear one-dimensional thinking. These street signs are meant to make us more aware of all those who unnecessarily died and to pay attention, observe and listen. Imagine that every mile you drive is equal to 2640 bodies shoulder to shoulder.

Biography
Victoria Vesna is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience to students. Victoria has exhibited her work in 30+ solo exhibitions, 100+ group shows, has been published in 30+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. Her work has always centered on environmental and social issues and she often hosts symposia and exhibitions that address climate change.

www.juliaschwartzart.com
IG @juliaschwartzstudio

Reflections
Although I’ve had access to my regular studio and could have continued work on a series of paintings in process, somehow that work no longer seemed relevant. Instead I’ve found myself once again returning to working in books which I’ve done for the past 5 years. In this period of isolation and quarantine, I began making collages with repurposed materials- newspapers and everyday papers, glue and gouache, very no-tech and quiet work, Glue paper, and paint. A return to simple materials which reflects a need to simplify things in these strange times. The work on view here is an expansion onto a broader canvas, but the idea is the same. I started adding daily updates from LA County Public Health website, with dates, new cases and deaths from Covid-19.

Artist Statement
I have always liked Keats’ idea of “negative capability;” this is quite compatible with being essentially self-taught, although my colleagues remind me that all of us are always learning on the job. Still, without benefit or burden of formal “technique” in art-making, I am comfortable with doubt, uncertainty, the freedom to explore materials and methods, and an infinite freedom to fail. Materially I appreciate the sublime- oil paint on canvas or linen- and the humble- gouache on book pages and trading cards, sharpie on cardboard and envelopes.
Art depicts my situation- the geographic, the emotional, the existential, the state of the world- and how I make sense of it. That means trying to make sense of the senselessness of the everyday world and its outsized ‘seismic disasters’ including personal loss and grief, profound political and cultural fragmentation, and most recently the absolute crumbling of the world as we have known it and the traumatic reverberations that are to come.

Biography
Julia Schwartz is an artist working in Santa Monica. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including a solo installation “tenderly cradled and lavishly flung” at Visitor Welcome Center in 2018 and recent work with the Binder of Women, including a limited edition print release at The Pit and upcoming group shows. Curatorial projects include “States of Being” at the Torrance Art Museum (2015) and “Black Mirror” at Charlie James Gallery (2017). Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including New American Paintings, Two Coats of Paint, Huffington Post, and The New York Times.

www.kimschoenstadt.com
www.nowbeherela.com
IG @kimschoenstadt

The Tasting Kitchen, a staple in the Venice community for the last 10 years, it has a chalk board wall in the upstairs dining area for which they commission chalk murals from local artists.

Artist Statement
For Drive-By-Art I have created a new work (pictured above), based on a 2017 commission for The Tasting Kitchens upstairs dining area. Since I already had a contact at the restaurant, I just ‘poured myself a cup of ambition’ and contacted them to see if they would be open to hosting me for this project. They were super receptive and welcomed me back. The work combines parts of the 2017 commission with color patterning based on a needlepoint chair cushion my mother made in the ’70s. The architecture included is from El Segundo, Venice Beach, Westchester, and proposed lifeguard station by local architect Thom Mayne.

Since ‘Safer At Home’ began, I’ve been spending time with the needlepoint chairs my mom made. Memories of my mom (who passed in 2012), her artistic skills, and intellectual curiosity have been swirling in my mind. She had an indomitable spirit and in addition to her masters in social work, she would take night classes at the University of Chicago including an Albers based color theory class and multiple Charles Dickens courses.

This new work is an homage to her spirit and a reflection of the odd new rhythms life is taking in this pandemic moment. Echoing the ebbs and flows of our reconstructed ideas of connectivity, space, and time.

In this moment of multiple simultaneous traumas, it felt weird to continue to do my job, it felt less important. Yet in a year where all my projects have dried up overnight this opportunity to continue to do my work was important. What I can do is commit to a percentage of the sale of this work to go towards Black Lives Matter and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

About The Tasting Kitchen
The Tasting Kitchen is a contemporary Italian restaurant with a New American farm to table heritage, using traditional and classic regional diction with thoughtful, local growers to guide guests through the ever changing landscape of Southern Californian cuisine. The restaurant reinforces their scratch kitchen philosophy with handmade pastas, in-house cured meats, and produce from the westside farmers markets. The menu changes regularly based on seasonal fresh produce and offers an optional tasting format as a guided dining experience. The neo-classical cuisine is amplified by an exquisite, purposely-curated wine portfolio and a celebrated cocktail program. Designed around a central olive tree in the entrance, The Tasting Kitchen, which opened in 2009,  is a romantic, intimate space where one would be comfortable finishing a bottle of wine with friends until closing time.

Biography
Kim Schoenstadt was born in Chicago, Il. and currently lives in Venice, CA. She received a BA from Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. She is known for large scale wall drawings / murals and a project entitled Now Be Here which gathered close to 1,000 women-identifying and nonbinary artists in Downtown L.A. for a historic photograph that visually showed the world artists who are not always included in exhibitions and collections. The project launched other “Now Be Here” events across the country in Brooklyn, Miami and Washington, D.C. to significant media attention and critical acclaim. Schoenstadt’s work will be featured at the Fairview Heights Metro station on the Crenshaw/LAX line.

www.kennyscharf.com  
IG @Kenny_Scharf

Artist Statement
Toy drive is a continuation of my obsession with plastic and garbage. This is an ongoing and growing piece that gets added to a couple times a month. Most of it is found discarded in the street, or my personal consumption and/or plastic things that come across my path. I hope to stimulate the eyes and mind. The ongoing consumption of plastic goods is continuously overflowing and overwhelming the earth and especially the world’s oceans. Plastic trash is a great artist material because it’s free, colorful, light, waterproof, and evocative.
Although, I feel sad about the suffering that people are going through physically and mentally during this time I also welcome the brief but hopeful respite( I noticed a lot more birds singing outside my window)that the slow down has caused as I feel the pace and path we were on similar to a speeding freight train going off a cliff.