LA West

www.phyllisgreen.net
IG @pgreen50

The work will be displayed behind a window on the north side of the building facing Wilshire Place. (“Wilshire Place” is the alley just north of 1218 but south of Wilshire Blvd.). Please note that this work can only be seen on the north side of the building.

The artist will be seated in front of a window, dressed in a hand-made cape and silently reading from the BHAGAVAD GITA

Artist statement
The suggestion that we change our lives like we change our clothes was offered in the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Sanskrit verses that are often regarded as the most influential text shaping Hindu spiritual thought and life:

“Worn-out garments
Are shed by the body;
Worn-out bodies
Are shed by the dweller
Within the body.
New bodies are donned
By the dweller, the garments”

Biography
Phyllis Green began her career as an artist, educator and curator in Los Angeles in 1981. Her practice integrates gender politics and the sphere of craft. Though she has worked in video, installation and performance, she is primarily an object maker who represents the body. These bodily surrogates have taken the form of skeletal fragments, organs, garments and containers. Most recently, her focus is the contrast between the material world and the immaterial world of belief. Green’s sculpture has been exhibited nationally and internationally for forty years. She is the recipient of individual artist’s fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the City of Los Angeles, the City of Santa Monica and The California Community Foundation. The J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation named her a Fellow in Fine Arts in 2014. She has taught extensively at universities in Southern California, including UCLA and USC. 

www.sonjagerdes.com

Artist statement
My practice can be defined by the relationship and interactions between the body, energy, and air and what it means to be human. My starting point is the consideration of the accessibility of air through a conceptual science fiction project called Oxygenenergizer (OE). Oxygenenergizer is a sci-fi exploration of a future in which machines create energy from oxygen and “breathing” is recognized as the connecting force between all life and spirits on the planet. It speaks poetically of the contemporary human condition as an ongoing, infinite, fluid movement versus the reality of environmental change. Through a combination of sculptures, performances, writings, spirit channeling, and social activation, Oxygenenergizer manifests moments of infinite possibilities while activating a sense of what it means to be amorphous — abstract, ambiguous, absurd and uncertain.

Biography
Sonja Gerdes was born in Germany. She studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and from 2007-2013, co-ran the Berlin-based artist run space, Infernoesque. Her work probes our disdainful relationship to the environment, grappling with the unchecked entrenchment of late capitalism and the potential extinction through climate change, while positioning a speculative convergence of technology and organic life as a malleable, amorphous mind and a means to create and embark upon a utopic future. “I see Oxygenenergizer as a multi-dimensional soul organism that draws on air for the potential to create a higher consciousness tapping into models of generative energies; being a soul spirit, a spider, a mother, a healer, an air activist, cellular plant life, an infinite hyper object for multispecies enmeshing.” The work also embodies a collective and dialogic dimension, one in which performances, durational works, and other site based activations become part of a process of engagement and an invitation towards creating meaningful dialogue around thoughts, belief, and change towards the infinite possibility of air and energy. Over the last few years Oxygenenergizer has created environments and installations that often connects us to a larger sense of the feminine and the animistic, suggesting embodied spaces that become porous modes of circulation – an ultimate soul-giving machine.

Recent exhibitions include Soft Schindler, Schindler House, Los Angeles; Pie of Trouble. Stays Trouble. Belly on Belly, Gas Gallery, Los Angeles; Pie of Trouble. Stays Trouble. Let’s Hang. Breathe. Oxygenenergizer. Becoming With. Genderless Breath. Animal Creature Plant Breath Soul. Air For Free. Do spiders breathe? The Multiple Amorphous Us. Crown Chakra – Sahasrara Rising. Nova, Cloaca Projects, San Francisco; Direct Contact, D21, Leipzig; School for Endurance Work, Cal State La, Los Angeles; Pie of Trouble. Let’s Hang. Air for Free. Uncertainty. Absurdity. You look at it but it doesn’t exist. Anahata. Vishuda rising. Unpredictability, Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; When the sea looks back. A Serpent’s Tale. The Many Headed Hydra #02, District, Berlin; Pie of Trouble. Let’s Hang. You look at it but it doesn’t exist. Air for free and The Elegant Universe, The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Unblinking Eye, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Berlin, Germany; and informell natur, Sabine Knust, Berlin, Germany. Her show at Cloaca Projects, San Francisco was reviewed by Brian Karl in Artforum, may 2018.

www.reneeafox.com
IG @reneeafox

Reflections
It doesn’t look like our world will be quite the same and the anxiety that exists because we are physically separated from each other without the ability to plan on what happens next is something I believe art can help to alleviate. Thank you to Warren Neidich, Renee Petropoulos, Michael Slenske, Anuradha Vikram, Julie McKim and everyone else working on and participating in the Drive-By-Art Los Angeles project for helping to bring art to everyone, at a time when generous gestures like this are needed.

Artist Statement
Nature has always been my muse. I am inspired by its intense beauty, resiliency and ability to heal, the fragrance of flowers blooming and sex in the spring that turns to death in winter. As a subject, nature for me grows more urgent, now more than ever before. I illustrate plants and animals in graphite and colored pencil as transparent layers over acrylic paintings of mythical landscapes with features of local landmarks like the range of the Sierras, Point Reyes and sometimes urban settings like Laurel Canyon. My passion for early American landscape painting inspired a dedicated study of traditional painting and drawing techniques which I enjoy using in combination with safe non toxic materials and modern methods. Stories referencing popular myths of love and loss surface in the paintings, and there is always a sweet vulnerability there, where ordinary things become special, that I think probably every person can relate to.

Biography
Born in Frederick, MD (1973), Renée Fox studied at the Corcoran School of Art and Design, WDC, from 1998- 2000, and Otis College of Art and Design, LA 2000- 2002. Since then she has exhibited new work each year in Los Angeles and nationally. She completed seven public art mural projects between 2012 and 2019, the next planned for LAX in 2021. Her work is in the permanent collection at MOAH and private collections.

www.angel-chen.com
IG @angelchenworld

Reflections
The coronavirus quarantine period has given us a great pause, an opportunity to reassess, recalibrate, and recommit.  We can choose a new path.  The Joshua Tree Society for Art & Living nurtures the creative process through a philosophy of permaculture that is natural, organic, and sustainable.  By returning to the land, we reconnect and harmonize with ourselves, each other, and the natural environment. 

Proceeds of this print will benefit the Spartan Mansion Artist Residency

Artist Statement
The artist is a modern mystic, cultural producer, and gatekeeper of the secrets of eternity.  To create fearlessly, one must reach deep into ancient wells, transforming our darkest shadows into light.  Making art is a spiritual practice, channeling material, form, space, and time itself.   The work is feminine, process-based, and intuitive.  Living and working on the edge of civilization, immersed in the natural environment of the raw, wild desert, in harmony with the earth and its rhythms, my closest neighbors are rattlesnakes and scorpions… I make art from this place.

Biography
Angel Chen is best known for her Forces of Nature series.  She works in multiple materials from painting to sculpture to photography to media.   The work is “Femme Brut” delicate and forceful, material and ephemeral, timeless and now, raw and refined.  Born in Taipei, raised on the coast of Southern California, she earned her BFA from UCLA, and MFA from Calarts, received the Ahmanson award, distinguished Skowhegan artist residency, and Atlantic Center for the Arts Fellowship.  She exhibited at BVLGARI jewelry showroom on Rodeo Drive and completed a 20 ft commission for the Annenberg Foundation Offices.  She considers her Zen Dome Joshua Tree to be her largest sculpture to date.

www.kristincalabrese.com
IG @only_future_thing

Reflections
I am broken-hearted because we can’t greet each other with hugs or stand next to each other anymore. I am heartened that artists still art — and give hugs by making concept shows together — just as much art as ever before because, for artists, to art is to live.

Artist Statement
For this project, my husband and I each decided to make a painting for opposite sides of a sandwich board. My painting is a loose depiction of a surface I’ve been using to wipe my brushes on (which is a way to record time and the present moment as it’s passing by).

Biography
Born in San Francisco in 1968, Kristin Calabrese is a Los Angeles-based painter and conceptual artist who received her MFA from UCLA in 1998.  Her paintings are imbued with multiple layers of meaning. Charged with psychological implications, the canvases eerily resonate on a subconscious level. Calabrese has exhibited with Gagosian, Leo Koenig, Saatchi Gallery, LA><ART, and Susanne Vielmetter, amongst others – and is represented by Brennan & Griffin in New York. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, WA, The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, and the San Francisco Art Institute, CA. and is included in such prestigious collections as the Neuberger Berman, Saatchi, Getty Research Institute, and the Hammer Museum.

www.ninarsalerno.com
IG @perfectreject

Biography
Humor and irony, even tragic irony, constitute the binding elements of my work, as they provide the opportunity to connect with my participants/audience while addressing complex problems; alienation, prejudice mechanism of social disaggregation are the central themes coursing through my work, and which
I disassemble, examine, and reassemble into structures that reveal the monstrosity or beauty hidden in plain sight.

https://Kimberlybrooks.com
@kimberlybrooksartist
facebook.com/kimberly.brooks

Artist statement
Painting is believing.

Biography
Kimberly Brooks is an artist whose work integrates landscape and abstraction to explore a variety of subjects dealing with history, memory and identity.  Brooks paintings have been showcased in numerous juried exhibitions with artist curators including Chris Burden and curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Brooks received her B.A. in Literature at UC Berkeley and studied painting at Otis and UCLA.  

www.voyagela.com

Artist Statement
Leonardo Bravo’s paintings draw upon the language of modernist geometric abstraction through complex structures and systems in saturated colors that suggest a constant state of becoming and unfolding. These works take their cues from a variety of sources including Bauhaus master weavers Gunta Stolzl and Ani Albers, the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, the works of Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, and traditional South American woven tapestries. Inherent in these structures is the visual tension suggested by the relationship of each color form to the other, and the way in which negative space becomes a counterpoint to each fixed form. The complexity of these structures suggest an architecture of time and space in which forms continue to build and collapse upon each other, emanating new relationships, and suggesting pathways that open up to limitless possibilities, questions, and complexities. 

Biography
Born in Santiago, Chile, Leonardo Bravo earned his BFA from OTIS Institute of Art & Design and MFA from the University of Southern California. Over the last few years his works have been exhibited at Elephant Gallery, Los Angeles, Charlie James Gallery, The Architects Collective, BKB Art & Design, Palm Springs, Mount San Jacinto College, Cerritos College Art Gallery, and Luis De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles.

www.theodoreboyer.com
IG @theodoreboyer

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.

www.sarahbeadle.com

Artist Statement
My professional life and creative life have had parallel currents which circulate around the material possibilities of food. Beginning as documents, writing, and research, my creative work has unfolded as carefully composed eating encounters, social clubs, speakeasies, or gatherings. Events provide an approachable structure for historical, political, or material puzzles. Plus, the added bonus of the work finding its completion in shared conversation, consumption, and digestion.

The forms of social engagement I’ve built a life on can’t happen right now, and may never be the same. Perhaps it’s all over. What a grand opportunity to start over with something new. Or, return to things I’ve done in the past.

Untitled (Here), 2020 marks a tenuous return to the production of improbable objects. I look forward to returning to photography. Much of my work will continue to occupy spaces of exchange where reciprocity (or lack of it) is more pronounced: living rooms, thresholds, back hallways, parking lots, kitchens, garages, bus stops. It will continue to trace and materialize spatial and social politics. I’m still interested in what birds, butterflies, and mammals can teach us about terrain, control, imagination of movement over land. About territorial ideologies. About border control. Yet now, instead of articulating my thoughts through encounters, I return to things. Things observed, sometimes at a distance. Like a beckoning windsock. That’s where things are now.

Biography
Sarah Beadle is an artist, producer, and educator who uses event production, architectural intervention, and photography to test everyday experiences of pleasure, power, and consumption. Her work is site focused, process driven, and activated by subjective research. Recent projects examine the cultural regulation of acts of reciprocity, especially around invisible labor, the performance of hospitality, and the politics of care. Her work is often dedicated to what animals can teach humans about politics.

Beadle has produced events and performed with artist collective notch at University Art Gallery, CSULB, Long Beach; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; Los Angeles Nomadic Division Manifest Destiny Billboard Project; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Materials & Applications, Los Angeles; UAG @ University of California, Irvine; Wight Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles; Carter and Citizen Gallery, Los Angeles; Queen’s Nails Projects, San Francisco; 18 Reasons, San Francisco; NTBA Gallery, Los Angeles; CENTRAL, Portland; TuckUnder, Minneapolis. She has exhibited photography at UAG Gallery, University of California, Irvine; Wight Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles; Denizen Design Gallery, Los Angeles.