Upcoming show: La Cosa Nostra

La Cosa Nostra - This Thing Of Ours

Artists:
Esther Achaerandio, Jon Apgar, Steven Bankhead, Jane Callister, Rebecca Campbell, Daniela Campins, Brian Cooper, Hollis Cooper, Sydney Croskery, Tony Delap, Walpa D'Mark, Alan Disparte, Tom Dowling, Ariel Erestingcol, McLean Fahnestock, Roni Feldman, Jon Flack, Richard Galling, Martin Gantman, Jeff Gauntt, Steve Hampton, Elana Hill, Carmine Iannaccone, Ichiro Irie, Kiel Johnson, Seth Kaufman, Andy Kolar, William Kaminski, Owen Kydd, Christopher Kuhn, David Michael Lee, Susan Logerici, Jason Manley, Melanie Moore, Nobuhito Nishigawara, Claudia Parducci, Max Presneill, Jason Ramos, Christopher Pate, Mary Anna Pomonis, Alison Rash, Nano Rubio, Connie Samaras, Aili Schmeltz, Jaime Scholnick, Brad Spence, Gabie Strong, Christian Tedeschi, Noah Thomas, Chris Trueman, Grant Vetter, Peter Wu, Liat Yossifor

enter via parking lot at rear of Assi supermarket (just southeast of The Wiltern on 8th St) off S Serrano Ave in Koreatown and take escalator up. Galleries at end of left branch in mall.
(213) 785-1121 or galerierheeway@gmail.com for further information

Speculative Materialism: Abstract Art and its Conditions

Speculative Materialism: Abstract Art and its Conditions
D-Block Projects
218 N Promenade
Long Beach, CA 90802
April 7-30, 2011

Opening reception: Saturday April 9, 6-9 pm

http://dblockprojects.com/

This survey of seventeen abstract artists looks at how abstraction has become a speculative practice in the wake of postmodernism. At the level of form many of the artists included in this show mix different mediums, participate with site-specific concerns and embrace an aesthetic that doesn’t view the architectonic and the organic as mutually exclusive.

Outside of these formal similarities each of the artists in this survey is invested in negotiating a distinct set of conceptual problems that range from kitsch to technology to entropy and beyond. While there is no defining ethos for twenty-first century abstraction the artists in this exhibition continue to provide a relevant set of conditions for continuing to speculate about the nature of the abstract.
Participating Artists: Brandon Anschultz, Seann Brackin, Hollis Cooper, Alan Disparte, David French, Richard Galling, Kent Familton, Steve Hampton, Greg Kozaki, Ashley Landrum, David Michael Lee, Marcus Perez, Alison Rash, Samantha Thomas, Chris Trueman, Grant Vetter and Stephan Walters.

Lawndale wrap-up

I will be putting up some images from my solo show at Lawndale in the next few days - in the meantime, here's a link to my artist talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRTHG5BEy9o

a link to the interview I did with Meghan Hendley at KUHF:
http://app1.kuhf.org/houston_public_radio-news-display.php?articles_id=1298931195

and a small shout-out by the Houston Press:
http://www.houstonpress.com/2011-03-03/calendar/working-space-by-hollis-cooper/

Volume at AT1:Projects

http://www.at1projects.com/

VOLUME is an experimental and expansive exhibition featuring a wide spectrum of LA and NY-based contemporary artists of diverse media - painting, sculpture, site-specific and multi-media installation, performance, sound art, and video - whose collective bios boast prestigious bi-coastal, national and international exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the New Museum New York, Performa, Deitch Projects, and documenta.

Contained within AT1 Projects, a 12,500 square-foot alternative venue, VOLUME takes advantage of space en masse; each artist will independently create, fill, employ, dissect, reconsider, and/or theoretically deconstruct the far-flung spaces within the massive warehouse locale. Rounding out VOLUME's audible dimension, solo and interactive sound and music performances will inhabit the venue on opening night. As if 12,500 square-feet were not enough, New York-based curatorial collective Super/Prime will occupy the adjacent "Super/Prime PAVILION".

Inspired by the sprawling spaciousness of LA's landscape as springboard and welcome respite from NY's intensely condensed atmosphere, VOLUME's New York-based curator, Andrea Neustein, unites East and West coast artists for this ambitious investigation of sound and space.

VOLUME ARTISTS: Harold Ancart, Elisabeth Benjamin, Vahe Berberian, Dan Carlson, Hollis Cooper, Mariechen Danz, Ira Eduardovna, Yael Frank, Liz Glynn, Alvaro Guillen, Simon Haas, Francisco Janes, Johns Burtle & Barlog, Erlend Larsen, William Latta, Brendan Lynch, Emily Mast, Melodie Mousset, Levon Parian, Grear Patterson, Tom Pnini, Adam Rabinowitz, Grayson Revoir, Samantha Roth, Jess Ryan, William Sabiston, Aili Schmeltz, Nathan Spondike, Miljan Suknovic, Ryan Sullivan, Kara Tanaka, Cody Trepte, Logan White, Aaron Wrinkle.

the Super/Prime PAVILION: The Cloacina Project (Molly Danielsson and Mathew Lippincott), Harry Gassel, Brendan Griffiths & Mylinh Nguyen, Riley Hooker, Gary Kachadourian, Brian Randolph, Steven Sarkozy, and Stacia Yeapanis.

Opening night: Arturo Vidich's brief dramatic sermon on mortality, which initiates with robust verbiage and physicality and disintegrates into cocooned silence; and a concert of Brooklyn-based pop trio Keepaway; and LA-based Lucky Dragons performing their interactive communal sound and light piece "Make a Baby".

Forever Now at Claremont Graduate University

Forever Now

East and Peggy Phelps Galleries
Claremont Graduate University

Anita Bunn
Liz Carney
Hollis Cooper
Katie Grinnan
Iva Gueorguieva
Michael Reafsnyder
Christian Tedeschi
Feodor Voronov

Curated by David Pagel

January 19 - February 5, 2010

Opening Reception:
January 19, 6-9pm

Paradise Lost [Inland Empire Weekly]

Edenistic Divergence examines the human impact on perfection
By: Stacy Davies

Environment has always played a crucial role in the world of an artist—if not directly represented in a work as landscape or dwelling, then always as a filter through which any emotional representation is seen and felt. Such artistic resonances take on many forms and themes, and when that environment is in chaos, the depictions become more fantastical and heated. Such is the case with the Riverside Art Museum’s newest show, “Edenistic Divergence,” guest curated by Andi Campognone through her curatorial service, AC Projects.

Culling some of the most breathtaking and outwardly chaotic interior landscapes from artists Lisa Adams, Rebecca Niederlander, Kimber Berry and Hollis Cooper, Campognone has put together an awe-inspiring show that depicts not only our divergence from a fabled Eden of perfection, but a recreation of that utopia in relationship to outside modern forces—most specifically, as mentioned in the show’s statement, of “pollution, global warming and genetic tinkering.”

Adams’ work makes an instantly recognizable connection to these powers. Her large oil on panel pieces of landscapes are our trodden grounds—surreal lands with birds and trees, fish and flora. But the beauty of these offspring of nature is capsized by the fact that they are floating on an Earth in upheaval. In Convocation, for example, delicate yellow birds perch high on gnarled branches of a tree submerged in water and tar-like runoff from a serenely smoking volcano in the background. The sky is blue and the water (perhaps from glacial meltdown?) lovingly reflects a truth—one that has been ushered in by destruction. In Given That All Things are Equal, there isn’t even a volcano—just water—but nothing is actually in that water. Instead, images of birds and a flower float above it. Even a ghostly fish and, ironically, a water lily, won’t be tempted by the darkened sea and are instead suspended in the air.

Sculptor Rebecca Niederlander offers up a vision of environmental overgrowth that might be expected in some future Eden when the earth returns to its natural form. In There is a Nova in the Bed Next to Mine, cascades of vellum paper blossoms pour down from the sky creating a jungle of purity that eventually empties into a pool of soft, white petals. It is melting and recycling without destruction. The motif is continued in A Certain Amount of Narcissism is a Good Thing, a mobile maze of white, pink and blue electrical wires turned into whirling dervishes of energy and motion—much like the tempests we both create and fear.

This subtlety is exploded, however, by Kimber Berry’s monumental Liquid Landscape Environment—an astonishingly detailed metamorphosis of combustion and expansion that sprays up the gallery walls and then bubbles back down them, meandering into corners and filling them with electrified colors from across the spectrum. Utilizing acrylics on PVC and vinyl to create this primordial celebration of purple waves crashing and twisting greens creeping, Berry has outdone herself with this organic, other-worldly experience.

Transmuting this wild abandon into a more fixed, yet no less exciting form, Hollis Cooper’s installation, Proteus, continues the colorful ride into what appear to be cities of the cosmos—structures that are recognizable as skyscrapers of a metropolis, but that are clearly located in another dimension, perhaps, even, in a more perfect parallel world of our own. Shooting across the back walls of the gallery, the neon buildings jut into spikes and suddenly roll down into loops and curves, sending us careening up and then blasting down a warping boulevard at sonic speed. It is a world where architecture is not hindered by gravity or zoning, and the pure beauty of structure can be imagined as if nature herself had designed it—a fitting end-piece to this visionary exhibit that pays tribute to man, and his undoing.

Edenistic Divergence at the Riverside Art Museum

Edenistic Divergence

Curated by Andi Campognone

Nov. 21, 2009 - February 20, 2010

Opening Reception:

Saturday, November 21 7 - 9pm

Riverside Art Museum

3425 Mission Inn Ave.

Riverside, CA 92501

951-684-7111

Museum Hours: Monday - Saturday 10am - 4pm

New Paintings

I finally have images of about half of the new set of paintings up ... more should follow shortly.