News and Updates

Upcoming show: La Cosa Nostra

2011-10-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-04T19:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-05T20:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-01-08T10:28:00.000-08:00

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]

2010-01-08T08:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-16T20:11:00.001-08:00

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

2009-05-12T17:33:00.003-07:00

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

Coriolis

2008-11-09T20:10:00.000-08:00

Some new shots of my piece up at the Wignall Museum - taken from slightly different angles (click for a larger image):

The walls are about 12' high.

Interview

2008-10-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was asked by Brian Sherwin, founder of myartspace.com, to give an interview about my work. It is now online - read it here:

http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2008/10/art-space-talk-hollis-cooper.html

New Artist Statement

2008-06-05T21:10:00.000-07:00

I made some long overdue updates to my artist statement - I think it relates a little more clearly to the work now!

Connecting the Dots [Inland Empire Weekly]

2008-03-13T15:00:00.000-07:00

Sum of Parts illuminates the whole of conceptual collage
By: Stacy Davies

Aristotle’s principle, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” is a widely debated mathematical position. But while the idea might not compute in the finite world, in theory, and especially in art, it makes perfect sense. When speaking of collage and multi-media works in particular, parts are often made up of disparate objects and medium, all of which are conjoined in the artist’s mind and then processed out into tangible form.

In dba256’s Sum of Parts, we find not only displays of this collage process, but often the repetition of forms that are not at all dissimilar—yet tampered with enough to create fragmentation and cohesion all at the same time.

Two of Irene Abraham’s acrylic on panel pieces do exactly this. Ironically, Abraham has a background in a scientific discipline—a research biologist—and so intrinsically knows about sums and parts. It’s no wonder then that all of her pieces evoke cellular images—especially “Strange Bedfellows” and “Random Acts”—orderly jumbles of circles and disks all painted in muted modern tones of tangerine, lemon yellow, brick red and copper brown, almost like records or earthy gumballs, scattered across textured, deep blue and brown washes. The disks are at once stagnant and in motion—what one might really see through a microscope, if it’s a fun, party-inclined microscope that is. Her two Mylar pieces also channel a scientific feeling—in toy land—with blue-green and orangey-brown acrylic dots connected by drips that meld into skyscrapers and industrial buildings made from Tinker Toys—or maybe they’re just amino acids. DNA? Fun, all the way around, nevertheless.

Also on some type of cellular level, Rebecca Hamm’s watercolors on paper filter nature’s offerings through a colorful spectrum of globular mosaic. Up close, it’s difficult to tell where the tributaries of branch-like lines and amoebas are going—but they’re going somewhere in a randomness of organized movement. From afar, we see that the negative space of these fragments indeed make up a tree, foliage, rocks, and even a pond. We wondered if we had put on our red-tinted glasses if a hidden word or phrase would appear—but we forgot our glasses, blast it.

Pulling us out of the microcosm, digital artist and painter Hollis Cooper’s wall-high acrylic on plastic is an energetic splash of color—a twisted abstraction of semi-recognizable city infrastructure that absolutely screams Rock & Roll. Careening across the wall like the environment seen from the windows of an out-of-control virtual taxi cab on acid, buildings plunge and turn in on themselves in waves and ignite upward once again, crashing through another plane, tugging at our reality to come along.

Shedding the color, but transporting you further into wild yet recognizable abstraction, Rebecca Niederlander’s wire mobiles embody once again the repetition of shapes that the human mind craves and seeks out (like when we see faces of Jesus in tree trunks and potato chips). In a very “Seussian” way, her electrical wire danglings evoke childlike imaginings of zany chandeliers or even the bouncing bouffant of a swinger party hostess.

Speaking of childhood, that’s where several of Lisa Adams’ metaphysical acrylic on panels belong—in some Shel Silverstein storybook land. Fairly unplaceable insofar as finding a point of reference in the material world, Adams’ intricate vines with soon-to-bloom buds cling and burrow into a heavenly cameo of clouds, a simplistically circular dreamcatcher-like medallion, and my favorite, “How Important is Volume,” wrap around a plasma-membraned balloon, next to delicate blue string, floating high above a wistfully dark atmosphere.

We are now in a truly otherworldly and indefinable place, and so brings us to the finest piece in the exhibit. We don’t know what the hell is twisting around in the mind of Kimber Berry, but we wish we had it. Her 12x6 mixed media panel of paint and photo linen is utterly engrossing—a vibrant anarchy of super-charged shockwaves igniting almost every color on the palette: Think of an aquatic scene shot through the kaleidoscopic lens of The Yellow Submarine—psychedelic prisms of swirls that suck you into electric coral, vibrating frog’s legs and translucent crystalline waves. Berry, a truly emerging young artist, is a phemon to be sure, and this piece alone serves as the pure translation of the exhibit theme—the whole of her expression not only transcends its own parts, but renders them indistinguishable from it.

And we can’t wait to see what she does next.

dba256 installation image

2008-03-11T20:33:00.001-07:00

Until I get the 2008 images page up on my website, here's an image of my work "Flexure" installed at dba256 (click on the image for a bigger version)

Sum of Parts | Exhibition Essay

2008-03-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Sum of Parts
March 8 - April 5, 2008

Essay by Kathryn Hargreaves

Can artworks affect us the way, say, singing certain types of songs can measurably shift our brain activity from one hemisphere (namely, the left) to the other (the right), with consequent mood and creativity enhancement (among plenty of other great things)? The "songs" in said experiments are simply repetitions of certain elemental sounds using a certain rhythm. In other words, they are chants. Is there anything in the way an artwork can be structured that would similarly affect us? We're not talking content here. Most people don't need the Ayurvedics to tell them that certain images will elevate their mood (and others will decidedly not). So, is there a (silent) visual equivalent to chanting, a "visual music," as it were? Tibetan monks contend that their sand mandalas, depictions of entities enmeshed in specific geometric structures, evolve the spirit of their viewers. Aside from studies in how color and value affect mood, it seems little scientific research has been done on "how patterns of changing shape and colour affect our mood," to quote British mathematician/programmer/molecular biologist/animator James Crook. However, being an animator, he's probably talking about repetition in time, not across a two-dimensional surface. Chladni plates are proof that certain sounds affect physical objects in certain ways. However, gazing upon them probably will not affect you in the way, say, the producing sound (or producing the sound) might. On the other hand, researchers have noted that the Jackson Pollock works deemed masterpieces are the ones with a fractal measure (level of complexity) closest to that of nature. It's not quite a case of non-time-based repetition of elemental visual elements shifting our metabolism. Or is it? At the very least, we are attracted to things that mimic nature in some parameters, most likely because we first adapted to a milieu of a certain visual complexity. Would that certain abstract images could evoke a mental sound current that could transform us!

Irene Abraham http://www.ireneabraham.com used to be a research biologist. Her work is, not surprisingly, often analytical. Her drawings look like maps, and some of her grid paintings look like histograms or 2D Fourier Transforms. She consciously presents mappings between logical systems. As with the algorist group OuPeinPo, she enjoys the problem solving necessary from imposing constraints. In her Sudoku-based paintings, she uses the structure of such puzzles to evoke "questions about how we perceive and read image and pattern." Besides this cultural decoding, her drawings and her grid paintings (both the free-form and the systematic ones) seem to visually create rhythms in the brain: the grids are the pulse and the foregrounds the overlaid rhythm.

Lisa Adams http://lisamakesart.com/paint.htm puts the tendril to good use with images from the subconsious that sometimes evoke mortised typography ornaments devoid of their copy and sometimes dream catchers, among other things. Some nice visual jokes aside, her content is nearly Ayurvedic-proof: it makes you feel better for looking at it. Her birds seem happy, her objects fly through dreamy skies. Hers is a contemplative landscape that offers a visual sanctuary.

Hollis Cooper http://www.holliscooper.com does paintings right at the edge of control, with the medium flying about with Pollock-like fractal measure close to nature's. In her acrylic-on-PVC installations, she constructs virtual environments with an infinite number of vanishing points, twisting and folding geometric interpretations of chat rooms onto themselves. Suddenly, the multiple perspectives are melded into one, all the conversations overlap, in a visual atonalism. Illusion of depth flattens and vise versa. She perturbs this even further when she installs the resulting images so they visually morph the architecture. What we have is a metaphor for what space might be like if the Many melded into One, or the illusion of time disappeared and we could see everything at once.

Rebecca Hamm http://rebeccahamm.net of course gets very close to nature's pleasing fractal measure, because she is working directly from it. She does watercolors that from far away hint at the earlier work of watercolor uber-master Joseph Raffael. Often her content is nature taking over what she calls "human constructs." What could be more satisfying than that, seeing nature recuperate from humans?

Virginia Katz http://www.uber.com/virginiakatz# sometimes collages with string instead of glue, Annette Messager style. The nodes are cut-up paper detritus, but Katz has pooled the fragments by color, so you get what looks like a topographical map or a nebula. This and her other work invoke images of real things, most often as satellite views of the planet. Though her working process is much more complicated (e.g., multi-layered mono-printing and dry pigments, for starters) than the mere rendition of nature, we feel perfectly at home with her images.

Rebecca Niederlander http://www.becster.org is the master of creating work with sophisticated detail hierarchies and visual movement. In her plastic-coated wire pieces, she puts in twists and turns that make your eyes want to follow them, stimulating (or satisfying) your natural urge to move. Sometimes they are also delightful "toys" with jumping-jack mechanisms that secretly store their own latent movement. That said, pretty much all her pieces are a visual score that makes you hear their music synesthesia-style, and it's euphoric music!

Coleen Sterrit http://www.coleensterritt.com makes sculpture by concocting a brew of naturally grown objects and human-constructed ones, with intact and scrap instances of both. She manipulates the materials minimally to skillfully construct unexpected objects. They are most delightful when they mimic natural proliferation; then they have all the satisfying size hierarchies found in nature. Best of all, they are ebullient: they make hay out of the mishmash of human and natural constructions with which we currently live. As for the drawings, they have similar properties, looking like what Richard Artschwager might do (although he doesn't draw like that at all).

As all artists know, it's one thing to look at art and another to make it. With the chanting effect described at the beginning, the physical act of making the sound helps produce the outcome. It may be the case that with visual artmaking, the kinesthetics of marking, mousing, or building is what enhances the spirit, working a sort of EMDR meditation that pushes things through neural networks and/or that balances the brain hemispheric functioning. Perhaps this is the "movement of the spirit" that the curator saw in these artists' work: the act of summing together parts to make whole both artist and viewer.

Los Angeles
March, 2008

CMA Auction update

2008-01-15T17:03:00.001-08:00

The collectors that picked up my piece Alpheta at the Claremont Museum of Art auction have written a very nice blog post about their experience at the auction:

Read it here!

New work in the studio - group show in March

2008-01-04T18:44:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the lack of updates! I am almost done with a new body of work - pix will be up soon.

I will be in a group show at dba256 in March ... here's the info:

Sum of Parts
works by Irene Abraham, Lisa Adams, Hollis Cooper, Virginia Katz, Rebecca Hamm & Coleen Sterritt
Reception: Saturday, March 8, 6-10pm
March 8 - April 5, 2008

Alpheta

2007-10-26T16:20:00.001-07:00

The painting that I am donating to the Claremont Museum of Art for their auction is now on my website - you can see it here:
http://holliscooper.com/art/alpheta.html

Velocity Art Auction at Claremont Museum of Art

2007-10-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.claremontmuseum.org/velocity.html

VELOCITY CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTION
BENEFITING THE CLAREMONT MUSEUM OF ART

Join us for an evening of fun and art!VELOCITY 2007 is dedicated to the work and vision of Milford Zornes on the occasion of his Centennial celebration.

EVENT DATES AND TIMES:

ART AUCTION AND RECEPTION Saturday, November 17, 2007
RECEPTION AND SILENT AUCTION: 7:00 - 8:30 PM
LIVE AUCTION PROGRAM: 8:30 - 10:00 PM

AUCTION PREVIEW
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2007 6:00 - 8:00 PM

PANEL DISCUSSION ON COLLECTING ART
Join William Moreno, Executive Director, Pilar Tompkins, Curator and Mike Verbal of Claremont Fine Arts for a discussion on approaches to collecting art.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2007 6:00 - 8:00 PM
General Admission: $5.00
Members: Free

LOCATION

THE CLAREMONT MUSEUM OF ART
536 West First Street
Claremont, CA 91711

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS ( AS OF October 4)

Dawn Arrowsmith (Los Angeles)
Hollis Cooper (Claremont)
Steve Comba (Claremont)
Luis Delgado (San Francisco)
Christopher Irion (San Francisco)
Maria Jensen, Salon Oblique (Los Angeles)
Kristie Lippire (Los Angeles)
Blue McRight (Los Angeles)
Miguel Osuna (Los Angeles)
Linda Vallejo (Los Angeles)
Perry Vasquez (San Diego)
Liat Yossifur (Los Angeles)
Jane Marquis (Claremont)
Michael Woodcock (Claremont)
John Lucas (Claremont)

TICKETS

Tickets: $100 per person
Special High Speed package: $1,000 (includes six tickets, free membership, and other benefits)

CONTACT

Evonne Gallardo Director of Development (909) 621-3200 ext. 103 info@claremontmuseum.org http://claremontmuseum.org/

New York New York 2007

2007-10-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

I was selected by Jessica Morgan (Curator of Contemporary Art, Tate Modern), James Rondeau (Curator of Contermporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago), and Steven Zevitas (Publisher, New American Paintings) as a finalist for myartspace's "New York, New York 2007" competition. Although I was not ultimately picked to be one of the four winners, my work will be published in the show's catalog.

More information here: http://www.myartspace.com/contestresults/nyny07/

Claremont Museum of Art

2007-10-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

Just a short note to let you all know that I have installed a remixed version of Caryatid in the offices at the Claremont Museum of Art. They have a great show up now called "Ephemeral: Explorations in Light" that's worth checking out.

I am also donating work to their upcoming art auction "Velocity" - I'll post more info on that later.

Water Garden

2007-08-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to let you all know that I have several paintings up at the Water Garden building (2425 Olympic Blvd. - across the street from Yahoo) in Santa Monica. I was contacted by Art Assets to participate in this project, which will be up until July 31, 2008. The show was curated by Helen Varola, and consists of four artists, each of whom have one of the building's four lobby areas.

Drawing Center Viewing Program

2007-07-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

The Viewing Program is now online -
http://www.drawingcenter.org/viewingprogram/index.cfm

The easiest way to find my page is to search by name.

Modular: New Art from Los Angeles [Art Papers]

2007-07-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

White Flag Projects’ second exhibition affirms the presence of St. Louis’ newest artspace. Its Chelsea-style restoration boasts a spacious, clean, muscular interior with high ceilings and polished concrete floors. The windows above a central black I-beam flood the space with the ashy light of the gallery’s mixed-use neighborhood. For art to succeed here, it cannot be faint, intimate, or decorative.

Organized by St. Louis-born independent curator Dana Turkovic, Modular: New Art from Los Angeles [White Flag Projects; January 6 – February 10, 2007] is a smart, formally concise exhibition that reflects her six-year stint in Los Angeles. Her intent is twofold insofar as she seeks to apply the idea of modularity to certain artistic practices while giving form to her memory of a city known for its impermanence and transience. What’s more, her use of the term “modular” tacitly references modernist art’s common consideration of repetition. Turkovic’s sense of object and image integrity is based on her experience of place, which she seeks to represent through actual artworks. While thematic relationships do connect the selected projects, her concept of modularity reflects an often-disregarded idea about Southern California: its thingness – its concrete reality and the equally concrete parts that lead to its understanding. In addition, the exhibition charts an experience of time that, shirking linearity, collapses into the concurrent layers that make particular moments. Ultimately, Modular, an exhibition of works by six artists in their early thirties, is both fundamentally anecdotal and an independent record of site, time, and memory.

Most of the work freely interprets constructivism by way of dynamic and colorful structures that assert themselves vigorously in the gallery. They often reference similar sculptural forms that have been turned inside out or flattened.

Two works are somewhat allegorical. Nichole van Beek suspends a 3-dimensional photocollage mobile of arms and hands from the ceiling. One hand emerges from the cloud of limb sand pours a glass of petrified water on an irregular polyhedron set in sand and laminated with a photograph of bubbling water. White it alludes to the artist’s actual beach play, the piece calls to mind the graphic intensity and lyricism of Hannah Hoch’s work, made 3-dimensional. Conceptually ambiguous but pictorially succinct, van Beek’s piece is an uncanny document. Still, a question remains: what does it document? Carnality? Intoxication? Rite of passage?

Bari Ziperstein presents an arrangement of fourteen small mixed-media collages that enlist photographic reproductions culled from popular home improvement and design journals. She corrupts these staged renovation projects with drawn gray and white pillars or partitions that intrude rakishly on the magazine illustrations, parodying one of the perpetual leisurely pursuits of the “rich and famous.” The shapes lurch awkwardly through parlor interiors, even through the bodies of craftsmen installing the latest tile or trim.

The abstract paintings of Kevin Wingate and Hollis Cooper are aggressive distillations of Los Angeles street culture. They also serve as lively points of transition between works that are more formally stable. Wingate makes trapezoidal aluminum panels of loosely gestured oil and spray car paint. Hybrids of automobile detailing and neo-expressionist canvases, they juke and jive their way across a huge back portion of the gallery space.

Cooper's titanic, irregularly-contoured, seven-by-twenty-feet painting-installation tumbles off the wall and onto the floor, inviting us into the spatial logic of its overlaid industrially-produced vinyl and brightly enameled matrices. The work is an imaginary urban map that also serves as a hyper-constructed backdrop for passage among the tighter arrangements of other works.

All of these works circulate formally and conceptually around two central installations. The first is a spectacular, multi-faceted plywood floorpiece designed by Louisa Van Leer, which looks like a digitized wooden starburst or the structural undercarriage of Lady Liberty’s torch flopped on its side. The structure’s back opens up to a ten-by-twenty-feet ad sporting a large red Warholian lipstick impression, the slogan “DUE THIS JANUARY,” and BRAVO blocked across the bottom. From the front, one can peer through several sighting holes that isolate fragments of one of the city’s corroborations of celebrity.

Danny Jauregui’s five small graphite and charcoal drawings on print paper feature beautifully rubbed and erased backgrounds with frame-filling fragments of architectonic projections. Each of the dense radiating structures is corrupted by eroding edges or incongruous improvisations on axonometric logic or standard perspective. Like each of the artists invited by Turkovic, Jauregui maps the sometimes slippery and asymmetrical logic of vision and place in Los Angeles culture.

Modular reviewed in Art Papers

2007-07-11T10:18:00.001-07:00

I have been told that Modular, the show I was in at the beginning of the year in St. Louis, has been favorably reviewed in the July/August issue of Art Papers. I have yet to see it - so I will post the review as soon as I get a copy.

Drawing Center Viewing Program

2007-06-25T14:39:00.000-07:00

I just received notice that my work has been accepted into the Drawing Center's Viewing Program (curated slide registry).

http://www.drawingcenter.org/artreg_viewingprog.cfm

Currently the registry is only available for viewing at the Drawing Center itself, but should be going online before the end of the summer. I'll post a link when that is up! In the meantime, during my next trip to NYC I will be able to meet and have a critique with the Viewing Program's curator.

Out Auction 2007

2007-06-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

I have donated my work Eurythmy to this year's Out Auction. So if you are interested in buying it, head on down to the Pacific Design Center.

Saturday June 23, 2007
6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Live and Silent Auctions
Cocktails and Hors D'Oeuvres
Special performance by LA Art Girls

Tickets are $65
For information or to purchase tickets by phone, call Tarlov Associates 310-996-1188.
Public previews Friday June 22 and Saturday June 23 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Honoring Artists Don Bachardy and Lita Albuquerque
Guest Auctioneer Andrea Fiuczynski, President, Christie’s Los Angeles

More info: http://www.kintera.org/faf/home/default.asp?ievent=231510

Time to Meltdown!

2007-06-07T18:22:00.000-07:00

I have posted the 2 pieces in the Meltdown show on the site - Tethys and Parallax (remix).

View them here (last 2 images under 2007 New Work).

If you are planning on attending the show, but haven't RSVPed, do so ASAP - because of the volume of RSVPs, they are closing the list Friday morning.

To RSVP, send an email to: RSVP@salonoblique.com

See you all there!

Meltdown - Art to Keep the Panic at Bay

2007-05-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

June 9th - July 14th
Press preview June 7 at 7 p.m.
Opening June 9, 6 - 9 p.m.
Salon Oblique, Venice, CA

The gallery is an architectural home and privately run, so in order to attend the opening, you must RSVP. All gallery visits are by appt only as well.

RSVP here: http://www.salonoblique.com/events.htm

Press release here: http://www.salonoblique.com/images/Meltdownpress.pdf

Upcoming show in Venice, CA

2007-05-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

I will be in a show called "Meltdown" at Salon Oblique (a.k.a. the mhouse done by XTEN Architecture) in Venice, CA. More info in the post above ...

New work on website

2007-05-07T08:40:00.000-07:00

I have just posted images from the Radiant series - a new set of paintings on panel. I should also have some work from another new body of work going on right now up in the next few weeks or so.

View the images here, or see them individually here:
Radiant 1
Radiant 2
Radiant 3

Artworld Digest Magazine

2007-04-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

I am featured in the current issue of Artworld Digest magazine - the Seed issue. My work was chosen to be part of the curated "Index" section, which is a survey of international contemporary art. The magazine is primarily distributed in NYC (including the New Museum Bookstore and PS1), but should be available at select Barnes&Noble locations in the Los Angeles area, including the one at the 3rd St. Promenade.

Update

2007-03-17T21:26:00.000-07:00

The website is redesigned, new work is happening in the studio, and there's an almost definite L.A. area exhibition happening later this summer. Stay tuned ...

"White Flag Projects" [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

2007-02-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

By David Bonetti
POST-DISPATCH VISUAL ARTS CRITIC
02/04/2007

Two local galleries are showing art made in the country's two major art centers — New York and Los Angeles — offering a rare bicoastal experience.

The Los Angeles show at nonprofit White Flag Projects is the more relevant as a yardstick for young local artists, because it features other young artists working out their own ideas. St. Louis-based independent curator Dana Turkovic describes this as a survey of a new generation of LA artists, "immersed in a radically fragmented visual culture that threatens to simultaneously spin off into space or collapse in on itself like a dying sun."

The six artists are all independent, resisting categorization, but their work shares certain characteristics. Awareness of architecture as a determinant of experience is a dominant concern, while surface decoration and a play of styles appear as leitmotifs.

Danny Jauregui and Bari Ziperstein have architecture and interior design on their minds. In his abstract ash-and-graphite drawings from the "Ruins" series, Jauregui creates fragmented cubic spaces out of alternating dark-and-light lines that suggest rooms without windows or doors but crumbling walls. In collages on pages torn from vintage house magazines, Ziperstein creates a utopian modernism laid over the rootless traditional — Russian constructivism atop Empire revival or chinoiserie.

Kevin Wingate and Hollis Cooper both use the wall as support and ground for their shaped works. Wingate, a Webster University graduate, renders three-dimensional forms on flat corrugated-aluminum surfaces, delineating their rectangular ends with a variety of decorative schemes. Cooper makes a Matthew Ritchie-like shaped painting that swoops across the wall, leaving a pile of unattached panels on the floor. She envisions a world of complex geometry, one where parallel lines bend, converge and merge as they move at apparently great velocity across space.

Nichole Van Beek and Louisa Van Leer contribute the most complex and, not coincidentally, satisfying works to the show. Van Beek's ceiling-suspended sculpture, obscurely titled, "Aether … Carbonated the Lattice Site Dude," is a surrealist conundrum that is actually somewhat easy to parse if you give it a try. Turkovic says it's all about a party on the beach at Santa Barbara. An orgy of (represented) hands and arms — photo-based inkjet prints, cut out and turned into a swarm — hang from the ceiling. One hand holds a (real) plastic cup out of which (represented) water drips onto a (represented) rock, where it splashes onto a circle of (real) sand. The piece ends up being a consideration of the differences between the real and the illusory, a time-honored subject of art that is particularly relevant in Los Angeles, the "dream factory" where truth and illusion are often hard to tell apart.

Van Leer's multipart installation, "Looking at You, Looking at Me," unfolds cinematically. A large plywood construction, shaped like a giant crystal lying on its side on the floor, dominates the gallery. On the wall behind it is a fragment from a giant vinyl billboard poster sporting a pair of red lips for a show on Bravo "due in January." At the tip of each crystal is a hole through which you can peer at the poster as if through a peephole, an experience that replicates the voyeurism at the heart of both film and art.

The piece changes dramatically when viewed from its open end. The crystal is lined with aluminum foil-coated board, which turns the interior into an elaborate architectural model of a deconstructivist interior of the sort that Zaha Hadid might design. The peepholes at the ends of the elongated spaces become windows that let in a rationed quantity of light, which make the spaces even more mannerist.

"Looking at You, Looking at Me," a tour-de-force on the subject of looking, presages an important career for Van Leer.

"Raising the flag" [West End Word]

2007-01-25T09:46:00.000-08:00

URL: http://www.westendword.com/moxie/ae/art/raising-the-flag.shtml

By Teresa Callahan
Posted Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Located in the Grove neighborhood, east of Kingshighway on Manchester, White Flag Projects is a not-for-profit alternative art space that was established to facilitate quality exhibitions by progressive local, national and international artists.

The art space itself is an impressive and dramatic 2,000 square feet with ceiling heights ranging from 15 to 22 feet. There are massive north-facing windows and 12-foot skylights that allow gorgeous natural light, polished concrete floors and a custom-made spiral staircase leading to a second-floor reading, viewing and lounge area. This space will be appreciated by every gallery lover and art connoisseur.

In its third exhibition, White Flag Projects presents modular: New Art from Los Angeles, curated by Dana Turkovic and featuring work by Hollis Cooper, Danny Jauregui, Nichole van Beek, Louisa Van Leer, Kevin Wingate and Bari Ziperstein. These are six emerging artists living and working in Los Angeles and exploring the city’s radically fragmented visual culture. One prong of this exhibition’s concept is to show work actually set in the city of Los Angeles, creating a constant underpinning formed by the city itself. The artists do not know each other, so the work remains socially separated yet still forms a visually interrelated and whole presentation.

Some of the 13 works in modular: New Art from Los Angeles hearken back to the Bauhaus by utilizing simple construction methods and less expensive materials that form modern, interlocking designs that are, in some cases, disposable. There is an emphasis on materials such as vinyl, plywood and composite aluminum used mainly in the formal basis of the grid. Turkovic refers to this work as being in the modular style, exploiting geometry and blending furniture design, biology and architectural structures to create deceptively complex art. A thematic component to the work in this exhibit that distinguishes it from the Bauhaus influence is a constant theme of deconstruction and decomposition, or construction and composition. This theme touches each piece with a spectacular vitality, suggesting that each piece is never stagnant.

The 2006 “Ruin” series by Danny Jauregui in modular: New Art from Los Angeles is composed of five ash and graphite drawings on paper. These are pure black-and-white line drawings that show a geometric form decomposing in varying viewpoints. Almost mimicking the appearance of mechanical drawings, Jauregui’s “Ruin” drawings are fresh and vital with a gestalt aesthetic that somehow manages to look brand new.

Nichole van Beek’s sculpture greets the gallery visitor at the door. The intriguing “Aether” (2006; inkjet print, resin, wood, aluminum, sand) is a free-standing sculpture of realistic arms and hands pouring a stream of liquid from a hand-held glass into a three-dimensional, geometric base. Clever and witty, this piece is sharp and crisp as well as perfectly constructed.

“Parallax” (2006; mixed media on PVC) by Hollis Cooper literally splashes and spills onto the wall and floor of White Flag’s space. Cartoon-colorful and wildly animated, this large and sprawling non-representational piece commands attention with bubbling outlined color blocks that begin with cool blues, then follows the color spectrum to end with hot fluorescent pinks and reds. As lyrical and vibrant as music, “Parallax” is also technically fabulous. As with many of the pieces in modular: New Art from Los Angeles, Cooper’s scintillating “Parallax” could be either decomposing or composing. Whichever, this work is in full-tilt progress.

Overall, modular: New Art from Los Angeles is a very good exhibition at a fabulous new venue. White Flag Projects has chosen an ambitious course, and modular: New Art from Los Angeles does not disappoint.

Parallax images

2007-01-20T22:28:00.000-08:00

I have updated the images section of my site to show a couple installation shots of my piece Parallax that was done for the Modular show at White Flag Projects. Enjoy!

Click here to view the images!

Los Angeles Art Association South: The Michael Napoliello Gallery presents the "Winter Biannual" Show

2007-01-16T15:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.laaa.org/about/press/01_13_07.html

Show dates: February 8 through April 14, 2007
Reception: Thursday, February 8, 7 - 10pm

Susan Cross, curator of MASS MoCA, Juries

Hermosa Beach (January 2007) — Los Angeles Art Association South: The Michael Napoliello Gallery is pleased to announce the artists who will be included in the "Winter Biannual," set to open February 8, 2007. They are as follows:

Ana Osgood
Gegam Kacherian
Hollis Cooper
Jamie Lee
Jason Adkins
Joy Rotblatt
Justin Davis
Kathleen Buckley
Liilian Abel
Mary Mallman
Michael Giancristiano
Quinton Bemiller
Richard Bruland
Sophia Allison
Susie White
Tm Gratkowski
Yaya Chou

The biannual is the Los Angeles Art Association's twice yearly survey exhibition juried by high profile curators. The biannual presents uncommon access to the very best in emerging talent.

-------------------------

Here's an image of my piece that will be in the show:

My final New American Paintings post

2007-01-11T19:33:00.000-08:00

... I think.

They have finally posted the 67th issue on their website, so you can preview it online.
Go here: http://www.newamericanpaintings.com and click "Preview"

or to just see the section sans-frames, you can go here: http://www.newamericanpaintings.com/67th%20book/editor.htm

"Modular: New Art from Los Angeles at White Flag Projects"

2007-01-11T15:23:00.000-08:00

Megan and Murray McMillan review of the show:
Source - Click here

One surprise we had upon moving to St Louis from Los Angeles was meeting another recently transplanted Angeleno, Dana Turkovic, an independent curator who used to work at the Hammer. Dana has brought challenging and innovative new work to this city, and most recently, worked with Matthew Strauss at White Flag Projects to bring a taste of LA to St Louis in the just-opened exhibition, modular: New Art from Los Angeles.

This exhibition features six emerging LA artists — Hollis Cooper, Danny Jauregui, Nichole van Beek, Louisa Van Leer, Kevin Wingate, and Bari Ziperstein.

Dave Hickey once called Los Angeles the ultimate postmodern city. It's diverse, all-inclusive, and tenuously connected with a gridwork of highways linking everything to everything; it's a hyper-constructed, artificial, surreal, multi-lingual, multi-everything kind of place. For someone unfamiliar with it, modular captures a spirit that is reflective of the ethos of the city.

For the art community in St Louis, which is culturally sophisticated and savvy, although perhaps more accustomed to the polished exhibitions of area institutions like the Pulitzer Foundation, it's a clear and well-presented introduction to the surprisingly loose and simultaneously tense aesthetic of contemporary Los Angeles. For example, Louisa Van Leer's witty and culture-critiquing Looking at Me, Looking at You (2006), has torn scraps of blue masking tape with assembly directions stuck on most of its wood planes, and Hollis Cooper's multi-layered piece, Parallax (2006), uses industrial PVC sheets as the surfaces of her site-specific painting.

If LA is indeed the frontrunner of emergent art, then modular at White Flag Projects is the place to see the kind of ebullient and gritty work that's in the forecast for the near-future.

Gallery 825 Winter Biannual

2007-01-10T14:27:00.000-08:00

I just found out that I have been included in Gallery 825's Winter Biannual, which was juried by Susan Cross of Mass MOCA. The show runs from February 8 to April 14 at LAAA South in Hermosa Beach.

I'll post again when I have more information.

“White Flag unveils LA creativity"

2007-01-09T15:19:00.000-08:00

By David Bonetti
POST-DISPATCH VISUAL ARTS CRITIC
01/04/2007

New York might be headquarters for the art market, "but LA is the creative center," Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says in W magazine.

White Flag Projects, St. Louis's new nonprofit gallery, will offer a taste of that LA energy in "modular: New Art from Los Angeles," a show opening Saturday.

Don't dismiss Govan as a provincial booster. He was, until fairly recently, director of the Dia Center, the intellectual heart of the New York art world.

Los Angeles' high-powered art schools turn out thousands of young talents every year — most of whom stay in the sprawling city to develop their ideas, form a community and forge a career. Increasingly, young artists from around the nation and the world migrate there to plug into its uncontained creative energy.

The White Flag show, organized by freelance curator Dana Turkovic, features six young artists, all of whom joined the migration west. Graduates of schools in New York City; Boston; Providence, R.I.; Baltimore; Athens, Ohio; and St. Louis, their work exhibits a fragmented style that Turkovic roots in LA's own de-centeredness.

A St. Louis native, Turkovic knows her material. She spent more than four years in Los Angeles before moving to London, where she earned a master's degree in curating at Goldsmiths College, itself an incredible incubator of new talent. She recently came back to St. Louis to launch a career in freelance curating, a challenge anywhere but especially where there are few venues.

Q: How did you get the idea for the show?
A: I went out to LA after not having been there for a couple of years and was overwhelmed by what had happened since I was away. I went to studios, I went to "Supersonic," the large annual exhibition of recent art school graduates. Those are the places to see what's going on.

Q: How did you choose the artists?
A: I came back with a list of about 20 artists who had struck my fancy. But it's impossible to capture in one show the entirety of the LA art scene. You need to focus, to find a coherent theme.

Q: That theme was "modular"?
A: The term describes, for me, the process of putting an exhibition together, but it also describes the process of artists putting their work together. The words that come to my mind when I hear "modular" are fragments, systems, architecture, geometry. Modular is about how the different parts fit together.

Q: Who are the artists in the show?
A: Hollis Cooper, who is making a site-specific wall piece; Danny Jauregui, who makes abstract architectural drawings; Nichole van Beek, who is sending a collage that hangs from the ceiling; Louisa van Leer, who has sent an enormous wood sculpture; Kevin Wingate, a painter; and Bari Ziperstein, who makes collages. You might not have heard of any of them — yet — but a couple got picked up by galleries at the recent Basel-Miami art fair.

Q: Are any of them coming for the opening?
A: Both Louisa (van Leer) and Nichole (van Beek) are definitely going to be here. And I'm hoping that Hollis (Cooper) will be able to make it.

St. Louis

2007-01-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

Modular opens this Saturday at White Flag Projects - if you are in the St. Louis area, please check it out.

I will post images from the opening/show as soon as I have them. I will also be adding pictures of Parallax to my website as well.

Parallax

2006-12-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a sneak preview of *part* of Parallax installed in my studio before it was shipped out. I will post real gallery installation shots of the full piece when I am able.

For reference, this section of the piece is apporixmately 7.5 feet tall and 12.5 feet wide. The full piece (including the floor section) fills up a 9' x 22' wall.

Click here

New American Paintings #67

2006-12-20T21:04:00.000-08:00

It's out! It's not on the New American Paintings website yet, but it should be at your local Borders/Barnes&Noble/art bookstore.

White Flag Projects

2006-11-06T17:30:00.000-08:00

My other major news item ...

I have been asked by curator Dana Turkovic to participate in the show "Modular: New Art from Los Angeles" at the not-for-profit alternative art space White Flag Projects in St. Louis. The other artists in the show are Danny Jauregui Montes, Nichole van Beek, Louisa Van Leer, Kevin Wingate, Bari Ziperstein ... I can't wait to see it.

This is my first time shipping a work of any great size (I am doing an installation on a 8' x 22' wall), so it should be interesting. Luckily, I happen to work on a material that doesn't weigh a whole lot, and is fairly durable, so it should pack well. The piece is well on its way to being finished, and I'll post some in-progress shots of it when I get a chance.

Link: http://www.whiteflagprojects.com

Here's a direct link to the ad that will appear in the Jan/Feb issue of Art Papers: View ad (PDF)

New American Paintings

2006-11-06T16:53:00.000-08:00

It's on the homepage, but I thought I would repeat it here with some more info ...
My work was selected to be in Issue 67 (Pacific Coast Edition) of New American Paintings - it will be out in December. The juror was Tumelo Mosaka, Asst Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

For more info: http://www.newamericanpaintings.com

New News!

2006-11-06T12:58:00.000-08:00

I will be posting all my news items here from now on ... and give my homepage a break! I will also list site updates, new work, etc.