Don't Sleep! - KAWS “Hold The Line" @ HONOR FRASER - Opening Reception 9.10.

Honor Fraser is pleased to present “Hold The Line,” KAWS’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In a new group of paintings and sculpture, Brooklyn-based artist KAWS delivers stylized adaptations of visual icons in American animation. Along with the existential emotive and psychotropic narrative avenues KAWS opens up for his altered versions of iconic animated characters, the artist’s works also provide the viewer with a richly rewarding and expansive formal consideration. Non-naturalistic color takes on new meaning in the case where there is no living, breathing, original referent for characters born of cell animation (such as SpongeBob SquarePants).

Nevertheless, the unconventional palette in KAWS’s paintings–from high impact contrasts to monochromatic use of fluorescents, primaries, and darker tones–simultaneously defamiliarizes the ubiquitous characters while accentuating the reductive geometric play that abounds in their volumes and surfaces.

“Hold The Line” opens September 10, 2011 at Honor Fraser Gallery on La Cienega Ave.

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
90034

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Go See - Clayton Brothers: Inside Out - @ The PMCA 5.14. - 9.4.11. -

The Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) is proud to present Clayton Brothers: Inside Out, the first solo museum exhibition of the work of Rob and Christian Clayton. Featuring their paintings and mixed-media installations, the exhibition surveys the brothers’ edgy aesthetic inspired by California skateboard and surf culture, punk rock, folk art, cartoons and street art. The Clayton Brothers have been working together since 1996, constructing complex narratives that introduce memorable characters and comment wryly on contemporary life.

After graduating from the Art Center College of Design, the brothers initially maintained separate studio practices, but soon found that their best work was done collaboratively. Through a continuous, organic process of each brother altering what the other creates, a visual harmony and shared idiosyncrasies are established. The resulting dynamic works thus each represent a visual conversation between the brothers, revealing incisive commentary about their personal symbols, memories, and subconscious states, as well as their environment at large.

Inside Out presents work from six major series created since 2001, beginning with four paintings from the In Green Pastures series and ending with the bold, large-scale canvases of the Jumbo Fruit series, whose title suggests the disquiet and irony that characterize the individual works. The pieces in the series As Is are connected by the concept of people, like houses or other objects available for purchase, being presented “as-is,” while the Patient series portrays the medical industry and its patients with both humor and dismay.

Stephen Fleischman, the Director of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and curator of the exhibition, describes the Clayton Brothers’ work as being “consistently informed by vivid color and an eccentric cast of characters. The result is an obsessively rich body of work that strikes the universal chords, but remains deeply personal. Front and center are the unique people, animals and places that occupy the outskirts of the American psyche.”

Rob and Christian Clayton share a studio in La Crescenta, California and are both faculty members at the Art Center College of Design.

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Neighborhood Public Radio - Thursday, April 7, @ MOCA Grand.

MOCA is pleased to announce the artist-run radio project Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) as the spring 2011 participants in Engagement Party, MOCA’s program presenting new works by innovative Southern California–based artist collectives and collaborators. Harnessing the airwaves, NPR will create three interactive sound projects for MOCA visitors to experience on the first Thursday evenings of April, May, and June 2011.

For their first Engagement Party project, NPR will transmit a collection of radio programs on local frequencies. MOCA visitors may tune in via hand-held personal transistor radios they either bring to or buy at the event.

For FMemory, NPR will broadcast interviews with downtown Los Angeles’s communities of residents, workers, and art professionals and patrons about their most memorable MOCA experiences and their perceptions of Bunker Hill’s evolving landscape.

Small Audience (for Large Ensemble), a large-scale polyphonic voice ensemble, will provide an unexpected space for museum-goers to perform on-air together.

For Silent Disco Party, NPR will transmit live performances of original music and remixed dance classics for those who feel like dancing. In addition to these programs, students from NPR member Lee Montgomery’s broadcast class at the University of New Mexico will be operating their own radio station from the plaza.

THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 7–10p
MOCA GRAND AVENUE

Visitors are encouraged to bring small radios and headphones. A limited number of radios with headphones will be available for sale for $2.

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THE RISE OF RAD: The Influence of Skate Culture On Contemporary Art @ The Torrence Art Museum

Now on View Through September 4, 2010 - Erupting from the Californian surf scene of the 1960s and branching out into music, language, street art and street clothing, skateboard culture has spanned the globe with its focus on individuality, freedom and a transgressive mixture of sport and play. This exhibition’s focus is on contemporary art that can trace its roots to this sub-culture-gone-mainstream, exploring urban architecture, resistance, and the core values of the skate phenomenon through the matrix of urban theory and politics.

It utilizes theoretical, historical, sociological and contemporary art facets to fully explore how a Californian children’s toy went through technological advances that led to a revolution throughout youth culture and, in turn, spread to the world and impacted culture from the street to the museum.

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WEDNESDAY @ MOCA GRAND

Join William Leavitt and Allen Ruppersberg, both of whom are featured in Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years, for a conversation with independent curator Carole Ann Klonarides about the experience of making and presenting work in the 1970s. This event is hosted by X-TRA, Los Angeles’s longest running contemporary art journal.

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