Tonight in Eagle Rock - Mike Kelley & MIchael Smith 'A Voyage of Growth and Discovery'

West of Rome presents...

A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, a collaborative video installation by artists Mike Kelley and Michael Smith. The installation includes a six-channel video featuring Michael Smith's character Baby IKKI. Filmed at a festival in the Black Rock desert in 2008, the related sculptures fill the 15,500 square foot space surrounding a 30-foot tall junk sculpture of Baby IKKI.

The installation reflects the fantasy-oriented environment of the festival, which is both grand and folksy-an odd mixture of fairground, playground, hippie commune, and the futuristic architectural aesthetics of R. Buckminster Fuller. Resembling an abandoned festival site of the post-"new age" era. This project is the first collaboration between Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, artists who have been friends since 1975.

Mike Kelley, born in Detroit in 1954, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Kelley's work embraces performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, sound works, and sculpture. Referencing both high art and vernacular traditions, his works draw from historical research, mass cultural references, and psychological theory.

Michael Smith, born in Chicago in 1951, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Austin, Texas. Smith's 30-year artistic career includes live performance, video works, commercial and cable television skits, puppet shows, exhibition installations, comic publications, and drawings.

Opens Tonight May 26 7–9p runs through August 26 , 2010

FREE! @ The Farley Building 1669 Colorado Blvd. Eagle Rock, 90042

TIM HAWKINSON @ Blum and Poe now through 6.26.10

Blum & Poe is pleased to announce their first solo exhibition of new work by Tim Hawkinson.

Tim Hawkinson’s practice is known for its sprawling surrealistic self-portraiture in which the body, through intense introspection, becomes an alien landscape open to radical redefinition and transformation. This artistic agenda is mirrored materially by Hawkinson’s use of familiar and ubiquitous consumer packaging and household objects in highly unconventional ways. The new work continues these refrains, while also exploring more pointedly temporality, mortality, and the cyclic.

Hawkinson works in a range of media, involving sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. The exhibition will present this wide array, including such pieces as, Orrery, a towering eight foot tall sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel atop a platform that is itself made up of a series of rotating concentric circles depicting tire treads. This piece references the mechanical models and devices used to illustrate the motions of the planets and their moons in our solar system. A sculptural collage of water bottles, plastic shopping bags, recouped ordinary hardware, and odds and ends; every part of this piece is interconnected and eternally spinning, from her head, hands, eyes, and ears, to the optical pattern on her dress, which is a motion illusion called “Rotating Snakes” designed by Japanese Psychology Professor Kitaoka Akiyoshi. With wheels upon wheels, this hyperkinetic sculpture resembles a Whirling Dervish, a hypnotic mystical dancer forever cycling between the material and cosmic worlds.

A sympathetic sculpture, also approaching eight feet tall, is a giant foam candle. This dramatic increase in scale turns a once knowable and homey object into a caustic, volcanic landscape. A central wick appears to erupt in flames, sending a cascade of casts of Hawkinson’s heels and toes pouring down the side like a revolving wax waterfall. A small door on its side reveals a chamber lined with a golden emergency blanket that bathes the piece’s handcrafted motor in an orange glow, altogether evoking Earth’s fiery recycling processes. The burning candle also references vanitas paintings and their reflection on mortality.

In another piece, Hawkinson takes large self-portrait photos printed in the negative and collages them together to resemble a fleshy and precarious motorcycle. Suspended on an empty backdrop, Hawkinson reconfigures his body so that arms become handles, legs the spokes, and fingers multiplied and braided together to become tires. Eerie structural correspondences and analogous traits between the body’s composition, its locomotion, its internal cycles, and mass-produced two-wheeled motor vehicles give way to a sense of the “self” as “other”, a subject that is explored throughout Hawkinson’s practice.

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The Way Things are Looking | Suzannah Sinclair at New Image Art

THE WAY THINGS ARE LOOKING

SATURDAY, July 18th, 2009 | Opening Reception from 7 - 10 pm

Suzannah Sinclair returns to New Image for her second solo show, equipped with an arsenal of ethereal realist watercolors. Sinclair, who is known for her paintings of beautiful women in gently provocative poses, will show works of watercolor and pencil on various dimensions of birch panel.

More info here.

At MOLAA -The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín

Now thru August 16
Of Rage and Redemption: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín
MOLAA is proud to celebrate the art of the renowned Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín (Ecuador, 1919-1999) with the exhibition Of Rage and Redemption: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín.

The retrospective exhibition profiles the evolution of Guayasamín’s life and his personal concern for crimes against humanity of social and political injustice. The collection of 80 works of art, paintings, drawings and prints created between 1937 – 1996 focus on the plight of the indigenous peoples in the Andean region as well human suffering, war and violence throughout the world.

Guayasamin earned a reputation as Ecuador’s official painter in the 1940s when he presented an exhibition of paintings and portraits of Indians that provoked a scandal. In 1999, he received honorary recognition from the Ninth Meeting of Latin American Presidents as “the painter of Latin America,” for being an activist against violence, war and social injustice. At this time in our history, the art of Guayasamin resonates within the global outcry for peace and justice in the world today.

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