Join us for a special presentation of new camera-less photographs by Paula Riff and textile work by Meike Legler.
Photographer Charles Brittin is widely recognized for his intimate and hard-hitting images of Los Angeles from the 1950s and 60s. When he began using a camera in the 1950s his compassionate style and liberal political leanings led him naturally toward two significant social revolutions unfolding in the city. He captured the profound cultural shift embodied by the California Beat Generation and as the Beat movement gave way to civil unrest in the 1960s, Brittin took his camera to the frontlines of antiwar protests and political actions, producing raw, provocative images of the social change sweeping the country.
Natalie Obermaier's Coalescing is a series of intricately constructed collages produced in response to the incessant onslaught of mass media and the exacting pressure of mainstream beauty standards. Women's fashion magazines in particular stand at a crossroads of cult, consumerism and the unattainable image. By re-appropriating and deconstructing those glossy pages into something unique, intricate and hand-made, a new sense of authenticity is realized. The resulting juxtapositions in Obermaier's painstaking collages evoke the visual and psychological manipulations that abound in advertising while creating a new dialogue in response. Coalescing manipulates the manipulated as both rebuttal to the aesthetic pressures of advertising and as reclamation of the human image to speak a deeper truth and to reflect a more personable and representative spirit of self.
The latest works by Laura Forman are exquisitely rendered using pastels and graphite on paper, as well as polystyrene bead foam and Foam Coat, sanded to a porcelain-like finish. There is a striking diversity among the objects, which include a Victorian fainting couch, a dramatic rendering of a cape, and a confessional booth surrounded by the meticulous chalkboard scribblings of Euler's Formula; a mathematical equation noted for its particular aesthetic beauty. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a sensitively sculpted rendition of a baby's foot, a freestanding anatomical behemoth magnified to nearly 4 feet high.
The black and white photographs in Hold Your Breath are rooted in the history of the constructed photograph. A confluence of portraiture, sculpture, and performance, the images echo the playful absurdity of Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus theater constructions as well as the sensual yet unsettling juxtapositions characteristic of the photographic work by West Coast artist, Jo Ann Callis. Like Callis, whom the artist studied with while earning her MFA at CalArts, Surdam begins her work by making sculptural forms, which become features of her final photographs. For her latest series, Surdam constructed eccentric papier-mâché headpieces, which she then covered with found fabric and wrapped around her models in a studio setting.
Kelly Berg's dynamic paintings and multi-layered works evoke the turbulence of geological processes in both color and form. Voluminous layers of paint, sparkling mineral tones and bold permutations in depth create a sense of the earth's monumental energy in flux. Her work captures moments of rupture where tectonic plates converge, mountain ranges lurch forth and volcanoes erupt spewing molten lava and ash. Often we see hints of landscape, a sky, and fierce weather conditions, framed by sculpted accumulations of paint. Dense, dark and magma-like forms settle around vibrant depictions of stalagmites and stalactites rendered elegantly in artist's ink and scratchboard technique. Shards of glass and mirror, like volcanic glass, emanate from organic mounds of vibrant color that appear wet and mineral-rich.
The paintings of Chilean-born artist Rebeca Puga are based on her investigations into how we see and experience the space that surrounds us and how that parallels our consciousness and perception of time. Her canvases possess a dynamic sense of incompletion, where line and shape are continually coming into definition. Puga imbues her work with a high level of gestural energy, constantly reworking her paintings until they vibrate with a sense of expansion and erasure, coming and going, being and unbecoming.
Sloan Projects is pleased to announce Body of Research, a multimedia group exhibition with works by Rose-Lynn Fisher, Adele Mills, Brittany Neimeth, Amanda Vincelli, Ireland Wisdom and Jenifer Yeuroukis. Body of Research brings together work by six women artists, all of which utilize the body as a site of investigation and revelation. The exhibition consists primarily of photographic prints, augmented by single works in video, charcoal and fabric.
Multi-media artist, Alia Malley, presents a week-long, large-scale, nightly video installation made possible with an Our Town Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Department.
Isabelle Harada's WORK / W=Fd consists of 999 golden paper cranes suspended from the ceiling and a looped projection on a single unfolded sheet, bathed in an artificial sunset. An allusion to the Japanese tradition of the origami crane and its mythical origin, the installation explores the nature of time and energy in terms of materiality and the virtual. The artist has created a hypnotic, immersive environment using simple materials.
In her latest body of work Southern California artist, Elizabeth Orleans, expands upon her minimalist repertoire, bringing geometric precision and sensual whimsy together in an installation of unpredictable ceramic objects.
Over the last decade Adele Mills has honed a technique of combining photography, painting and digital rendering to produce abstract and figurative work with a structural layering, where one image is viewed through the transparency of a second image. The signature gap between the layers in her work creates a displacement of colors, shape and composition and produces doublings, fadings and seeming movement, as aspects of the image are activated through the shifting perspective of the viewer.
Since opening in March 2015, Sloan Projects has showcased the work of mid-career and emerging multi-disciplinary artists. The budding gallery program focuses almost exclusively on women artists who maintain studios in the Los Angeles area. In this spirit, SECONDS, brings together four L.A. based women who employ a variety of mediums in their studio practices and whose work combines a joy of experimentation with technical gravitas.
GRAVITY - the force responsible for the creation of our universe and the dominant cause for the formation, shape and orbit of astronomical bodies including stars, planets and even galaxies - provides the thematic thrust for a group exhibition featuring ceramics, cyanotypes, line drawing, photographs on newsprint and scratchboard by Laura Forman, Alia Malley, Elizabeth Orleans, Jason Peters, and Karley Sullivan.
For Mary Beth Heffernan's first solo exhibition at Sloan Projects, a dynamic series of unique cyanotype photograms will be on view for the very first time. Comprised of ten large-scale works on paper, Blue, utilizes two early photographic techniques to articulate themes of human intimacy and loss and the myriad ways the dead and the living continue to animate one another. Measuring eight feet tall, the sheer life-size of Heffernan's photograms captivates from a distance, along with stark white negative spaces that dance distinctively on the paper and lend the work a bold, graphic punch. Upon closer inspection, a tenderness emerges; button-holes, gauzy threads and delicate seams, ghostly crystallizations that arose unpredictably in the printing of the work and subtle variations in blue that accentuate the impression of an endless abyss.
July 11 - August 29, 2015.
For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in eight years, musician and artist Exene Cervenka exhibits selected collages from the past decade, including a triptych from her series in progress, The Singularity. An inquiry into the merging of man and machine that is occurring at an ever-increasing rate, The Singularity marks a decided shift in Cervenka's approach to collage. Works of the past two decades have primarily been loose compositions comprised of found objects, images, and text. The Singularity, on the other hand, falls within the tradition of the obsessively intricate, densely woven collages of Bay Area collage pioneers, Bruce Conner and Jess.
Los Angeles artist Eve Wood brings Sloan Projects to life with a vibrant, wall-to-wall installation of works on paper. An array of avian portraits expressively rendered in gouache, graphite and oil stick on handmade rag paper highlight the artist's life-long connection to orphaned and injured birds and her commitment to their rescue and rehabilitation. Her intimately scaled bird portraits are fraught with an energy that is decidedly playful yet distinctly unsettling. Some of her subjects are captured with thick, assertive brushstrokes while others are loosely defined by unadulterated splatters and frenetic, tangled lines that vibrate against rich, solid hues.
Los Angeles artist Claudia Parducci deftly navigates the border between humankind's elevated worldview and its destruction and collapse. Inside her work the foundation of what we believe begins to dissolve and the tools we use to situate those beliefs no longer apply. Both on and off the canvas the artist articulates the contemporary catastrophe we face in environmental terms and in terms of our culture's dominant visual language.
UK based artist Melinda Gibson also questions the power of images and the origin of their authority. In her series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" she recreates Charlotte Cotton's seminal book of the same name, literally tearing into it and refashioning its pages into one-of-a-kind collages.