Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles Summary by Magali Arriola

5/7/18

During my first studio visit with Cayetano Ferrer, we spent some time reviewing the different aspects of the projects he has done in Vegas, such as the modular carpets he’s reconfigured on several occasions out of the residues and left overs of the casinos carpets in the city. It was particularly interesting to see how he contextualizes these works in the social history of Vegas as a spectacle city, one that is intricately related to its political background as a nuclear test site. Cayetano also spoke at length about his research with different materials around ornament, reflection and casting, and about the way he has translated that into books and design.

After meeting with Cayetano, I went to Gala Porras Kim’s studio. That was a particularly enjoyable visit because we spoke of her recent exhibition ‘An Index and it Settings’ at Labor gallery in Mexico City, which is a continuation of the project she is currently showing in ‘A Universal History of Infamy’ at LACMA, and of ‘An Index and its Histories’ also related to that that series at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. In all of these projects she explores the origins of a series of pre-Columbian pieces from Western Mexico. She shared her interest in ethnography, anthropology and art history, which has often infused new life into stories that might otherwise have gone missing. She explained her extensive research into Zapotec, a tonal language from the region of Oaxaca that has been translated by the local population into whistling tones as a form of resistance to colonialism. It was particularly interesting to see how she addresses the frictions that result between the provenance, interpretation and conservation of these historical artifacts in public institutions and private collections, testing the ability of what she calls ‘mute objects’ to create knowledge.

Next day, I met with Mariah Garnett, whom I later realized I had already met some years ago in Los Angeles at our mutual friend’s house Shirley Morales, where she first told me about her ambitious project Other and Father. I was very pleased to realize that she was finally able to complete the project with the help of Artadia. I found Mariah’s way of addressing personal history and documentary practices very compelling. We spent most of our time talking about Other and Father and I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin, two very layered and complex works that address identity issues from very different perspectives, and that explore different manners of using visual imagery, found footage, installation and film.

From Mariah’s studio I moved on to Leslie Shows’ studio. It was interesting to see how she is dealing with the challenge of translating her very delicate collages and her fine experiments with ink and paint—a very personal way to deal and play with materiality—to a larger format in the public commission she is doing for a San Francisco train station. In a similar way, most of the time I spent at Josh Mannis’s studio, we talked about his creative process. We discussed the different source images for his work—most of the time compelling images taken either from the press and/or popular films reflecting a particular political landscape—that he then translates into very detailed and skilled drawings. These are in turn projected on canvas to elaborate his colorful paintings.  

It was also particularly interesting to encounter Nicole Millers work. We not only had a chance to review her different videos from The Borrowers, a series dealing with loss, appropriation and performance: David (on phantom limbs), Ndinda (on the laughing therapist), Anthony (the double of Jimmy Hendrix rambling on Hollywood Boulevard that Nicole had playing and singing on stage), and to discuss how she is also constantly looking into finding new ways to display her work, and to articulate her videos in order to trigger an expanded dialogue among them. We also spoke about her upcoming projects and about how her interest in marginal communities and their relationship to spectacle might be translated into a different media like sculpture.

My last visit was with Stanya Kahn. We had a chance to see her most recent work in ceramics and also to review some of her films, specifically Stand in the Stream. It was very interesting to see how she is able to mix personal history via the figure of her mother and her actions as a political activist, through a fast-pace editing of live stream, found footage as well as her mother’s personal archive as a testimony of particular historical and political moments. In a similar way Don’t Go Back to Sleep utilizes actors and non-actors, scripted and improvised scenarios, to stage a portrait of the economic crash in an abandoned suburban house, exploring the limits of the real and the fictive.

Magali Arriola is an art critic and independent curator currently living in Mexico City. She was curator at Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo between 2011 and 2014, where she organized exhibitions of artists such as James Lee Byars (co-curated with Peter Eleey and co-produced with MoMA-PS1), Guy de Cointet and Danh Vo, and curated shows contextualizing works from the Jumex Collection. She was Chief Curator of Museo Tamayo between 2009 and 2011 where she curated exhibitions and projects with artists such as Roman Ondák, JoachimKoester, Claire Fontaine, Adrià Julia and Julio Morales. She was visiting curator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco in 2006 where she curated Prophets of Deceit. From 1998 to 2001 she was Chief Curator at the Museode Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, where she worked with a generation of artists that include Eduardo Abaroa, Francis Alÿs, Miguel Calderon, Daniela Rossell and Pablo Vargas Lugo. Her independent projects include The Sweet Burnt Smell of History: The 8th Panama Biennial(2008); What once passed for a future, or The landscapes of the living dead (Art2102, Los Angeles, 2005); How to Learn to Love the Bomb and Stop Worrying about it (CANAIA, México City / Central de Arte at WTC, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2003-2004); Alibis (Mexican Cultural Institute, Paris /Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2002); Erógena (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City / SMAK/ Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, 2000); Peter Greenaway, Painting and Artifice (Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 1997). Arriola has extensively written for books, and catalogues and has contributed to publications such as Art Forum, Curare, Frieze, Mousse, Manifesta Journal, and The Exhibitionist, among others.

Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles Public Program with Magali Arriola

2/28/18

Magali Arriola, art critic and independent curator, presents a public program at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles on November 16, 2017.

Magali Arriola is an art critic and independent curator currently living in Mexico City. She was curator at Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo between 2011 and 2014, where she organized exhibitions of artists such as James Lee Byars (co-curated with Peter Eleey and co-produced with MoMA-PS1), Guy de Cointet and Danh Vo, and curated shows contextualizing works from the Jumex Collection. She was Chief Curator of Museo Tamayo between2009 and 2011 where she curated exhibitions and projects with artists such as Roman Ondák, JoachimKoester, Claire Fontaine, Adrià Julia and Julio Morales. She was visiting curator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco in 2006 where she curated Prophets of Deceit. From 1998 to 2001 she was Chief Curator at the Museode Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, where she worked with a generation of artists that include Eduardo Abaroa, Francis Alÿs, Miguel Calderon, Daniela Rossell and Pablo Vargas Lugo. Her independent projects include The Sweet Burnt Smell of History: The 8th Panama Biennial(2008); What once passed for a future, or The landscapes of the living dead (Art2102, Los Angeles, 2005); How to Learn to Love the Bomb and Stop Worrying about it (CANAIA, México City / Central de Arte at WTC, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2003-2004); Alibis (Mexican Cultural Institute, Paris /Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2002); Erógena (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City / SMAK/ Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, 2000); Peter Greenaway, Painting and Artifice (Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 1997). Arriola has extensively written for books, and catalogues and has contributed to publications such as Art Forum, Curare, Frieze, Mousse, Manifesta Journal, and The Exhibitionist, among others.

The Mistake Room (TMR) dwells in the terrain of ideas and practices fueled by radical imagination. A constantly morphing cultural platform, TMR is shaped through ambitious multi-year thematic projects that expand the possibilities of what an independent art space can be and do. Working alongside artists, thinkers, and other makers, TMR summons new publics for art and ideas into being in ways that reflect the complexity of our world and time.

Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles Summary by Diana Nawi

2/3/17

For Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles, Diana Nawi, Associate Curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami, traveled to Los Angeles to give a talk in conversation with Iman Issa at 356 S. Mission Rd. As a culmination of her participation in the program, Nawi presented a summary of her experience in the city. 

I was delighted to have been invited by Artadia to visit Los Angeles to conduct studio visits with their awardees and participate in a public conversation hosted by 356 Mission. Los Angeles is a city close to my heart—I went to UCLA as an undergraduate and my time there was incredibly formative—and it was great to have the chance to return to connect in earnest with the constantly changing scene there.

I found this trip particularly rewarding as I was able to meet artist who I didn’t know as well as reconnect with artists who I’ve been in conversation with for some time, a product of the breadth and diversity of artist’s with whom Artadia works. Over the course of three days I met with Max King Cap, Meg Cranston, Cayetano Ferrer, Mariah Garnett, Stanya Kahn, Robyn O’Neil, Melanie Schiff, and Kerry Tribe. My trip came on the heels of the election and many of the conversations I had were filtered through that lens and a sense of renewed urgency. It was an interesting moment to be in the studios of so many artists as they responded to their usual context (preparing for or coming off of exhibitions, working through new ideas and materials, teaching, etc.) as well as to this new national circumstance.

My first two visits were with Tribe and Kahn. Having met with both artists about a year ago, it was great timing to pick up the conversation—seeing how previous projects and exhibitions had evolved and been realized, and having the chance to see new works in formation. Tribe and I discussed the work she had recently shown as part of the Current: LA Water, Exquisite Corpse (2016), which is 51-minute meditation on the 51 miles of the LA River. Comprised of original footage of the waterway and its nearby communities, the film touches on the ecology, sociology, and economy of the river and its surrounding environs, beautifully capturing the complexity of such a present but strangely overlooked site. Tribe was in the early stages of embarking on a newly commissioned piece, and it was really interesting to get a sense of how she determines and approaches her subject matter. Kahn had likewise recently finished new work for exhibitions and it was great to see not only the work itself, but discuss how she had approached installing these projects in gallery spaces. We also spent quite some time discussing a video work that is in progress; a really compelling piece that like much of her work taps into so much that is painfully, exquisitely personal and yet somehow collective.

Likewise Mariah Garnett, whose film Full Burn (2014), included in Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer, was a real highlight for me, was very generous in discussing previous works and newly in formation projects. We watched a few of her older films together, talking about her process and in particular, the decisions that go into her own role within the works and into determining what is revealed to the viewer and what is withheld. Garnett’s work often seems to seek to understand its subject matter through the self, and it is both her and the viewer that thus become implicated in the works. It was really interesting to see how this focus shapes the formal concerns of her projects.

Robyn O’Neil was deep in preparations for an exhibition that was right around the corner, and it was a great moment to be in the studio as she was working towards completing her labor-intensive, large-scale drawings. I appreciated being afforded insights into the actual processes that guide the work, as well spending time talking about her recent production and its relationship to this new body of work. Cayetano Ferrer was similarly preparing for an upcoming exhibition and it was great to speak with him about his materials and processes, both of which are so central to the conceptual underpinnings of his work. I had seen an excellent installation of his work in an exhibition at Miami’s Michael Jon and Alan and I was really pleased to be able to learn more about his practice through this visit.

I’ve known Meg Cranston for many years, having studied with her at UCLA. Cranston’s classes remain a touchstone for me, both for the direct lessons she imparted but also in the way in which she, and many of the other UCLA faculty, modeled how to be an artist in the world. Her relationship to her subject matter and forms, which is wonderfully idiosyncratic and open, really exposed me to the way in which artists work and approach ideas. I was grateful for the chance to reconnect with Cranston at this moment, and in addition to looking at new work, much of our visit was spent discussing the election, the role of feminism in shaping the current conversation, and the arts education.

My last two visits were with Melanie Schiff, whose work I knew in particular from my time in Chicago, and with Max King Cap, whose practice I was pleased to learn more about. Schiff had recently opened an exhibition in New York and it was great to see some of the work from the bodies that comprised that show, as well as to talk about her shooting and editing process. We also discussed her recent show at LAXART, which I was fortunate to see in person, and it was a great touchstone to discuss the way in which she conceptualizes exhibitions and installations. Cap was in the midst of a number of projects, both artistic and focused on arts education, and our conversation was very open, pivoting around both topics. I particularly enjoyed seeing his bold, graphic drawings and discussing ways in which they might circulate, as well as learning about his research into the successes and failures of art schools in the US.

I invited Iman Issa to join me from New York after speaking with Ethan Swan at 356 Mission, who, like me, has been following her work for a few years now. I very much think of LA as a sculptor’s city and Issa’s practice offers a really interesting and pointedly political dimension to that conversation. I am grateful to Artadia and to Ethan and his team for supporting this program and for opening up the space for us to have this conversation, both literally and figuratively. I’m also grateful to Artadia for facilitating this trip and these visits, which were so productive. And lastly, I’m thankful to the artists with for opening their studios to me. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Image: Max King Cap, Dubois is Back in Town, 2014, ink on paper, 24 x 36 inches

Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles Public Program with Diana Nawi and Iman Issa at 356 Mission

12/16/16

Diana Nawi, Associate Curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami, was in conversation with artist Iman Issa at 356 S. Mission Rd. as part of Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles on Thursday, November 17 at 7:00 pm.

Diana Nawi is Associate Curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she has curated exhibitions including Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot, Iman Issa: Heritage Studies, and Nari Ward: Sun Splashed, a mid-career survey of the artist’s work. Nawi has organized newly commissioned projects with Yael Bartana, Nicole Cherubini, Bouchra Khalili, LOS JAICHACKERS (Julio César Morales and Eamon Ore-Giron), Shana Lutker, and Matthew Ronay. Prior to joining PAMM, Nawi worked as an assistant curator on the Abu Dhabi Project of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and served as a fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Nawi holds an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Iman Issa (born 1979, Cairo) is an artist based in Cairo and New York. Recent group and solo exhibitions include the 8th Berlin Biennial, MuHKA, Antwerp, Tensta Konsthall, Spånga, New Museum, New York, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Sculpture Center, New York, and the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo. Books include Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places published by the SculptureCenter in 2011. Awards include the HNF–MACBA Award (2012) and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013). Issa teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art.

Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles Summary by Katherine Brinson

8/8/16

Katherine Brinson is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she recently curated a major retrospective of the work of Christopher Wool. Since joining the Guggenheim in 2005, Brinson has organized numerous exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, including solo presentations by Danh Vo, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Agathe Snow, Ryan Gander, Kitty Kraus, and Julieta Aranda. In 2015 she co-curated The Hugo Boss Prize: Paul Chan and the group exhibition Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, and was the curator of the Guggenheim presentation of Doris Salcedo (organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago).

—

In November 2015, I traveled to Los Angeles as the visiting curator for Artadia’s Art & Dialogue series, a recently inaugurated program that aims to facilitate exchange between artists and curators across the country. I hadn’t had the chance to do many studio visits during my previous brief trips to the city, so this was a welcome opportunity to get to know new practices, as well as to deepen my insight into a number of L.A.-based artists I had long followed. My illuminating conversations with each awardee exceeded my high expectations, and while the work was resolutely diverse, I was interested to see that a number of connective threads emerged across an intense three days of visits—notably a common focus on the social fabric and natural landscape of California.

My first visit was with Nicole Miller. Having seen her mesmeric video The Conductor as part of the Highline Art program in 2009, I knew that her work occupies a space between documentary film, storytelling, and performance, exploring the capacity of the moving image for perceptual disjunction as well as narrative. Our discussion ranged across phantom limb syndrome, laughter therapy, and the daggering dance style, with a particular focus on her recent work Believing is Seeing, a collection of oral histories from L.A. residents commissioned by LACMA. Later in the day, my visit with Kerry Tribe touched on some related concerns, particularly the instability of recalled narratives and cinematic representation. I had seen Kerry’s riveting three-channel video The Aphasia Poetry Club at her solo show at 356 S. Mission Road the previous spring, so we focused on a number of other past installations and film works, as well as her forthcoming public project based on the Los Angeles River.

My conversation with Richard T. Walker, a fellow British transplant to the US, centered on the notion of the sublime and how it was parsed and amplified in his video, installation, and sound-based works. We viewed a work in which monologue, score, and tableaux of the southwest desert cohered into an eloquent exploration of the individual’s relationship to nature. In Melanie Schiff’s studio, I was excited to have the chance to see and discuss many of the photographs that had featured in her recent monograph at LAXART. Excavating the nuances of her domestic setting, the female body, and the quality of the Californian light, each of the images we viewed was quietly dense with meaning. I saw a similar consideration of the vicissitudes of the daily environment in the work of Ken Fandell, as we looked through a series of photographs that studied the cypress trees outside his living room window. Other subjects veered from the everyday to the cosmic, and a favorite memory from this visit was a series of witty collages created by merging cuttings from various books of canonic photography.

Allison Wiese is based in San Diego, where she Chairs the Department of Art at USD, so we met at a café to discuss her wide-ranging practice. We focused on a number of projects that activate and intervene in architectural spaces in performative ways, including some ambitious works in progress. My final visit was with the sole painter in the group of awardees: Nick Brown. Brown’s densely layered canvases take as their subject the forests and abandoned settlements that can be found in surprisingly close proximity to the city. Interestingly, these paintings were as immersive as any of the installation or time-based work I saw during other visits, with fragments of the compositions at times advancing beyond the conventional bounds of the canvas toward the viewer, in a merging of the pictorial and physical space—a bracing revelation rounding off a few days that had been full of them.

–

Image: Richard T. Walker

Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles Public Program Katherine Brinson in Conversation with Alex Hubbard at LACMA

12/16/15

Presented at Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of Artadia’s Art & Dialogue program, Katherine Brinson engages in a conversation with artist Alex Hubbard. In addition to providing an overview of Hubbard’s practice, this talk focuses on work presented in Hubbard’s exhibition “Basic Perversions,” which was concurrently on view as the inaugural exhibition at Maccarone, Los Angeles.

Katherine Brinson is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she recently curated a major retrospective of the work of Christopher Wool. Since joining the Guggenheim in 2005, Brinson has organized numerous exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, including solo presentations by Danh Vo, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Agathe Snow, Ryan Gander, Kitty Kraus, and Julieta Aranda. In 2015 she co-curated The Hugo Boss Prize: Paul Chan and the group exhibition Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, and was the curator of the Guggenheim presentation of Doris Salcedo (organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago).

Los Angeles-based artist Alex Hubbard was born in 1975 in Toledo, Oregon. He received his BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Working across painting, sculpture, and video, Hubbard often blurs the distinctions between mediums by migrating the rules of one over to the next. One-person shows of Hubbard’s work have been presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Midway Contemporary Art Center, Minneapolis; The Kitchen, New York; and the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2010 Whitney Biennial; Greater New York at MoMA PS1; and at the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Miami; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Hubbard’s work appears in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Hubbard’s first monograph, “Eat Your Friends,” was published this year by DoPe Press.