Niko Solorio, "Yaweh or the Highway" Still Image, 2011
Michael-Vincent Garcia, still image
June 30 – August 29, 2012 Invoking LA. . . Curator: Paige Tighe Opening Reception: Saturday, June 30, 4-6pm Press release (pdf)
Artists: Raul Paulino Baltazar (’09 OTIS Fine Arts, ’13 MFA Public
Practice), Michael-Vincent Garcia (’10 OTIS Fine Arts), Mark X Farina,
Bridget Kane (’12 OTIS MFA Fine Arts), Elena Rosa (’12 OTIS MFA Fine
Arts), Signify, Sanctify, Believe: Claire Cronin, Adam Overton, and
Tanya Rubbak, and Niko Solorio
Can we still find spirituality in a world of pixels and sound bites?
Invoking LA..., curated by artist Paige Tighe, ( ‘10 OTIS MFA
Public Practice) presents the work of seven artists who use the
fast-cut editing techniques and formats of reality TV shows,
commercials, and music videos in an effort to summon the divine.
Events
Saturday, June 30, 4pm-6pm, Opening Reception
Tuesday, August 28, 12pm, Gallery Talk with Artist and Curator, Paige Tighe
“We no longer need old authoritarian ideologies,
which demand that art be difficult, willfully inaccessible and disturbing to
the audience – in some sense a contest of wills – as it was under modernism.
However, any approach, even now, is still considered analgesic, conciliatory
and without a critical edge, which brings me to the question of whether there
can be a truly postheroic, postpatriarchal art – one that does not equate
aesthetics with alienation from the social world, but embodies modes of
relatedness that were difficult to achieve under modernism.”
-Suzi
Gablik
The Reenchantment of Art
This Little Piggy…explores how young
artists enter their concepts and art objects into the economic and social
structures of culture, and how they navigate a system driven solely by capital
gain. How do they define, mediate, frustrate
and challenge their expected relationship to the market? This Little Piggy… went to market features the work of five Otis
artists that propose new questions and possibilities for the role these
culture-creators play as they enter a shifting global economy.
Through
this collection of work, the artists are asking who we are, what we desire, who
distributes this desire it, how do we consume it, and who feeds it to us. They offer
us thoughtful meditations on how we are more than the perpetual cycle of
consumption that we participate in on a daily basis.
Jamie Crooke, performer and
artist, in Health Care À La Carte, questions
the economics of health care, specifically through access and distribution, by
taking a cart into the streets of East LA to hand out free medical supplies.
While Cake and Eat It works with the
idea of a “gift economy.” They present five wall-mounted sculptural works that
hold masses of colorful used clothing behind Plexiglas, though sculptural these
works are presented as formal paintings. Viewers are invited to pull free
clothes from holes in the boxes. The work questions the history of painting and
distribution/ownership of art, while existing as seductive art objects
themselves.
Also
questioning methods of distribution and the creation of value, Shalini Sanjay Patel has designed a
conceptual catalog for the exhibition, in an effort to question the use of
catalogs as arbiters of provenance in defining the worth of art objects.
Besieged by thoughts of ownership and distribution of art, her non-catalog is
woven into the presentation of the exhibition and other promotional materials
for the show.
Through
film and photography, Gabi Vru retells
the story of being a woman. Through videos Vru creates an alternative to the
myths of womanhood produced by mainstream culture. Using the myth of Adam and
Eve, she counters the notion of classic beauty with slabs of meat, and sits in
a chair banging herself into a corner. Her work challenges mainstream media’s
wholesale marketing of prescribed, pre-packaged desire.
Unlike
Vru who uses media to question media, Hanna
Kovenock questions media through painting. The work may look like a still
image of a reality TV show with its middle class models and urban settings but
her process is drastically different from the production of a television show.
In contrast to the media frenzy of thousand of images per second Kovenock
creates portraits of people she runs into in her unearthing of Los Angeles. She opens herself up to experience
and people that leads to paintings. Brush stroke by brush stroke, meeting by
meeting Kovenock paints her present reality of Southern
California.
Art
is not separate from social needs but rather is in a special position to
critique and help ignite change.Taking
the familiar physical and conceptual structures of art and putting them together
in new ways in an effort to discuss economy tugs at and can tear open the
structures of marketing, distribution, and consumption. A gallery can be the
liminal space in which new ways of living can grow.
