Sunday, November 7
1:00-4:00
Artists Kim Alexander Jr., Elana Melissa Hill, Jessica Pezalla and Erica Ryan Stallones will be teaching a drop-in drawing workshops at LACE on November 7th 2010. Through these workshops, they will bring attention to the relationships between architecture and living organisms within the dense streets of Hollywood which surround LACE. People, plants and animals form connections between disparate parts of urban space by inhabiting fissures, crossing barriers, or obeying restrictions within pubic space. How do living things and man-made structures affect one another in urban space? How do people and other animals interact with a line of trees or hedge as opposed to an expansive “natural” area or a park? If nature is inserted or left to thrive within urban space, what effect does it have socially and culturally? These are some questions they hope to explore through drawing workshops that strive to examine the way people, animals and plants make connections and barriers through the urban fabric of Los Angeles.
Jessica Pezalla recently moved to Los Angeles after completing a yearlong Staff Artist in Residence position at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. Born in Montreal, Canada, she has a BA in Studio Art from Oberlin College and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has attended residencies at Ragdale in Lake Forest, IL and the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, MA. Solo exhibitions include Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art in San Francisco and the Red Mill Gallery at Vermont Studio Center. Pezalla’s current series of papier-mâché sculptures explores the overlap between interior spaces and the natural world. http://www.fakenature.com
Elana Melissa Hill is a california native who completed her BA at UC Irvine, and is currently in an MFA program at Claremont Graduate University. Her most recent exhibition was at The Hive Los Angeles. Her paintings are imaginative urban landscapes that combine the chaotic movement of poured and sprayed paint with the precision of pen and ink drawings. The iconic images in her paintings are pulled directly from the urban areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, as well as industrial areas found sprawling in between. elanamelissahill.wordpress.com.
Kim Alexander Jr. received his BA in 2005 from the Evergreen State College with an emphasis in Pre-Columbian Art History and Printmaking. He is currently an MFA candidate at Claremont Graduate University. Kim's work is invested in asserting drawing as a primary medium for articulating ideas in art and design. The work investigates the potential for drawing to scramble and expand the boundaries of design, architecture, and art. He distills the highly stylized forms of late modernist American design so they begin to operate in the realm of symbols and icons. By accepting drawing as operating in a conceptual space, he explores experimental loops between visual logic, drafting and other mediums.
Erica Ryan Stallones is a Los Angeles based artist currently completing her MFA at Claremont Graduate University. Her paintings capture and explore a world parallel to our own, but inaccessible through form, psychology and situation. The figure or gathering is central in Ryan Stallones’ work; it is watching, waiting, connecting to an unknown party outside the picture frame. Universal elements of light, heat and time affect the figure within a recognizable but non-specific environment to access an uncomfortable familiarity and an invitation to seek after that which has been hidden or lost.
On Curatorial Practice
Sunday, November 14
2:00-4:00
Join ASAP @ LACE in a conversation on curatorial practice and its future on Sunday, November 14, 2010 from 2:00-5:00.
The workshop will be begin with a roundtable discussion with curators Charlotte Eyerman, Anat Ebgi, Lisa Melandri and artist Rob Reynolds on their work in the field, projects that excite them and what their hopes are for future endeavors. After artist Rob Reynolds will lead a workshop and discussion on the Wunderkammer or wonder-room.
Charlotte Eyerman is an independent curator and scholar specializing in Modern and Contemporary art, based in Los Angeles. She earned Master's and PhD degrees in the History of Art at the University of California at Berkeley. She has held curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the Department of Paintings, as well as at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where she was Curator and department head of Modern and Contemporary Art. Most recently, she was a director at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. Eyerman has published and lectured extensively at museums and universities nationally and internationally, and has curated numerous exhibitions including, "Courbet and the Modern Landscape" (Getty, 2006), "Action/Abstraction: Pollock, deKooning, and American Art, 1940-1976," which won awards for excellence from the Association of International Art Critics, the Association of Art Museum Curators, and the National Jewish Book Award (St. Louis, 2008), and numerous contemporary and new media exhibitions, including Doug Aitken, "Migration: Empire," and Tom Friedman, "Ream" (St. Louis, 2007-2009). She founded an art consultancy business, ElucidArt, Inc. (Los Angeles, 1999-2002), and was on the faculty at Union College from 1994-2001, and was named the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor in 1996. Eyerman has also taught art history courses at the University of Southern California and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Anat Ebgi holds a Master of Arts degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, class of 2008. Her Master's thesis Under The Influence featured work by John Baldessari, Jen DeNike, Nancy Holt, Tim Jackson, Joan Jonas, Dave Jones, Jill Magid, Rachel Mason, Michele O'Marah, and Robert Smithson. In 2004, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Arts in Context from the New School for Social Research in New York City. Anat co-founded the nomadic and experimental FRISBEE FAIR, which took place in a hotel on Miami Beach during Art Basel from 2004-06, and in a converted YMCA building in Chelsea during the Armory Fair in 2005. She has curated exhibitions in galleries in New York, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In 2009, she co-curated, with Rita Gonzalez, the 2009 Cal-Arts graduating MFA class exhibition, Why Theory.
Lisa Melandri is the Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Ms. Melandri organizes exhibitions and manages oversight of the museum’s infrastructure and exhibition/education program. She was curator for Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico, and the upcoming Art After White People: Time, Trees, and Celluloid. Ms. Melandri also curates the Project Series at the museum and serves as an independent curator for projects such as Painted Faces.
Rob Reynolds lives and works in Los Angeles and has exhibited work at The Wexner Center; The Katonah Museum; Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles; Khastoo Gallery, Los Angeles; Happy Lion, Los Angeles; ROVE New York/London; The Basel Art Fair; Threadwaxing Space; Printed Matter at DIA; The Whitney Museum ISP; Bell Gallery, Brown University, and elsewhere. His photographic work has been published in Blind Spot, Spin and George magazines. Rob was art editor of FEED Magazine and taught literature and documentary studies at Harvard University. Previously, he played in the noise band Dung Beetle. Rob graduated from Brown University, (BA Art and Semiotics 90'), and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (92'), previously studying at The Boston Museum School, and The School of Art Architecture and Planning, Cornell University. Rob was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1968.
