Here's the haps:
Date: Thursday, December 11
Time: 6:00 - 10:00 pm
Locale: 120 Judge John Aiso Street, Los Angeles, CA
Darin Klein teaches "zines with one page"
Ami Tallman on "Hope and Hopelessness (or a variant on the theme)"
Christopher Russell on "Personal Evasiveness.."
Check out the ArtSlant event post, with fancy links to directions!
Spotlight on Upcoming Speaker Christopher Russell
Russell is an artist and writer who lives and works in Los Angeles. He publishes Bedwetter magazine and has spoken about his work at a number of universities and art colleges. His writings have appeared in Small Doggies, Art US, Instant City, and Homeless Ideas. An independent film, Letter to Faye, was based on one of his stories. Christopher's visual work has appeared in several American and European exhibitions, including solo shows at the Van Harrison Gallery in Chicago and Acuna Hanson in Los Angeles. He was included in the Harper Collins photo book, Voyeur and has been collected by the RISD Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.He is currently represented by the Circus Gallery in Los Angeles and has been selected to take part in the UCLA Hammer Museum's Project Room series in January of 2009.
Spotlight on Upcoming Speaker Darin Klein
From Klein's website:"My introduction to curating came fast and furious in the fall off 1996 when I co-founded scene/escena in the Mission District of San Francisco. Built literally from the ground up, scene/escena was a totally D.I.Y. venue for emerging bay area visual and performance artists. In its first year, the gallery was host to 17 exhibitions featuring over 70 artists and performers and had garnered the San Francisco Bay Guardian Reader's Poll award for Best Friday Night Art Events.
During this period I fostered relationships with many fledgling artists who would go on to exhibit work at established galleries and museums including SF MOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, The Armand Hammer Museum and Roberts & Tilton in Los Angeles, and The Drawing Center and The Whitney in New York.
In 1997 I took the position of curator and events coordinator at San Francisco's SPACE, a cross-disciplinary environment for artists working in any medium. There, I implemented the salon-style gallery Ground Level, working to promote underexposed artists in a casual, nurturing atmosphere and co-organizing successful events to raise much-needed funds for Visual Aid, a non-profit organization benefiting artists living with HIV and AIDS.
My involvement in independent media and San Francisco's underground literary community developed as I published and distributed numerous solo and collaborative artists' books, chapbooks and 'zines - publishing projects that can be described as exhibitions in print, a cost-efficient and immediate alternative to actual gallery space. This led to my involvement in 1999 with Blue Books, the small press bookshop at The New College. There, I curated a series of socio-politically inspired exhibitions featuring visual art, spoken word and self-made book arts. My primary objective in undertaking these projects was to bring together artists, writers and those concerned with the growth and exposure of independent media. During this period I was also fortunate to spend time in Mexico City as an artist in residence at la Panaderia.
In 2000 I moved to Los Angeles, and I have continued to curate exhibitions, seeking out and utilizing both galleries and non-traditional spaces for projects that evolve from my extensive networking and professional relationships with emerging and established artists, my constant research into individual artists' practices, and my curiosity about developing narratives in the current art historical dialogue. Most recently, my focus has been trained on film, video and performance art, culminating in my involvement as guest curator at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, prog:ME Digital Media Festival in Rio de Janeiro, and The Hammer Museum and Silverlake Film Festival Shorts in Los Angeles. From 2001 to 2007 I curated the small press section at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, resulting in a selection of 'zines, mini comics, chapbooks and artists' books unprecedented in Los Angeles. In 2007 I took the position of Programs Coordinator at the Hammer Museum.
Throughout the past decade, I have participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, and continue to show my own work in galleries and museums internationally as well as produce and distribute independent publications on a regular basis."
Materials for Zine Workshop by Darin Klein
Klein asks that everyone bring some cool stuff with which to participate in the Zine workshop:Collage materials
Scissors
Photographic prints (5 ½ inches high by 4 ¼ inches wide)
Original or appropriated texts including poetry, short stories, political rants, recipes, etc
Variety of pens including sharpie, ballpoint, fine line, calligraphy, etc
Transfer-type
Scissors
Glue
Clear tape
Students may want to embellish their final product after photocopying. Suggestions include:
Glitter
Paint pens
Stickers
Puffpaint
Markers, highlighters, watercolors, colored pencils, etc
Spotlight on Upcoming Speaker Ami Tallman
From the press release from See Line Gallery, for Tallman's solo show, "When the Sun Shines it Does Not Need Proof" July of 2008:"This body of work by Ami Tallman muses on the shared qualities of gurus and dictators, in particular the aesthetic devices used by both to inspire awe and ecstatic devotion amongst their followers. Tallman’s practice draws on images and phrases culled from idiosyncratic research. As she sought materials for this show, Tallman observed a recurrence of charismatic leaders in the 20th century who employed extravagant and sophisticated spectacles to create new, insular societies comprised of fiercely committed followers. The movements these men created usually slipped into violence and paranoia, ending in purges of their inner circles, scandal, and dissolution.
With a lush use of color, Tallman’s use and choice of materials is promiscuous. She combines colored pencil, oil, and ink with other materials, on a wide range of surfaces, yielding a tactile variation which echoes her subjects’ shifts from beatific to vengeful, doting to aloof, delphic to precise. Her work is tinged with foreboding, and both broods and frets on themes of power, hope, bliss, and betrayal. Her whimsical line slips into doubt, its cheer faltering as it encounters gaps on the page. The resultant series of images includes depictions of pageants, expectant throngs, blissed out hippies, banks of microphones, banner-lined streets, shrines, thrones, and of course, gurus and dictators.
Ami Tallman lives and works in Los Angeles. She completed her MFA at Art Center College of Design in 2006. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco and was most recently included in Against the Grain, a group show at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions that runs concurrently with this exhibition. She was featured in “15 Artists Under 35” in the May 2008 issue of Art ltd magazine."
