1:00-4:00
at LACE // 6522 Hollywood Blvd.
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.
