Fil Rüting | Opening WPA

Fil Rüting | AUSTRALIAN
September 3rd - October 2nd, 2011
Opening Friday, September 2nd, 8-10pm

WPA is pleased to announce "AUSTRALIAN",
a new Video Installation by Fil Rüting.

"AUSTRALIAN" consists of two video projections screened on opposing walls. As the title suggests, the work's focus is on the artist's homeland, exclusively sourcing its imagery and sound from the cinema of Australia. The video is the next installment of Rüting's ongoing process he refers to as "Tri Repetaé". "Tri" referring to the human ability to see three channels of color, trichromacy. "Repetaé" referring to meaning affirmed through repetition and context. Rüting uses cinematic sources, wrenching them from their linear format, cutting and shifting time, recomposing imagery in colorful ghost-like forms and figures moving through a stationary camera space. In "AUSTRALIAN", the tri repetaé form explores a compositional narrative focusing on the question of what the term "Australian" means.¹

Themes explored in Rüting's video installation include primitive utopianism, colonialism, gender politics, transgression, the modern condition and spirituality. The artist has subtitled a few segments within the installation, "Nura (Country)", "White Fellas", "Petrol Heads", "Blokes and Sheilas", "The Big Smoke" and "Dreamtime".

The result is a thirty-minute drop into a psychedelic Down Under, filled with wonder, angst, hedonism, transformation and suspense. Sonically abrupt and mesmerizing "AUSTRALIAN" disarms the viewer into a bi-polar space, where iconography and narrative meet to create a poetic identity hidden within the cinematic condition of a unique modern nation.

Gallery hours:
Open 12-6pm, Saturday and Sunday or by appointment.

510 Bernard St, Los Angeles CA 90012

Film Screening | WPA Present's Alan Kaprow's Fluids, 1967

Sunday, August 14th, 8:30pm
WPA will be screening the rarely seen Pasadena Art Museum documentary of Alan Kaprow's "FLUIDS" 1967.

Alan Kaprow's happening FLUIDS involved
constructing enclosures with ice blocks at various locations in Pasadena
and Los Angeles. Kaprow recruited participants using billboards that
displayed the FLUIDS score: "During three days, about twenty rectangular
enclosures of ice blocks (measuring about 30 feet long, 10 wide and 8
high) are built throughout the city. Their walls are unbroken. They are
left to melt".

Groups of young people made his work a reality. They stacked blocks of
ice, delivered by the Union Ice Company, into rectangular structures.
Over the ensuing days, the ice structures melted. This 30 minute film documents one of these events.

The Optimist’s Parking Lot | Amy Sarkisian and Charles Irvin

Beacon Arts Building
808 N. La Brea Ave.
Inglewood, CA 90302
310.419.4077

Art Exhibition: The Optimist’s Parking Lot
August 13th – September 25th, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 13th from 6:00-10:00 PM
Gallery Hours: Thurs. – Sat. 1:00 – 6:00 PM & Sun. 1:00 - 4:00 PM

The Optimist's Parking Lot, a group show curated by Suzanne Adelman and Keith Walsh, proposes a state of being that metaphorically draws upon the provisional or transitional status of this zone, which may be a stop within a journey, the location for a political sit-in, or possibly even one’s home. In this way, a parking lot is much like a gallery: A way station for art objects, and a zone for expectation, contemplation, deferment, anxiety, advocacy, and exaltation.

Optimism is, in fact, a noun. Common definitions of the word also often cite Gottfried Leibniz’s 17th century philosophy that the existing world is the perfect world as it was conceived through God the master architect. This notion has given way in the last four centuries to a humanist sensibility and, as embodied through artistic production, realizes phenomenological zones of self-empowerment. The decision to create, and the will to do depends upon a certain optimism—which may also be considered a utopian gesture. Inevitably, optimism evokes its counterpart, pessimism and dystopia. This expressed struggle is often enfolded into the various processes that transpire during the making of art, and may find its reification in the work’s formal aspects, or its manner of response to external conditions. How might the work acknowledge, filter, or avoid references to our larger contemporary context of economic malaise, corporate capitalism, geopolitical unrest, environmental catastrophes, and conservative social mandates? How might art help us better imagine our individual and collective futures? The relationship of form to content also brings about the question of whether art functions well as evidence of optimism or not. Can art be a more reliable indicator of the complexities of optimism than a smile or an upbeat spiel?

The poetics of The Optimist’s Parking Lot attempts to remind us of the multifaceted nature of optimism: the challenges of considering a sense of future and possibility--along with its potential detours, waiting, and endgames in the context of current events.

The Optimist’s Parking Lot feature the work of Lisa Anne Auerbach, Aaron Brewer, Kristin Calabrese, Mason Cooley, Young Chung, Dorit Cypis, Mark Dutcher, Doug Harvey, Steven Hull, Steve Hurd, Charles Irvin, Ed Johnson, Vincent Johnson, Molly Larkey, Amy Sarkisian, Kyungmi Shin, Jen Smith, Thaddeus Strode, Suzanne Adelman, Keith Walsh, Chris Wilder, and Aaron Wrinkle.

Pamela Jorden + John Pearson | NYC Group show

For Immediate Release-

SNOWCLONES

INNA BABAEVA
DREW BEATTIE
SUSAN BRICKER
DAVID DEUTSCH
MICHAEL DOPP
EJ HAUSER
PAM JORDEN
RACHEL LIEBER
BENJAMIN KING
LAUREN LULOFF
MICHAEL MAHALCHICK
ROB NADEAU
JULIA OLDHAM
JOHN PEARSON
CLINTEL STEED
JACKIE SACCOCCIO
HOLLY ZAUSNER

ART BLOG ART BLOG is extremely pleased to announce the opening of "Snowclones" curated by Benjamin King (HKJB) and Rob Nadeau. This show is the fifth in a series of exhibitions ART BLOG ART BLOG is presenting at a temporary location in Chelsea, NY on the 11th floor of 508 West 26th St. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, August 4th from 6 - 9pm. The exhibition runs through Saturday, August 13th. Open hours are Tuesday - Saturday, Noon - 6pm and by appointment.

The tendency toward artists employing a multi-disciplinarian approach seems today more prevalent than ever. In the spirit of Alan Kaprow, Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, happenings, liquid light shows, shamans, tricksters, wits, oracles and so on, we have invited a group of 17 artists to come together in a collaborative effort entitled Snowclones.

It could be argued that many visual artists work within culturally identifiable visual templates, such as sculpture, painting, video, installation, performance, etc. Similarly, a snowclone takes a linguistic template ( as in "X is the new Y,” or “if by X, you mean Y,” and “X2: Electric Boogaloo,” and so on) where the substitution of the variables change the meaning of the statement while still retaining the original form.

Drawing upon this concept, the form of the group show could be considered just such another timeworn template with endless possibilities for customization. In Snowclones, the organizers seek to foster an experiential environment in which each person, or artwork, plays off one another, generating meaning through the juxtaposition, presentation and re-presentation of interwoven layers of artistic content. The resulting event will ideally affect a shift in focus from that seemingly well-known format to something surprising, improvisational and unique.

The artists involved represent a wide spectrum of visual templates, disciplines and conceptual practices. Everyone is free to experiment and alter their own work as they see fit throughout the run of the show. Whether each artist contributes an already existing piece or chooses to work site specifically in the gallery, the continually evolving show seeks to be collaborative, fluid and open. Boundaries become blurred between disciplines and authorship, while content bleeds from one source to another, thereby altering and subdividing the existing space to reveal some underlying and intuitive logic.

* A snowclone is a type of cliché and phrasal template originally defined as "a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants". An example of a snowclone is "grey is the new black", a version of the template "X is the new Y" where X and Y may be replaced with different words or phrases. Snowclones are related to both memes and clichés. . . In the study of folklore, snowclones are a form of what are usually described as a proverbial phrase which have a long history of description and analysis. There are many kinds of such wordplay, as described in a variety of studies of written and oral sources. The term was coined by Glen Whitman on January 15, 2004. (Wikipedia)

Benjamin King and Rob Nadeau
HKJB.org
info@hkjb.org

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ART BLOG ART BLOG
artblogartblog.com
joshuaabelow.blogspot.com