Tyler Vlahovich | I Drank the Kool Aid"My work is an expression of certainty and ambiguity. I mean to link these interests in a practical and accessible way.
My approach is to set in motion a certain kind of tension through the seduction of abundance, inquiry and discovery. I start with the rudiments of composition - volumes, values, lines and their variants - and methodically build toward excess. My aim is to have these straightforward elements spar with the spatial ambiguities they propagate; and, because the repetition and variation of these elements is plain, it quickly becomes a game of how I can relate or cluster them. Somehow a rapport emerges that slows the read of the overall image while leveling a richly charged field to study. The resulting image is intended to be compelling by means of its uncomfortable vagueness. I use contour line as a means to plainly articulate form and space while hinting at figuration. Often the clarity of the line is bent toward misinterpretation. Figuration steps in to maintain a point of reference. Contour lines also suggest a great deal with extreme economy and can easily slip or flash between two and three-dimensional representation. I like how this flux can delay a quick appraisal. And, as the title of the show suggests, I’ve not only embraced the promising/worrisome paradox of clarity but the attraction has become a calling."
- Tyler Vlahovich
Gallery hours:
Open 12-6pm, Friday - Saturday or by appointment.
Henry Taylor | Couch Paintings
September 30 - October 23
Opening Reception | Thursday September 30th 7-10pm.
WPA is proud to present a new exhibition from Henry Taylor,
Couch Paintings.
Gallery hours:
Open 12-6pm, Thursday - Saturday or by appointment.
The Video Compilation from the installation at WPA is now viewable online at Guide-LA.com Click here to watch now. Also some new pictures have been added to the current page of last night opening.
Sun Zoom Spark
March 26 - April 25
Opening Reception, March 27th, 6-9pm
WPA is proud to present Sun Zoom Spark, featuring work by Julie Becker, Katy Crowe, Pamela Jorden, Alice Könitz, Virginia Holt, and Terri Phillips.
Andrew Hahn | Paintings for Achillia
February 20 - March 21
Opening Reception, February 20, 7-10pm
WPA is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and prints by Andrew Hahn. “Paintings for Achillia” features three oil paintings that continue Hahn’s investigation of the female portrait, but here his ghostly cinematic and disembodied faces achieve a grand scale, and the figurative fragmentation of bound feet shows up in two of the paintings. For Hahn, these works are like film stills from a surrealist movie about a female Achilles, a perversion of the Greek myth, that has yet to be made. The paintings’ surface remains relatively flat, though complex with Hahn’s layering techniques of both scraping wet and sanding dry paint, creating filters and blurred lines, and the occasional element of spraypaint, all making the canvases, and the fleshy subject matter, appear attacked.
Like in his earlier series of 50 photorealistic watercolors of crime scenes or his feature-length bio-pic on the Unabomber, these new paintings are about the procedural, assembling clues in a documentary fantasy, privileging fiction over fact. The depths of literature as well as the movement of projected film can be allegorized as a motive for Hahn’s mechanics of painting, wherein he has set up his own classical story of fear and seduction, paranoia and vulnerability.
Also on display is his varicolored collection of ‘Unfinished Girl’ monotypes. In the context of this installation, the artist has referred to these quickly painted and transferred portraits as “a casting call for various Achillias.” The chance blurring and smearing created in the printing process does much of the work in creating the psychological story of his subjects. These prints are installed in the office alongside the same lithographic press from which they were pulled.
Andrew Hahn lives and works in Los Angeles.
Gallery open 12-6pm, Thursday - Sunday or by appointment.
January 17 – February 21, 2010
