Andrew Hahn | Opening

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.

Michael Minelli | Guide-LA.com Video Interview

Guide-LA.com has posted a new conversation with WPA artist Michael Minelli and UCLA Contemporary Art History Lecturer Miwon Kwon. Check it out here.

Charles Irvin | Art Since the Summer of ‘69

January 17 – February 21, 2010
Opening reception on Sunday January 17, 4 – 7 p.m.

Art Since the Summer of ‘69
195 Chrystie Street,
Suite 303, 3rd floor
10002 New York, NY
www.artsince69.com

Art Since the Summer of ’69 is proud to present Wuv is the Waw, Charles Irvin’s premier solo show in New York.

Los Angeles-based Irvin works with a wide range of media, including video, performance, drawing and painting. For Wuv is the Waw, Irvin has produced two series of new drawings, depicting conflations of opposing concepts: birth and death, masculine and feminine, inner and outer space, organic and inorganic, the spiritual and the obscene.

The drawings depict mystical states where all is one, visualizing the alchemical concept of the union of the opposites. Carl Jung compared this to the psychological process of individuation, where the personal and collective subconscious join with consciousness. Since Irvin’s imagery is intuitive, the work depicts the process that creates it, the subconscious and conscious working together. The drawings in the series Wuv is the Waw were inspired by a quote from Aleister Crowley; “Love is the law, love under will”. The drawings seek to represent the fun, light-hearted, and perhaps even cute and cuddly side of the complex, multifaceted Crowley. In tribute to Crowley's meditations on the multivalence of symbols, the drawings contain an image that evokes light and dark sides of our contemporary visual culture. Crowley loved riddles, so Irvin refuses to reveal what these sides are.

For more information and image requests,
please contact the gallery by email info@artsince69.com or by phone 347.208.5437.

Michele O'Marah | Opening at Cottage Home

Michele O'Marah
A girl's got to do what a girl's got to do
January 9 - February 6, 2010
Opening Saturday, Jan 9th, 6-9pm






Kathryn Brennan Gallery is thrilled to present A girls got to do what a girls got to do, an exhibition of new work by Michele O'Marah. For the exhibition, O'Marah has created three new video works that are re-created scenes from the Pamela Anderson film Barb Wire (1996). Continuing her examination of the mass media representation of the revolutionary, this exhibition is the second half of a project that began with her piece How Goes it with the Black Movement? (2007), whose focus was a PBS broadcast interview between Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton and conservative host and author William F. Buckley on his program Firing Line. A counterpoint to the heady, academic discussion of the former, O'Marah's current source, Barb Wire, is an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name. Anderson's "Barb" is a disaffected mercenary in the post-Second U.S. Civil War city of Steel Harbor, who gets caught in the middle of the revo lutionary activities of a former flame who is working to expose the ruling Neo-Fascist government for its ruthless behavior. Aimed at a Gen X audience, the film has acquired a cult status despite a poor reception, both critically and at the box office. For A girls got to do what a girls got to do, the artist will be exhibiting three video works, installations of set pieces, photographs, and text-based drawings. Having re-staged four scenes from the film, O'Marah has cast a different actress for each to play the character of Barb. In addition to the artist's probe of the corporatized, MTV version of a revolutionary hero, O'Marah's efforts serve as deconstructive analyses of the film's representation of femininity. Hiring a diverse range of professional actresses to fill Anderson's stiletto high heels, O'Marah's "Barb" takes various forms. Working with each actress, O'Marah's video works take on the most sexually explicit scenes from the film and offer a variety of interpretations of the lead role: campy, flirty, and sexy. The one-dimensional, Barbie Doll of a character is given a depth, sexuality, and humor that is lacking in the original. Set pieces from the production of the videos re-installed and accessori zed with photographs and sculptures blur the line between art installation and function. In addition, a series of text-based works on paper, pulled from dialogue and lyrics from the film’s soundtrack (primarily new metal cover versions of older songs), address issues of authorship and contrivance.

Performance | December 24th

WPA is pleased to announce a performance on December 24th from 8:30pm.
featuring:
David Hughes, Derrick Maddox and John Williams.

WPA | 510 Bernard Street Los Angeles, CA 90012 | +1 213-503-5762

David Hughes | Opening December 19

David Hughes

December 17 - January 10
Opening Reception December 19th 6pm - 9pm

WPA is pleased to announce an exhibition by David Hughes.
David Hughes’ sculpture is discursive and infused with personal narrative. His work can be seen as a peculiar kind of storytelling. In Hughes’ world, the practicality of objects is isolated from both use and subject. The care is taken in the synthesis of a unique material language, not in the directness of pointing. His work is at once about the anxiety of effort and the ease of a complex gesture.
Hughes’ art encompasses everything from performance, sound, video and film, to various forms of painting and drawing, all siphoned through the expanded definition of sculpture; even his writings have a materialist quality.

Gallery open 12-6pm, Thursday - Sunday or by appointment.

WPA Soup Kitchen Event

With the closing of Terri Phillips show we will also be hosting the inaugural WPA Soup Kitchen event.
From 4pm on Saturday Dec 12th.