acp Dec 5, 2010 - Jan 22, 2011

ACP

PARKER JONES is pleased to announce Artist Curated Projects.  While this continues the gallery’s mission of showcasing the work of emerging artists, for this exhibition the artist-as-curator is given consideration.

The artists Eve Fowler and Lucas Michael began Artist Curated Projects in July, 2008, and have realized twenty-four projects since then, always with artists they believed deserved closer inspection, and always in non-traditional exhibition spaces, most often the home of a volunteer.  For this project, ACP will operate within the ‘white cube’ and existing infrastructure of a commercial gallery.

The ubiquitous five-week exhibition duration has been divided into six sections.  The first, which is curated by Fowler and Michael, will be a two week exhibition of the work of recent graduate from the California College of the Arts, Lee Maida.  The remaining three weeks have been given expanded gallery hours and will be a seamless succession of four four-day solo shows, each by an artist selected by a guest curator chosen by Fowler and Michael.  The schedule is:

Dec. 5 – 18:  Lee Maida, curated by ACP
Jan. 4 – 7:  Anne McCaddon, curated by Alex Segade
Jan. 8 – 11:  Laurie Nye, curated by Anna Sew Hoy
Jan. 12 – 15:  William Downs, curated by A.L. Steiner
Jan. 16 – 19:  Madison Brookshire, curated by Erika Vogt

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LEE MAIDA
EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES

curated by ACP

“A woven fabric consists of two opposing linear structures:  the warp and the weft.  Imagined on a frame, the warp would be threaded first between the top and the bottom with tension across the thread.  The weft would then be passed under and over each warp thread in consecutive rows to create a surface.

This structure is quintessential to my work in methodology, material and process.  The system of support, balance, tension and weight among the threads are all central elements to the form and language of my work. Weaving becomes a concept I mine, research and perform in order to glean the social, historical, architectural and scientific import.  Deploying a broad spectrum of sculptural and performance practices, I use the information of weaving to more deeply consider social fabrics both intimate and communal.

Everything in the world began with a yes is an utterance of failure and fortune—one that works at working.  With this collection of work, I am considering utility and interaction. Floating weaving on the surface of a clay body prioritizes the process.  Inciting/inviting bodies into communion and allowing the viewer to partake and take are processes by which the making and viewing (writing and reading) of the object can be re-invented over and over. Yes, because it is consensual, creative, moving, forming, and positive.”  (Maida)

Lee Maida (b. 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY.  She received her BFA in Textiles from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA.  Maida’s work has been exhibited at venues in New York and California including Artist Curated Projects, Silvershed, SOMArts, Taxter & Spengemann and La Mama Galleria.

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ANNE McCADDON
OVER-UNDER WORKED

curated by Alex Segade

When Anne McCaddon’s studio was down the hall from mine, I couldn't keep myself from interrupting her so I could look at the pictures. First, there were these buildings she seemed determined to never finish: gesso eradicating the city, inky windows dribbling. Then, portraits of a hot apparition, smiling maybe, looking away. She made these faces for a year, then the portrait broke apart, and there were fingers and eyes, in batwing blacks and bright siren reds. The spookiness of these self-conscious abstractions was sad and funny – and she seemed so close to making her point: the paintings turned away from the viewer as if the pointless work of making paintings had to be confronted, and affirmed.

We spent three years talking about the other students, money, competition, R&B, art history and boys. Sometimes, our discouragement. This is what I remember about those pictures in Anne's studio: a tireless pushing, an unending scratching, the infinite building up of what is to be infinitesimal in it's taking apart. It seems so impossible, describing how hard it is for an artist to work, when making art is the easiest thing to do. And yet one thing I had in common with Anne was that we both believed that art is labor, if you think of it that way, and it should be hard. We also agreed on not making it look too much like work – that's a major turn-off. In Anne’s eloquently imperfect colorings, tender cover-ups, prettinesses made out of clumsinesses, the confidence is placed in the viewer: she trusts that we are worth confiding in. Anne’s paintings are vulnerable, like friendships, and honest, like friends can be, but they don't always comfort, and they can't always be there for you. They withhold just enough to seem human.

At Anne's most recent open studio, there were fancy wines and classy snacks – and I don’t think there were any hip-hop/R&B conglomerations playing in the background – but there were the new paintings of pine-apples and sushi and rugs and flowers, these familiar, drawing-like icons barely keeping themselves together, displaced by amorphous shapes in un-obvious colors. The absurdly pleasant subject matter is rendered with the easiest hand, or rather, an eased grip; something’s changed, and it would be fitting to say that these works are mature, made by someone who knows what they are doing, and what is being un-done by doing it. Anne's paintings play out the tensions between the work and the not-work, the image and the means of making it appear, the plan and the tentative steps taken toward its execution.

Yes, Anne McCaddon’s still working hard, which is not so easy to do, even if you have your degree and you are officially a master of fine arts. McCaddon is still working it, and there are places on the canvas where she can’t let go, where the fixation on an unknowable idea runs aground, and paint accumulates on these otherwise girlish compositions like scabs over scraped elbows. Standing among these products of her labor, a labor so close to leisure the outside world will never understand, I get this feeling like Anne’s telling me, you know, hard work pays off, even when it doesn’t. (Alex Segade, Los Angeles, December, 2010)

Anne McCaddon (b. 1981) received her BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2003) and her MFA in Painting from UCLA (2009). McCaddon’s been included in the group exhibitions Wet Paint: 10 Young LA Painters (Steve Turner Contemporary, 2009) and New Insight (Art Chicago, 2009, curated by Suzanne Ghez of The Rennaissance Society). She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, and this is her first solo exhibition.

Alex Segade (b. 1973) is an artist who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Segade holds a BA in English and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from UCLA (2009). He is one-third of the performance trio My Barbarian, which has exhibited or performed at De Appel, Amsterdam; Torpedo, Oslo; The Power Plant, Toronto; Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy; Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; MOCA, Los Angeles; LACMA; The Hammer Museum; REDCAT; LAXART; MOCA, Miami; The New Museum; Whitney Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem; the 2005 and 2007 Performa Biennials and the 2009 Baltic Triennial.

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LAURIE NYE
NATURE DIAMOND FIGURE

curated by Anna Sew Hoy

In Lewis Carroll everything begins with a horrible combat, the combat of depths...Everything in depth is horrible, everything is nonsense. Alice progressively conquers surfaces. She rises or returns to the surface. She creates surfaces. We no longer penetrate in depth but through an act of sliding pass through the looking-glass, turning everything the other way round like a left-hander. (Gilles Deleuze)

This engagement of surfaces to discuss depth is the platform from which I explore the nature of painting’s physical and symbolic potential. My paintings verge on fantasy and suggest an impetus for transformation. Everything is changing, shifting, ebbing, flowing and returning to the surface. An unconscious drive is assimilated and reconstructed into form. Figures and objects often morph, emerge or dissolve and become transformed by what’s around them, creating an ambiguous figure/ground relationship. Exploring these spatial relationships and an interchange of representational versus non-representational, I’m interested in a visionary pictorial space where the viewer’s experience is layered, suggesting new ways of “seeing” rather than rational ways of “looking.” (Laurie Nye, Los Angeles, December, 2010)

Laurie Nye (b. 1972) has been included in exhibitions at Karyn Lovegrove and POST (Los Angeles), Green Gallery (Milwaukee) and Elizabeth Dee Gallery and I-20 (New York), and selected for group exhibitions by curators such as Jan Tumlir (An Arc, Another Arc & So On, Fine Arts Gallery, CSU) and artists such as Martin Kersels and Charles Gaines (Messy Fingers, Track 16, Santa Monica). Nye received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002 and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Anna Sew Hoy's work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions such as the California Biennial 2008 at the Orange County Museum; Now You See It at the Aspen Art Museum; Eden's Edge at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and One Way or Another at the Asia Society, New York. Sew Hoy has had solo exhibitions at Sikkema, Jenkins & Co. and Renwick Gallery in New York and at LA><Art and Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sew Hoy was awarded a United States Artists Broad Fellowship in 2006, and a Durfee Foundation Grant in 2010 to support her collaborative work with Eve Fowler, for their project “Two Serious Ladies”. Sew Hoy received her MFA from Bard College in 2008 and lives and works in Los Angeles.

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WILLIAM DOWNS
AT EASE

curated by A.L. Steiner

A.L. Steiner presents the work of William Downs. Downs’ drawings are a visual reflection of human interactions within the artist’s psyche, enabling a unification of formal and surreal elements on the surface of his drawings. Using the figure as a foundation within landscapes of layering lines, the drawings represent an infinite discovery beyond their representative locations and formalities. Inspired by the tradition of craft, Downs collects vintage paper and newsprint to support the visual language explored in his drawings and prints. Utilizing the imperfection of the hand as evidence of a human presence, the artists marks fuse with existing marks and imperfections to create a tangible merging of histories. Collage, grids and seriality construct a narrative of perhapsness for the works, enhancing the accumulation of memories which function as an attenuated visual diary of what has been/what may be. (ACP, January, 2011)

Born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, William Downs now lives and works in New York. Working in a range of mediums, Downs focuses primarily on painting, drawing and printmaking. He received his BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art and Design in 1997 and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2003. He has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad including the Nexus Biennial at the Nexus Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, Georgia, Century Gallery in London, England and Hammonds House Gallery in Atlanta. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum in La Grange, Georgia, and at Mission Space in Baltimore, Maryland. He currently teaches Drawing I and II in the Foundation Department at MICA.

A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Steiner exhibits internationally and is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of the project Ridykeulous, a founding member of  W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her work is represented byTaxter & Spengemann.

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MADISON BROOKSHIRE
NOTHING IS ACCOMPLISHED

curated by Erika Vogt

3/9 …the sound of the studio with the window open, playing back on my tape deck with the window open, in the studio. Layers of reality and recording. 3/10 Made another recording today, during the day, which I liked much less than the one I made last night. Will try again tonight. Not sure what I’m after, yet, but I like the feeling of being on the track of something. … 3/11 Listening to last night’s recording. It is pleasing to be unable to immediately apprehend what is the noise of the apparatus itself and what is the recording. 3/15 The tape I made at dawn, labeled “very soft, nearly white,” has a beautiful color to it…but the sound of morning birds places it a little too well, as the sounds of my neighbors on the other side…started to define a space. … The inseparability of the color from the foreground of the recording—that, I think, may be what I like in these recordings. The birds, however, are few and far between. Maybe they are interesting incidents, little breaks in the surface. … 3/17 Listening now to the tape I made last night. … Very fine. Considered making another recording at dawn and decided against it. … The morning birds started singing before the half-hour of tape would have expired. I think this would have located the recording too much. The birds signify, whereas the dogs are just sound. It is important not to have signifiers in these recordings, maybe. It must be about perception. The signifier, in this sense, is a cliché; the unnamable sound is direct perception (framed and mediated by the recording apparatus, of course, but immediate in the sense that it is not filtered [diluted?] by language). 3/28 All art—no—every recording has some element of the lyrical about it because there is a mind on the other end of the recording. The decision to record, the moment that stretches and distorts time itself, has an incisive quality to it. Even the blandest recordings—intentionally bland, intentionally gray—are colored by the romance of that phenomenological imprint. “I was here—and I wanted you to have this.” (Madison Brookshire, 2010)

The performance, by Madison Brookshire and Tashi Wada with Mark So, will take place at the closing reception, January 19, at 8 pm.

Madison Brookshire is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. He has exhibited his work widely, including a residency at the Hammer Museum, performances at The Lab, The Wulf and Betalevel and screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, REDCAT and the Los Angeles Filmforum. He studied cinema, philosophy and music at Binghamton University and the California Institute of the Arts and currently works in the education department at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Erika Vogt has exhibited nationally and internationally, including screenings and exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. Vogt was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and 2008 California Biennial, has had solo exhibitions at Daniel Hug Gallery (2008) & Overduin & Kite (2010) and been included in group exhibitions at Romer Young Gallery (Progression Minus Progress, upcoming), Taxter & Spengemann (Ma, 2010) and Black Dragon Society (Christmas In July, 2005). She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and lives and works in Los Angeles.