Autonomie / Autonomy / Autonomía

Exhibit 11.0

2012-02-29T17:57:00.001-08:00

Autonomie is proud to host Pacific Non-Standard Time: Foundation for Art Resources 1977-Present on Saturday, March 10th from 7-10pm. This exhibition provides both an errant survey of the critical art practices supported by FAR and an evening of performance pieces that engage with sound, image and the contemporary paradoxes of performativity.

Pacific Non-Standard Time: Foundation for Art Resources 1977-Present

Featuring works by:

Aaron Drake

The Friendly Falcons

Performances:

Helga Fassonaki

Maya Gurantz

Fatima Hoang & Janice Gomez

Anna Oxygen

As an artist-run non-profit organization FAR has a thirty year history of supporting non-institutional projects, including the early works of John Baldassari, Judy Pfaff, Jack Goldstein, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, Matt Mullican, Dan Graham and many others. Working well beyond the confines of the white cube, the non-standard history of art production promoted by FAR has been an important supplement to the dominant conventions of the Los Angeles art world. By promoting disparate models of art production and unconventional modes of exhibition, FAR’s valorization of marginalized practices continues to question the norms of the present in order to open up new avenues of artistic experience. Continuing its commitment to an anti-institutional ethos, this Pacific Non-Standard Time event is a response to the large-scale survey format, the privileging of certain narratives of production over others, and the desire to separate the past from the present.

In contrast to other PST events, the historical dimension of PSNT highlights some of FAR’s lost moments in a discrepant genealogy that resists the urge to create a coherent meta-narrative or a teleological progression of sorts. If there is a minor theme or subtext for the evenings events, it can be seen in some of the archival selections that draw on FAR’s extensive involvement with sound art and/or musically-driven performance, such as the works of Glen Branca, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Sonic Youth and the Swans. With the above in mind, PNST aims to extend, challenge and/or re-invigorate the trajectory of these historical forerunners through the work of 4 contemporary performances that de-standardize our ideas about authorship, performance and spectatorship in the expanded field aesthetic inquiry. Morgan Thomas, a founding member of the organization, described the early activities of FAR and its rampant experimentation as being in search of “an appropriate production model.” While FAR has been through a myriad of configurations since the 70s, the artists included in this exhibition continue the drive toward new horizons of thought, feeling and experience through a consistent re-tooling of standard practices that is anything but.

For more information link to: http://www.far-la.org/

Exhibition 10.0

2012-01-25T08:44:00.000-08:00

Autonomie is proud to announce the two person show of David Micheal Lee and Michael Kindred Kinght on February the 11th, from 7-10pm. Please join us for this amazing exhibit.

LEE / KNIGHT: QUOTIENT SPACE

David Michael Lee

David Michael Lee

Known as an innovative curator, an influential art instructor and a notable figure in So Cal abstraction, Lee's work is informed by a myriad of influences, experiences and methodologies. Among his many bodies of work the Herb paintings stand out as an exemplary instance of Lee's commitment to working in a series, to his love of geometric abstraction and to his unique treatment of painting as a type of sculptural object and as an optical experience. Having developed out of a role of hemp fabric inherited from his father, and from which the series takes its namesake, the original impetus behind these works was to produce an elegant number of organic abstractions about growth and decay, permanence and transition. Beginning in greens and yellows applied to a black ground, Lee's earlier compositions suggested the use of a kind of flatten geometric space which could accommodate the traditional rules of perspective while calling into question the relationship of the viewer to 'nature', the nature of objectness and even the construction of objectivity.

David Michael Lee

Often composed from two or more horizons, the shifting dynamics of his falling and sliding forms suggest a conflicted sense of spatiality by highlighting the contradictions that adhere to perspectival systems and the experience of color. This is evidenced in the play of high key and muted tones, slick forms and rough grounds and the use of bevelled edges on a deep substrate. Experienced as interlocking or impossible geometries, or as an essay on the tension between structure and form, Lee's modular works suggest a kind of minimalist refrain, a non-essentialist take on the tradition of hard edge painting and a disruption of the Cartesian idiomatic. These three distinctive traits — as well as the floating quality of his shorn surfaces — problematize the sense of space attributed to the geometric tradition(s) that valorized flatness and the 'truth to materials'. And yet, neither an overdetermined program nor a reductionist ethos underpin Lee's work. Instead, we find a focus on absence and presence, the interchangeability of positive and negative shapes and a series of forced relations that is itself about forcing us to rethink our bodily relation to the activation of space and authorial intention.

David Michael Lee

Lee's newest works, which tend to project rich colors over a dark ground, carry off something of a neo-baroque sensibility while also returning us to a place of pure virtuality. In this regard, his most recent pictures are not so much a space of computational rigor as of punctured and paradoxical forms. One might even call them geometries of inquisition, not only for their implicit anti-Platonism but also because they expand our notion of geometric expressivity over and against the rhetoric of discursive positions. Afterall, Lee's work is dedicated to a kind of recombant aesthetic that valorizes both the power of the modular and the singular while letting the idea of the incomplete stand-in for a politic and a working method that resists all attempts at closure. While being indebted to the ideologues of design that extend from the Arts and Crafts movement to the Bauhaus to Art Informal and even certain members of American Abstract Expressionism, Lee's work still sets out for new ground in picturing an inbetween space of desire and dissonance based on the idea of the infinite as a place of instability, or of the absolute rendered in a manner that is irresolute. Such is the nature of Lee's contribution to how we understand the contested field of experience we have come to call 'the contemporary'.

Bio: Born and raised in Southern California, David Michael Lee had been active in the Orange County art community for the past 15 years. Before finishing his M.F.A. from Cal State Fullerton as a resident of Grand Central Art Center, he had completed his B.A. from Columbia College Chicago. Presently, Lee works as the collections manager for the "Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art" at Chapman University, where he also teaches drawing and design. He also works as the gallery Curator/Director for Coastline Community College's Art Gallery where he teaches courses in curatorial practice and art history.

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Michael Kindred Knight

Michael Kindred Knight

However inviting and accessible Knight's paintings might seem, to anyone who has encountered them in person, they are contradictory and complex pictorial events. At first glance they appear to be a unique marriage of postmodern syntheticism and modernist organicism — being as playful as they are analytic and as ironic as they are 'invested'. Upon a second take however, one quickly notices that these architectonic pictures are not so much about essentialism or parody. If anything, they present us with a series of questions about painting as an artificial construct or even as a dialogic design. One could even say that in Knight's last few bodies of work the conditions that frame the pictorial sublime have been transmuted into a kind of post-human space built on the use of artifice and the disruption of certain codes of mark making. Neither strictly landscape based, nor 'pure' abstraction, Knight's pictures inhabit an inbetween space that is as much about unhinging the relationship between sign and signified as it is undermining the logic of any given historical program.

Michael Kindred Knight

If we were to attempt to define his painting practice in positive terms, we could say that Knight's pictures are genre bending — a dynamic re-synthesis of past idioms. Within Knight's works one might come across the pallet of Halley or Schutz, the lost horizon of Hodgkins or Mitchell, the geometric naturalism of Diebenkorn or Feitelson, the push and pull effects of Hoffman or Albers and even the subtle sense of light attributed to Scully or Guston. And yet, Knight's works are irreducible to these influences because they come from a place that is more informed by our experience of the present, and especially, a present dominated by the feeling of oversaturation. It is an amazing trick which his works perform, being not so much a cartography of the landscape as a vivisection of art historical motifs and different compositional stratagems. In fact, in the wake of postmodernism, we might call his pictures temporal topologies or inerrant indices of a post-futurist, post-historical, post-avant-guard aesthetic. Afterall, Knight's pictures are not so much about deconstruction as reconstruction — but more specifically, a form of reconstruction that doesn't ignore all the sutures, scares and trauma of confronting the affective skin of history that is abstract art.

Michael Kindred Knight

However, in Knight's new work something slightly more nuanced is emerging, something we might even see as being a little more cosmetic if we take the idea of embellishment to be a delicate science of integrating formal relations. Indeed, the cosmetic is not shallow, but a deployment of carefully applied techniques that make the play of revealing and concealing into a public affair. And in Knight's newest works, deft and delicate decisions abound, providing us with a greater sense compositional nuance, a greater degree of naturalism and even a gentler orchestration of the sense of passage from one form and color to the next. This is not to say that his pictures aren't rigorously indebted the plastic problems of painting, only that the sense of plasticity that permeates his most recent works is just now verging on that forbidden territory of twentieth century abstraction — the construction of the beautiful as an entree into the sophisticated.

Bio: Michael Kindred Knight holds an M.F.A. in Studio Art from Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. in Studio Art from Western University. His work has been shown in several west coast cities, including Seattle and Los Angeles. Michael has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards, including the Claremont Graduate University's President's Art Award, the Karl and Beverly Benjamin Fellowship in Art, and the Walker/Parker Memorial Fellowship. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Exhibition 9.0

2012-01-08T23:02:00.000-08:00

Autonomie is proud to announce a two-person show of Nick Agauyo and Marcus Perez on Saturday, January 14^th from 7:30 to 9:30 pm.

Aguayo / Perez:

You do this to me and I do this to you

Nick Aguayo

Nick Aguayo

Aguayo’s work can be thought of as something of an essay on the function of the emblematic in abstract art inasmuch as his work consists of redressing the use of basic geometries, the application of bold colors and the deployment of various systems of arrangement. And yet, for all this, Aguayo’s work doesn’t resemble the feel of its modernist forerunners in touch, taste or program. There are no allusions here to essentialism, no remarks about the status of marks, and no determined effort to achieve the feeling of ‘organic unity’. If anything, Aguayo's work ossilates radically between a kind of neo-primitivism, a kitschy form of outsider art and the recent turn toward 'provisional' aesthetic experience.

Nick Aguayo

However, it is also worth noting that Aguayo's engagement with the improvisational urge is everyewhere informed by his last few years of work which have largely consisted of making collaged paintings out of his previous paintings. In this regard, Aguayo's homespun use of bricollage relies on the permanent and unending recycliblity of idiograms — a strategy that seems to permeate mass culture at large. A key difference however is that his methodology feels more like a personal mix tape rather than a massified remix of abstraction's greatest hits. This shows itself in a certain sensitivity of selection, a deft sense of touch and even a longing for sentimental and authentic experience.

Nick Aguayo

But does this kind of subjective approach to abstraction end up returning us to the site of a pictorial crisis greater than the problematic of modern experience, or even the impasse of postmodern painting, i.e., the end of any sense of teleos for ‘pure’ pictorialism and unmediated experience? And does Aguayo’s endless reworking of his own materials and emblmatic forms represent an even greater type of hermeticism than that which we might attribute to modern aesthetics or postmodern polemics? And if this is indeed the case, than his art practice might be rightfully called hyper-modern or even supra-modern — the example of an abstract art based on the idea of an exquisite corpse. Not painting as a zombie medium per say, but as the production of painterly events based on grafting together modernism’s remains through a cosmetics of conscription — or even art as the remains of the day or as what remains of self-invention and a certain will-toward-inscription posited as an intermmidable process of reinscription/deinscription. If we follow this line of thought to its natural end Aguayo's work appears not so much to be a type of painting about reappropriation as it is about self-appropriation; not so much about collage as it is decollage; and not so much about resemblance as it is dissemblance, transformation and the migration of motifs.

Nick Aguayo

If these are the various trajectories at play in Aguayo’s work than his most recent shift in orientation also offers up another sweeping challenge to how we understand the idiom of abstraction. Aguayo has finally begun to make a new aesthetic out of his own vocabulary of interchangeable motifs. His recent works simulate some of the taped, torn and edited effects of the previous collage works, only such aesthetic ticks are now acknowledged as part of the process of making itself. One could even say they talk about the painterly process as a means of delimiting the pictorial field of exchange. Playing with this kind of auto-referential practice evidences something of a mixed display of the emblematic made banal, of timeless geometries debased or of a cartography of symbols set to work against each other. Such productive contradictions allow us a space of contemplation to think about the presuppositions of the present and the possibilities of engaging with a different form of aesthetic hermeticism. And yet, in Aguayo's work yesterday's imagery remains tied to the present, the instance and the artifact and as a means of demarcating the terms and conditions of contemporaneity.

Bio: Nick Aguayo received his B.A. from UCLA in 2007 and his M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine in 2012. His work has been included in GLAMFA at California State University, Long Beach, The Armory Center for the Arts and INMO gallery. Aguayo's work was recently featured in New American Paintings # 97. He currently lives and works in Irvine, Ca.
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Marcus Perez

Marcus Perez

Perez’s work presents us with a direct confrontation with the ground and/or the grund of painting. But this consideration of the ground is itself twofold, or rather, it is a dialogue circumscribed by a kind of slippage between foreground and background and the doublebind of a discrepant use of materials. In painting, the ground is afterall, a thing in-itself, an open substrate and a pourous breathing surface. And yet, the ground also refers to the act of preparation. To have or produce a ground is also to prepare a ground. A ground is not given. The ground is what gives itself as groundless, ungrounded, the void, or simply, the unmade.

Marcus Perez

With titles like "To give an account and another" and "And another still", Perez’s work also points back to the defining motifs of modernity — the elimination of the subject in art — and even the reduction of the world of visibility to its subjective traces. Such a radical pairing down of means leaves us questioning the values of modernism writ large, and especially the idea of medium specificity as a type of preparation, both for understanding the conditions of action painting and the active subject.

Marcus Perez

And yet, Perez’s pictures also seem to be about the idea of abstraction posited as a stain in the Lacanian sense of the term — as the thing which is at play in intersubjective (dis)identification — first by mimicry and second by entrance into the symbolic order, (two gestures which ultimately amount to one and the same thing). In this way Perez’s work can be seen as a kind of visual essay on the traumatic real, or on those conditions of suspended presentation that mark a gap in the symbolic order — a space that opens onto the event of subjective reflection. As such, Perez's pictures return us to the question of how we understand modern autonomy and its twofold determinations: 1) the autonomy of the individual from cultural conventions, and 2) the autonomy of the medium from its historical uses — only this duality is challenged in Perez's work because it is about the very inconsistent consistency of structuration itself.

Marcus Perez

Working with the ground as a preparation, or rather incorporating it’s preparedness into the active dialog of painterly presentation, allows Perez’s canvases to show us the stage where the abyss of freedom was played out over the twentieth century as a tabula rasa. Moving between extreme reduction and an uncanny sense of absorption, Perez’s works illicit a kind of visual questioning that comes after post-painterly strategies and before minimalist stratagems, but which feels informed by both in equal measure. If anything, his works are a reminder that the failure of the subject to coincide with itself, (both the subject of painting with its materials and subject of expressionism with authorial intent), reveals the very suture that strives to foreclose any discussion of the subject as-such. Rather, the subject of Perez’s works come close to articulating what Adorno called non-identicality by presenting us with a series of characters that actively distort the substrate (ground). This occurs not only through the introduction of a medium without preparation but also as a result of the warping of the fabric around the constituent elements of painting. In this regard, Perez's imagery disrupts the idea of autonomous art by presenting the mark as an act that both (pre)figures and fractures its own ground, ultimately pulling the terms of how we think about medium specificity right out from under us.

Bio: Marcus Perez recieved his M.F.A. from the University of California Irvine in 2011, and his B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Perez has recently shown in Speculative Materialism: Abstract Art and Its Conditions at D-Block Projects and AC Projects as well as Nothing Comes from Nothing at La Cienega Projects in Culver City. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Exhibition 8.0

2012-01-01T12:54:00.000-08:00

Autonomie is proud to announce a FAR (Foundation for Art Resources: http://www.far-la.org/) sponsored exhibition of Liz Nurenberg’s work on Sunday, January 8^th from 7-10pm. Please join us for this incredible exhibition.

Liz Nurenberg: Affect

Liz Nurenberg

The work of Liz Nurenberg can be characterized as a type of sculpture that is performative, intimate, tactile and even somewhat confrontational. Often constructed from clothing, furniture patterns and a variety of abstract motifs Nurenberg’s pieces invite personal interactions by setting up the conditions for events of mutual reciprocity. Her oeuvre of inhabitable sculptures are often built for two or more people and they tend to position bodies within a shared space of exchange that motives a spectrum of emotions from the romantic to the playful. Not only is her practice as an artist based on creating a different kind of use value for everyday objects but they also work to challenge the politics of participation by upsetting the typical conventions of the audience/performer dichotomy.

Nurenberg often speaks of the ‘life preserving’ function of artistic experience and in her newest works this means engaging with a full range of the senses. Touching and looking are complemented by the activation of individual soundscapes composed of sampled elements from movie soundtracks, ambient noises and even the occasional intervention of Nurenberg’s own voice. These subtle sound collages create an echography of audio tropes that connect with the cultural unconscious as much as the present moment — or really, the moment of being-present. As hybrid cartographies of sound and form Nurenberg’s pieces activate a space of transversal interactivity that puts bodies, perceptivity, listening, and intersubjective relations into a state of mixed constitution that problematizes the role of spectatorship and consumption. In fact, Nurenberg’s sculpture’s are as committed to deconstructing the public/private dyad as they are the reified relation of high and low art.

At a time when metropolitan life is increasing atomized, or even hyper-atomized, Nurenberg’s reconfiguration of the sculptural idiom offers up the hope of finding a common relation, one that is informed as much by the idea of casual connections and affective becomings as it is from the eventual quality of inhabiting shared space. If there is leitmotif that permeates her work it is the cultivation of a kind of delicacy that issues from the beauty of handmade objects and the types of interactions they engender. In a world of hermetic object relations and increasingly hermetic art discourses, Nurenberg’s social sculptures provide us with an opportunity to rethink the politics of embodiement as in-bodied experience. Such an art practice seeks to disrupt the culture of commodification from the inside — providing us with a set of provocations that are both timely and touchable — or what today is only the rarest of experiences.

Bio: Liz Nurenberg is a Los Angeles based artist and a recent graduate of Claremont Graduate University (2010). She was a recent recipient of the Helen B. Dooley Fellowship while at CGU and was also awarded a fellowship student residency at the Ox-bow School of Art in 2002. She has shown in Los Angeles, Michigan and Chicago.

Exhibition 7.0

2011-12-05T19:02:00.000-08:00

Autonomie is proud to announce the two person show of Chris Kuhn and Richard Galling this coming December 10th from 5-10pm. Please join us for this amazing December show.

Kuhn / Galling: Arranged

Chris Kuhn

Chris Kuhn

Kuhn’s pictorial vocabulary is invested in the limits of a certain kind of modernist practice, or even neo-modernist theatrics, but rather than reach for the sublime, the absolute or the ineffable, Kuhn courts an aesthetic of failure and silent repose. His pictures are not so much iconic statements as a slow process of veiling and unveiling. And these various forms of concealment often rely on a duplicitous function, allowing us to see the past through the present, and also producing a formal means with which to gage the rhetorical function of copious editing. In abstract painting, or even ‘action’ painting proper, this selective gesture both preserves and eliminates spontaneity, covering over some marks while allowing others to show through. As a consequence the viewer is left with fragments not only of a disparate aesthetic, but with an unsettled picture of the ideological program of modernism writ large, (i.e., the cult of medium specificity).

Chris Kuhn

Paradoxically, this same set of presuppositions supports the critical edifice of Kuhn’s work which is itself composed from a mixed vocabulary of painted and stenciled effects, different types of materials and disparate modes of application. The heterogeneity of mediums and marks in Kuhn’s images is anything but a principled picture of organic unity. Part transcriptions of the passing of time, part memoirs to the idea of a type of compositional activity associated with the ‘all-over’, and part dialogic intervention into the themes and programs of abstract painting, Kuhn’s pictures remind us that we are never that far from our modernist forerunners when it comes to contemporary debates about the experience of finitude and the constraints of autonomy as an aesthetic endeavor. If anything, Kuhn’s work foregrounds the idea of revealing and concealing the presuppositions of the past as a visual essay in démodé apriori’s. His pictures are even a kind of exploration of pentimenti, everywhere layering eclectic motifs with newly invented ones.

Chris Kuhn

Touch is not absent in his pictures, and neither is the idea of ‘touching’ and being touched, even as a romantic or sentimental ideal. Certainly Kuhn wants us to feel with him by feeling our way along the surfaces of his canvases which always seem to activate the desire to look and look closer. Beauty in Kuhn’s work, if such a word is even applicable, follows the logic not of seduction but of the double take — of needing to step back and look again to make sure what you think you caught the first time is the same event upon closer inspection, even though it almost never is. If we were to name Kuhn’s aesthetic disposition it would have to be something of a frugal formalism with no particular agenda in mind save the idea of restoring a kind of waving afterglow to the contested notion of modern experience and aesthetic experimentation. One might even say that his pictures return us to the lost and found drawer of aesthetic ideology, hoping to find something we misplaced on the way toward modern enlightenment.

Chris Kuhn

Bio: Christopher Kuhn studied at Macalester College under conceptualist Don Celender before graduating from the American University of Paris with a B.A. in Art History. He earned a Post Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and was an MFA candidate in painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where he was awarded a Graduate Teaching Assistantship. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Nashville, and Boston and published in Arkitip and Tokion magazines.

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Richard Galling

Richard Galling

Galling’s new works are not necessarily ‘about’ the history of painting, nor are they ‘after’ history in the sense of performing a symbolic rupture, break or scission at the level of material means. They are not even what many art theorists now refer to as works that inhabit the post-historical condition. Although it is true that they play through the history of twentieth century abstraction, or rather that they play across it, substituting a surface effect for an ideological program, a texture for a historical model of ‘taste’ and a deft sense of touch for the parodic play of postmodern reflexivity, all this makes little sense if one is not familiar with Galling’s last few bodies of work and the changes that have occurred therein. These ongoing shifts can be loosely charted through three overlapping transitions.

Richard Galling

One could say that Galling first entered into the practice of painting as a ‘portraitist’ of abstract forms. Over time he cultivated a selection of motifs that dissimulated other pictorial milieus, ultimately producing pictures that are internally at odds with the implicit logic of their own hermeticism. These new pictorial arrangements were often given over to discrete mutations, derivations and what might otherwise be called discrepancies that are diachronically and synchronically mismatched — images of a kind of systematic inconsistency. In short, his earlier works were not so much a foray into unrestrained hybridity as a farcical form of non-objective realism that took prior forms of abstract art as subjects of the present, and even as subjects of (re)presentation.

Richard Galling

However, a second movement in his oeuvre began to emerge over the course of the last few years. His allusions to the past, to the play of sign and signifier in modern and postmodern painting, and even his dedication to the reproduction of abstract forms became a bit looser, for lack of a better word. This passage in the development of his artistic practice was not so much focused on the notion of slippage or indeterminacy, but instead, on the idea of pictographies that seem to float, not literally of course but optically. Galling’s works from this transitional period were more like an event of shimmering chromatic lattices spent across the production of so many pristine surfaces. This occurred not only because Galling often gessoed and sanded his canvases and hard board substrates until they took on the quality of pearlescent marble but also because the passing of time had engendered a certain sense of virtuosity in how he lays paint down on the canvas, sets a particular stroke and fixes the indexical quality of a rather supine material. Through series after series Galling’s imagery became both more subtle and fragile, like the surfaces of sixteenth century still life painting pushed so closely into the viewers space that they began to resemble an altogether depthless surface. In this period of experimentation Galling seemed more focused on hiding his considerable skill beneath the pleasure of affective qualities rather than redressing history with a capital H.

Richard Galling

Yet in his most recent series of works (seen here) something new emerges entirely, and it emerges from the ritual of painting itself — even giving us an example of what the Italian theorist of aesthetics Mario Pernolia calls ‘ritual thinking’. But how are his works an example of this epistemological shift — how are they involved in courting a post-academic, post-avant-guard, post-paradigmatic play of signification? And how do these pictorial events present us with a model that ceases to ‘practice’ the fine arts altogether — if such a thing is even possible? Or, to put it a bit more simply, what is the status of the ritual act in Galling’s painting outside of its post-political, post-ideological function?

Richard Galling

Of course, the answer here is not at all simple. Galling’s recent works speak about a break between sign and signifier in the history of painting that has become a condition of contemporary experience itself, and his works often achieve this by prohibiting a motif from becoming a mere replication (realism), a simulation (imitation) or a model of reenactment (program). We see this most decisively in the redistribution of colors, the interchangeability of painterly signs, and in the defamilarization of ‘types’ and ‘kinds’ of abstract symbols. In Galling’s work a decorative element from Matisse is not (re)painted in the same way as its original author, nor even in an ‘authorial’ manner, or even in an identifiably mannered way. Through Galling’s iconographic distortions a recognizable gesture is not negated or synthesized but instead remains struck-through while being left intact, or even slightly obscured as a model of painting imperfect. Galling’s work is not planned per say, it is not assuming the value of a given program, it is not even gesturing toward the fading horizon of twentieth century art. Instead, it is conjured — a type of painting that might be described as pure disidentification based on prior models of inscription without conditional apriori’s. In other words, Galling pictures rely on a practice of making that is dependent on the tools at hand, the relation between tool and hand, and the appearing of what appears.

Richard Galling

Yet how is this type of process linked to ritual thinking? It is a kind of painting that follows the univocity of Roman aesthetic experience rather than the Grecian dichotomies of beauty/ugliness, truth/falsehood and real/fake. As Mario Perniola has noted, the ritual life of Roman culture “starts beyond the opposition of truth and falsehood,” everywhere producing works that aim for “a repetition so precise that it erases the prototype the very moment it preserves it.”[i] But most importantly, and with special regard for understanding the impetus behind Galling’s images, the art of Rome “offers the example of a ritual without myth” which reconnects to our contemporary moment in moving beyond metaphysics, and most especially the metaphysical presuppositions that subtend twentieth century art.[ii] If one needs further proof of this recent turn in Galling’s work then one need only examine the sense of otherness engendered by his adoption of the subterranean pallet of Lascaux — a move that is even more primitive than primitive in not making a fetish of primitivism as a school of thought. Instead Galling’s paintings are a kind of arche-writing meant for a ritual with no gods left to worship, but which emerges from the ritual act of painting nonetheless.

Richard Galling

In fact, if Galling’s works teach us anything about the moment of contemporary painting we are living through — what the critic Terry Myers has elsewhere called an ‘indisciplinary moment’ — it is that we can practice the craft of paintings no more because there is nothing left to practice, no state sponsored academy, no pre-given formulas and no progressive argument on behalf of the teleos of painting and its given methodologies. In, after or before — or even betwixt and between — the post-post-historical condition offers us only this, a space in which to conjure the image wherein history is not absent but never fully present either. Instead, it is struck-through, struck-out, struck-down, posited as a cancelation destined for reruns, or perhaps the better comparison in this instance is that of a set of computer files that cannot be entirely deleted. In Galling’s paintings the history of art is only present in the ether — the trace of a past milieu cast against the indiscernable horizon of the present. In such a condition we all find ourselves searching for a new set of rituals to describe contemporary experience. Galling’s work is one such endeavor and also one to which we should all pay head, least we miss the passing of the present in the experience of the now.

Bio: Richard Galling received his BFA from Art Center College of Design and MFA from Yale University. He has recently exhibited at The Green Gallery, 47 Canal, Ebersmoore, D-Block Projects and Andi Campognone Projects. He was the recipient of the Mary Nohl Fellowship and Ely Harwood Memorial Prize. Galling currently lives and in, WI.

[i] Mario Perniola, Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. (New York: Humanity Books, 2001) 97, 98.

[ii] Ibid. 104.

Upcoming Event

2011-11-29T18:35:00.000-08:00

Autonomie is proud to be hosting "Blanket Solidarity", a FAR (Foundation for Art Resources) sponsored event put on by Christy Roberts this coming Sunday the 4th, from 5-8pm. Come discuss the current state of OWS, Occupy Museums, the Art Workers Union and the general state of art and politics while making blankets to support the Occupy movement this winter. Bring blankets, food and drinks for this evening Blanket "make-in" and potluck.

Blanket Solidarity is an “open and collaborative project” initiated by Los Angeles-based artist Christy Roberts that “encourages artists and art enthusiasts to make and donate blankets to your local occupiers”. The project seeks to address an important and pressing problem, the need to keep warm during the winter protest season. While there is no obligation to participate Roberts has asked everyone who sees this post to spread the news and “encourage others to donate” — and even to add your own embellishments to the blankets to “encourage the occupiers in addition to keeping them warm.”
The focus in this project is the one thing that the Arab Spring and the American Autumn have missed, the harsh reality of the Occupation Winter. Please take a moment out of your busy December schedule to donate blankets, make blankets and distribute blankets as part of “Blanket Solidarity”, not only here in Los Angeles, but across the nation.

Share this link with friends and family, and especially with parties you know want to show support for this international movement during the holiday season: http://www.facebook.com/groups/BlanketSolidarity/

Link to FAR for more infomation: http://farsited.org/2011/11/09/christy-roberts-blanket-solidarity-with-ows/

Exhibit 6.0

2011-11-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

Hill / Hughes: Hypersurregionalism

Autonomie is proud to announce the two-person show of Elana Melissa Hill and Simon Hughes on Saturday, November the 12th, from 7:30 to 10pm.

Elana Hill

Elana Melissa Hill

Hill’s art practice is an exercise in cartographic thinking and process based painting. Playing through the pictorial history of abstract means and representational meme’s, Hill’s particular brand of imagery is reminiscent of Turner’s turbulent seascapes but with a postmodern twist. In Hill’s work the hand of the artist is almost altogether missing, allowing weathered surfaces to congeal into inerrant forms of naturalism. This particular methodology departs from the environment itself — urban or natural — by literally capturing some of the textures, colors and various modes of inscription that issue from Hill’s open air studio. Even when she chooses to introduce a recognizable pictorial motif, like a palm tree or a city skyline, it almost always suggests a kind of visual slippage between the real and the artificial, the natural and the inorganic, a fullness of form and a flattened out silhouette.

Elana Hill

As a mix of western modernism and eastern perspectivalism her hybrid compositions play across a broad spectrum of identifactory markers. Hill has described her images as “palimpsests of other’s imagined ideas”, as “an assembly of anachronisms” and as “huge living bodies where electricity, sewage, water, gas, humans and other resources are pumped through the dense flesh of cement, metal and dirt.” Caught between post-apocalyptic narratives, the visual tropes of sci-fi cinema and discrete topologies of the everyday, her layered pictures offer us a trace of the present as an image of the cultural imaginary.

Elana Hill

Like some of the most challenging contemporary voices in landscape painting today, Hill’s pictures are a catalog of unstable and fluctuating ideas about local, and especially about image production in So Cal. However, her newest body of paintings departs from the cinematic format that has defined her last few years of production — a shift that has allowed her work to take on a greater sense of complexity with regard to improvisation, material impressions and the power of suggestion. As a fluid cartography of process, pentimenti and place, Hill’s paintings offer us an allegory of experience that reflects the fluctuating horizon of contemporary life. Whether seen as a mindscape or a landscape, such pictures are indelibly marked by the iconography of regionalism, or even by a kind of a supra- or hyper hermeticism that comes as much from Hill’s recent return to square shaped canvases as it does from her dedication to mapping a sense of passage through the denatured landscape.

Bio: Elana Melissa Hill holds an M.F.A. from Claremont (2011) and a B.A. from the University of Irvine (2007). She has recently shown in the "Emergent 12" at Object Gallery and "La Cosa Nostra" at Galerie Rheeway. Hill was the co-founder and director of Catalyst Gallery at UCI from 2005-2007 and is currently the program director of ReVISIONS of LA, the monthly drawing program at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Simon Hughes

Simon Hughes

Through a subtle vocabulary of implacable aesthetic effects Simon Hughes has been examining Canadian themes, political myths and the natural phenomenology of his birthplace for more than a decade. While his production has often consisted of large scale watercolors, the practice of drawing and painting have also figured prominently in his approach to diagramming the social landscape of the great white north. Icy expanses, color streaked skys, native inhabitants and architectural models are all passed through a series of visual ciphers in Hughes work that are as charming as they are irreverent. Whether working to disarm our relation to indigenous politics or the presuppositions of modernism, Hughes's imagery suggests other possibilities than the traditional narratives proposed by the canon of American art history.

Simon Hughes

In fact, one could say that Hughes artistic practice is something like an imaginative psychogeography of urban tales, non-standard histories and alternative myths. Recently, his work has focused on rethinking the themes and discourses that adhere to American and Canadian modernism, although Hughes's treatment of these varied stratagems is subtly subversive, and sometimes, outright heretical. Hughes often restages the motifs of action painting in the slow and methodical medium of watercolor — reducing the iconic gestures of 'high art' to a pleasant, if not, diminutive size. If this weren’t already paradoxical enough, Hughes even invites the occasional naïve collaboration, further undermining any sense of the grandiose or the heroic. In so doing Hughes's pictures ask us not only to rethink the dominant dialogues of North American art, but they also serve as an example of dia-log-ic pictorialism that takes logs and lodges as key motifs in a new form of regionalism.

Simon Hughes

Yet what is often missed in these mixed cartographies is Hughes’s focus on the productive use of kitsch. His work unhinges the central themes of modernism not so much by their treatment or thematic double coatings as by the transmutation of pictorial motifs into another world — and even into the order of the commodity divine. Modernist cubicals for indigenous people, popular stickers placed inside works about medium specificity, and collaged psychoanalytic imperatives are all imposed on the frozen symbolism of the Canadian landscape. This enigmatic and minimal series of references often seems to congeal into a form of cartoonified colonialism — providing us with images about social appropriation and geopolitical expropriation that are still very accessible. Perhaps one could even see Hughes’s images of ‘the great white north’ as something of a metaphor for the great white washing of Northern American history — its peoples, its myths and even its varied modes of existence. In this regard, Hughes work carries a sympathetic tone toward the politics of indigenous peoples by making modernism into a children’s book of sorts, or a fairly tale gone awry. Undoubtedly, Hughes's oeuvre could even be seen as a running commentary of sorts on the conflicted status of intercultural aesthetics: European and American, American and Canadian, Canadian and indigenous, indigenous and commercial. Such a heady mix of themes requires some reflection, but in Hughes's work the hyperbolic mix of characters, motifs, and cultural thematics always proves to be as pleasurable as it is rewarding. That is perhaps the joy we find in entering a topsy-turvy of hypersurregionalism.

Simon Hughes

Bio: Simon Hughes lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and a BFA from the University of Manitoba. He has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the Manitoba and Winnipeg Arts Councils. His art practice encompasses painting, drawing, film and video. Recent group exhibitions include the Canadian Biennial: It Is What It Is at the National Gallery of Canada and RE:Cycle at the Sweeney Art Gallery , University of California – Riverside. Simon's work is currently on view in Sète, France as part of My Winnipeg, a touring exhibition organized by La Maison Rouge in Paris.

Exhibit 5.0

2011-10-01T15:14:00.000-07:00

Autonomie is proud to present the solo exhibition of Gabie Strong and the Solo Performance of Katie Herzog this coming October the 6th from 7:30 to 9:30pm. Please join us for this amazing event!

Gabie Strong: The Exegesis of Entropy

Gabie Strong

Gabie Strong’s work has a breadth and range that is hard to summarize in a few short sentences. Over the course of the last decade she has produced a large body of photographic works that challenge the unconscious acceptance of military motifs as a naturalized part of the American landscape, she has been engaged in rethinking critical issues around architecture and architecture education, and she has expanded the boundaries of radical performance/sound art with the collective Lady Noise. However, in her most recent body of photographs Strong has achieved something that is unique even within her own oeuvre, she has managed to make the post-urban landscape into a image of socio-psychological necessity. Her treatment of the everyday, the banal and even the abstract, have come to stand in for what Slavoj Zizek sees as the crisis of western culture — an inability to properly mourn the west as an Empire in decline. Strong’s subtle cartographies of texture and place, image and imagination, mythos and materiality, all contribute to creating a sense of psychological unease around zones of trespass and operational congress. But what is especially uncanny about her imagery is how such places can be made to seem inviting, natural, or even quite accessible.

Gabie Strong

By courting a kind of productive ambiguity, her discrete topologies of the denatured landscape work to dismantle the binaries of urban/rural, realism/abstraction and poetic/documentary forms. Playing with a sense of contradictory fictions and real simulations, Strong’s investment in place can only be described as a complex topology of tropes that resist easy identification. Her specific brand of iconography resonates with the speculative fictions of Octavia Bulter and Philip K. Dick while picking up different theoretical concerns from Henri Lefebvre, de Certeau and Foucault. Everywhere in Strong’s work, we can see intangible allusions to the psychodynamics of power and space; conflict and place; action and trace.

Gabie Strong

Her overture is a kind of exploration of limited places of access that are supposed to safeguard cultural traditions, constitutional promises and the security of the nation state. And yet, in Strong’s work, they produce a palpable sense of melancholia, a tinge of regret and loss, and even a moment of thoughtful repose that issues from the failures of American exceptionalism. While Strong's work always presents us with a series of furtive pictures of the present, it is much more likely that we are looking back on pictures that are ‘about’ the past set in the present tense — images birthed ex nihilo from the futurity of a world gone awry. This kind of recursive gesture mirrors the writings of the French philosopher Paul Virilio and the retro-futurism of texts like Pure War — where destruction by automation and the drive toward automaton consciousness are envisioned as the final destination of instrumental rationality.

Gabie Strong

Strong’s work is perhaps the first step in helping us toward understanding the conflicted and interlocking crisis’s we face today — a photographic Kubler-Ross method of negotiating the de-militarized landscape and its various forms of capture and conscription. The question is whether or not we will have the wear-with-all to work through the implications of Strong’s pictures — to confront the five stages of mourning that are so intimately tied to a military-industrial-complex driven by means rather than ends. This is perhaps what is captured by the title, the Exegesis of Entropy — our common need to resist the forms of social control all around us that have gotten out of control — the endemic acceleration of perpetual catastrophe: economic, militaristic, social, geopolitical, etc. Such a project highlights the conflicted status of the contemporary moment as well as providing a critical model for understanding the power of documentary fictions.

Bio: Gabie Strong received her B.A. in Art from UCLA in 1993, and completed graduate work in both architecture and studio art, earning an M. Arch from SCI-Arc in 2006 and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from UC Irvine in 2008. She has received commissions for sound pieces and visual art from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, the Barbara and Art Culver Center for the Arts, and is a 2011 CCI ARC grant award recipient. Strong's work has been exhibited at Pitzer Art Galleries, University Art Gallery at UC Irvine, LA><Art, Acuna Hanson, Gallery Five Thirty Three, and the Torrance Art Museum. She has performed at venues including the UCR Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, Human Resources, LACE, 2011 Art Los Angeles Contemporary Fair, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Las Cienegas Projects, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

Katie Herzog: Literaturwurst

The projects of Katie Herzog are actively engaged in rethinking contemporary forms of information distribution, alternative models of archivization, the traditions of librarianship and how artistic interventions communicate both inside and outside the confines of the fine art world. Her most recent project, Literaturwurst, takes up a process of appropriation that was originally proposed by Dieter Roth, but with a contemporary twist. Unlike Roth, Herzog will be taking requests from the general public, rather than her own tastes and measures, in an effort to remake the edible book as a delicacy of absurdist aesthetics. Challenging the politics of literary representation and judico-legal inscriptions, Herzog will be soliciting title requests which she will retrieve on-line for book titles to be downloaded and repackaged for a different kind of consumption. (Submit requests at: molesworthinstitute@gmail.com)

Katie Herzog

Whether her book sausages are seen as seasoned writings, food for thought or nourishment for the mind, Herzog’s works redress the functionality of copyright laws as a series of expropriative restrictions. In an age where the ‘general intellect’ has been subsumed by big capital, Herzog’s performances present us with a different set of preparations for offset printing — where outmoded economies of exchange can be transformed into new forms of artistic and textual perceptivity. As libraries are transformed into media centers and hard-bound books are displaced by e-readers, might not all texts soon become displaced subjects — or even subjects without a literal place, i.e., an ensemble of disembodied literatures? Can we think of Herzog’s works as gesturing toward a different means of imbibing literature, or honoring the text as a form of transubstantiation — or even creating a new means of embodying the performative as an instance of ingested utterance?

In counter-distinction to the last major Literaturwurst project, which was a collection of 20 volumes of Hegel’s life works rolled into a series of book sausages, Herzog’s (de)commissioned texts return us to the Benjaminian notion of the outmoded, i.e., of the general commutability of terms based on an immanently historical medium in decline. Or, perhaps her project takes up another key theme from Benjamin’s overture — the notion of a dialectics at standstill — where new regimes of knowledge distribution and design have yet to emerge from the fading light of the literary age. Or, following on the irreverent attitude of any number of modern and postmodern interventionists, (Dadaist, Actionists, Fluxists, Situationists, etc.), Herzog’s work could be seen as acknowledging the mystical moment of sovereignty which takes real knowledge to be non-knowledge, unknowingness, and even transcendence. Thinking about textual appropriation in the form of a sausage is even something of a dietetic metaphor for the machinations of dialectic digestion — a post-historical allegory about repackaging (art) history’s ruins for the anthropocentric appetite. In short, Literaturwurst gives Hegel’s movement of the Spirit a material twist, a movement from below — and even a case of theoretical indigestion, historical reflux, and a touch of aesthetic heartburn. This is the horizon of aesthetic consumption against which such projects announce themselves, not only as a moment of levity, but also as a radical engagement with the confines of the present as always already implicated in the pre-sent.

First Performance: Opening night, October 6th, 7:30pm-9:30pm.

Second Performance: Ciclavia Bicycling day, October 9th, 10am-3pm.

Third and Final Performance: Closing night, October 29th, 4pm-8pm.
You can give Katie a book title of your choosing at one of the above performances at Autonomie or by email at molesworthinstitute@gmail.com. It can be any title, and a few websites are listed below to help facilitate the process. You can also choose any title beyond those listed on these sites. There is no cost and you can retrieve your book sausages at the closing reception in October 29th between 4pm and 8pm.

http://www.worldwideschool.org

http://www.fullbooks.com

http://www.gutenberg.org

http://www.archive.org/details/texts

http://openlibrary.org

Bio: Katie Herzog’s work investigates epistemology in the civic imaginary through painting, disjunctive librarianship, and experimental lexicography. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, a Master of Fine Arts at UC San Diego, and studied Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. Residencies include Bblackboxx, Skowhegan, the Banff Centre, and Program Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations. She is currently the Director of the Molesworth Institute and a Reference Librarian and Artist in Residence at the Whittier Public Library. Recent solo exhibitions include Gravity is Always Attractive at PØST, Informel at Actual Size, Ecstasy of Municipality at Whittier City Hall, Librariana at Circus Gallery, and an upcoming show at the Palo Alto Research Center.

Exhibit 4.0

2011-09-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

Hollis Cooper: Invirtuality

Autonomie is proud to announce a solo show of Hollis Cooper on Saturday, September the 17^th, from 7:00 to 9:30pm, with an adjoining show by Seann Brackin in the project room.

Hollis Cooper

The paintings and installations of Hollis Cooper are invested in the haptic and the optic construction of space in a way that privileges neither while questioning both. Her compositions act as a recursive loop that joins the digital and the painterly in a series of complex mediations between memory, found materials and innumerable acts of aesthetic transduction. Cooper’s works remind us that ‘the virtual’ is not just a hypothetical construction, but that we encounter the production of virtuality all around us as a series of visual tropes, cultural memes and rhetorical devices. Much like her immersive environments we find ourselves encircled by the digital aesthetics of cinematic seductions, scripted spaces and technologized environs — or what many theorists now refer to as a culture of remediation. By folding different digitized spaces together — spaces from internet chat rooms, videogame backgrounds and various forms of theoretical architecture — Cooper’s work engages in a kind of radical geometricism that points to the instability of ‘the virtual’ as a well defined local. In fact, her painterly installations insist upon a type of shifting presence that is determined by the interplay of the viewing situation as well as the orchestration of technological motifs, nexus effects and (de)constructed systems of representation.

Hollis Cooper

One could even say that Cooper’s hyperbolic vivisections of architectural and computational space show us how the virtual is commiserate with Deleuze’s interpretation of the term —where the virtual is conceived of a series of potentials within the real that are irreducible to the structures that condition their appearance. Rather, Deleuze provided us with a vision of the virtual as a paradigm of compossibilities that unfurl and unfold all around us in anti-systematic, anti-linear and anti-teleological ways. Such a notion of mixed topologies; of visual events taken as so many forking paths; and of the type of dynamicism that issues from the (neo)baroque theatrics found in Cooper’s imagery could all be thought of as allegorical effect of the anti-Cartesian urge — or even as a model of Deleuze’s devout anti-Platonism. In many ways Cooper’s artistic practice could be characterized as a type of cartographic cataloging that takes emergent properties and proliferating mutations as its given subject.

Hollis Cooper

In her most recent works however, even these pictorial anomalies find themselves displaced by so many generative derivations — giving rise to a spectrographic language that can only be described as Baroqucoco — or as embodying a hybrid disposition toward the use of different motifs and the logic of embellishment. Cooper’s newly extended vocabulary is not so much about the artificiality of architectural systems as it is about capturing the texture and trace of vituality in all of its various incarnations. Such a cacophony of visual paradoxes makes us question how we think about the structuration of space while the phenomenal complexity of her works asks us to activate our perception of the living present in order to map its constructed measures as naturalized artifacts. This is perhaps, what it means to be in-virtuality, or within an aesthetic experience that subtracts from the known what we think we have always already known before.

Bio: Born in 1976 in Jackson, Mississippi, Hollis Cooper grew up in New Orleans and Houston before moving to New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and finally California. She received her undergraduate degree with high honors from Princeton University, a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University. In 2006, she was nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Award by the CGU Art Department, and in 2007 was selected for the Drawing Center's Viewing Program in NYC. Her work has been featured/reviewed in publications such as New American Paintings, Art Papers, and Alarm Magazine, and has been included in shows in galleries and museums throughout the United States.

Seann Brackin: It's Happening Right Now

Sean Brackin

Seann Brackin's work as an abstract painter is focused on understanding the topography of gesture as a virtual and performative model of inscription. He has taken hard edge painting into the twenty-first century by bending and warping its constituent elements: bold graphic shapes, eye-popping colors and sleek surfaces. His morphogenic compositions no longer feel related to the essentialist outlook of the abstract classicists but to the curvilinear exuberance of the (neo-)baroque. This shows itself through layers of pentimeti that pile up like translucent wire frame meshes just below the thin verneer of his otherwise immaculate surfaces. For all of these reasons Brackin's work presents us with a model of contemporary abstraction that is neither overly distopic nor unrepentantly optimistic but which helps illuminates the conflicted status of the present.

Sean Brackin

Bio: Seann Brackin, born in 1976, uses paint, sculpture, performance and the street to make art. He graduated from Claremont and The Pacific Northwest College of Art and has worked as an art librarian at the Portland Art Museum. He shows across America, in Seoul, Korea, Madrid and Berlin. He is living and making art in Madrid, Spain, where he works independently and with the art group El Keller (http://blogs.latabacalera.net/elkeller/).

Exhibit 3.0

2011-08-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

Becker / Friges : Erasing Traces

Autonomie is proud to announce the two person exhibition of Nina Becker and April Friges this coming Thursday the 11th of August, from 7:30 to 9:30pm. Please join us for the Downtown artwalk and what will be an incredible exhibit.

Nina T. Becker, All White, Digital C-Print, 40 by 60 inches, 2011.

Nina T. Becker

Becker’s art practice often revolves around the themes of absence, mourning, trauma and the irreducible quality of time. In her most recent series of photographic works she introduces us not only to the trappings of the cinematic mode of production but also to the apparatus of capture associated with economimesis (the aesthetic presuppositions of political economy). Both enigmatic and formless, the rooms depicted in this suite of images are known as ‘psyches’ or ‘coves’. Spread throughout the Hollywood infrastructure, these types of places are regularly reconfigured to accommodate simulated fantasies and special effects props.

Nina Becker, Endless Sunset, Digital c print, 40 by 60 inches, 2011.

The illegibility of their local, their uncanny position as non-descript places and the evacuation of Cartesian coordinates works to undermine any sense of temporal and spatial specificity. Instead, such images confront us with the traumatic real of remediated culture, i.e., with the non-place of pure vituality that acts as a substrate for the projection of commercial desires. In this stark and surreal presentation of the repressed order of production we find that the obscene core of remediated culture is also a real place; that it can be visited; that it has a texture and location — but that it is still a place without a proper name. And yet, Becker’s photographs provide us a fleeting glimpse of an 'open space’ that highlights the difference between systems of symbolic meaning that circulate within the domain of white-cube-like production. That is the nature of their strategic intervention into the space(s) of the cultural imaginary as well as their enduring contribution to how we understand the contemporary moment.

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Nina T. Becker holds an M.F.A in Studio Art: Photography, with an emphasis in Visual Studies from the Univeristy of California, Irvine. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at LA><Art, Monongalia Arts Museum, and the Lyceum Theater. She has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including the Center for Global Peace Studies Project Grant, the Medici Scholars fellowship, the Claire Trevor travel award and most recently, the Six Points Fellowship. Becker is also the director of the Mobile Pinhole Project which brings experimental photography workshops to Los Angeles youth groups and different communities interested in the arts.

April Friges, 5533 York Blvd., Los Angeles California, 12 by 15 inches, Archival inkjet print, 2011.

April Friges

Friges’s photographic practice is everywhere informed by different economies of experience: economies of habitation, of liquidation, of transference and of transformation. Her previous series have focused on creating documents of suburban compression rather than urban sprawl, of calling forth factory memories rather than factory production, and of situating homes in transit rather than homesteads in foreclosure. In each of these projects, as well as her newest series of works, Friges’s engages with the ethic of what remains, i.e., with the specificity of architectural forms and how they are informed by so many points of social interlocution.

April Friges, 2959 Crenshaw Blvd, Los Angeles, California, 12 by 15 inches, Archival inkjet print, 2011.

However, in her most recent body of work she also gives us a portrait of structuralist photography turned on its head — not so much documents of a style in time but of architectural motifs that are out of time — expired, conscripted and repurposed structures. In such a series of photographs we are made to question not only what forms subsist beneath the willful transformation of a familiar food chain but also what persists in an economy of disposability, decay and redistribution. Functioning as a subtle cartography of the commonplace, Friges’s images allow us to investigate the temporal division of before and after through so many indices of visual and structural displacement. Through varying degrees of indexical similitude we can locate a subject that is almost indiscernible at first glance — visible only through a few architectural ticks, instances of mixed or remodeled signage and the discrete attenuation of franchised building caught up in a process of erasure. That the structuralist idiom has to be rethought in an economy of accelerated consumption seems obvious, but that post-structuralist stratagems could be posited alongside socio-economic concerns, historical concerns, infrastructural concerns and even the process of enculturation — that is a decided challenge to the carrying capacity of the image. Friges’s photographs certainly serve as the high watermark of such an enterprise.
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April Friges holds an M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and a B.F.A. from the University of Akron. Her work has been shown at LA><Art, Lyceum gallery, New Work Gallery, Summit Artspace and Fawick Gallery. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Exhibit 2.0

2011-07-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

Rash / Trueman: The Suspended Literal

Autonomie is proud to announce the two person show of Alison Rash and Chris Trueman on Saturday, July 9th, from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. Please join us for this exciting exhibition.

Alison Rash, Second Time Around, 18 by 24 inches, acrylic and pencil on paper, 2011.

Alison Rash

Alison Rash's paintings and drawings juxtapose radically different motifs from the history of abstract art such as geometric patterns and gestural marks, formless illegibility and opaque inscriptions, linear elements and dynamic negative shapes. Psychological intuitions, systemicity and the meaning imbued in everyday objects serve as a jumping off point for her recombant compositions. Rash's open sensibility, both playful and rigorous, reminds us that genre based discourses like craft, geometricism and action painting are not necessarily mutually exclusive endeavors. Her specific form of abstract pictorialism negotiates an in-between space of webbed meanings and networked sources that not only demands time and contemplative reflection but also resists commodifying style at the cost of substance. The composed conviviality of her most recent body of work challenges us to rethink the presuppositions of automatic writing as an archetypal methodology - releasing us from defining the aesthetic unconscious in retrograde terms.

Alison Rash, Begin Again, 18 by 24 inches, acrylic and pencil on paper, 2011.

Alison Rash holds an MFA in Studio Art from Claremont Graduate University, an MA in Education from Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology and a BA in Art from Pepperdine University. Her work was recently shown in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Milan. She was awarded the Walker/Parker Memorial Fellowship and Claremont Graduate University Fellowship and was a Dedalus Foundation Nominee. Rash lives and works in Los Angeles.

Chris Trueman, Stripes, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 64 by 72 inches, 2011.

Chris Trueman

The works of Chris Trueman collide motifs from the history of abstract art with more contemporary forms of mark making. As a vivisection of gestural, architectonic and graphic elements Trueman's visual mash-up's present us with the irreducible feeling of serendipity and deja vu. The visual paradoxes in his work often consist of pushing deep space forward, adding a palpable sense of dimensionality to gestural marks and making accidents appear planned. These types of dialectic contradictions are informed by the presuppositions of modern and postmodern art while courting a type of hyper-self reflexivity that exceeds the conditions of twentieth century abstraction. We see this evidenced in Trueman's newest body of work which mixes the look of stencils, sprayed techniques and taped off passages with a reversible sense of figure/ground relations and somber color harmonies. Trueman has described this recent transformation in his work as issuing from the use of "equilibrium canceling diagonals", "slippery images" and "provisional" stratagems.

Chris Trueman, Whitestripe, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 36 by 42 inches, 2011.

Chris Trueman graduated with an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2010. Recently his work was included in the exhibitions: "Speculative Materialism" at D-block Projects in Long Beach and "About Paint" at Carl Berg projects in LA. Trueman has also shown his work extensively in exhibitions at venues in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Milan, Italy. While at CGU he was the recipient of the Ann Peppers Foundation Fellowship, a Claremont Graduate University Merit Fellowship Recipient and received the faculty recommended Dedalus Foundation Fellowship Nomination. Trueman’s work was included in the 2010 New American Paintings MFA edition (87).

Exhibit 1.0

2011-06-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

Landrum / Rubio: The Levity of Translation

Autonomie is proud to announce a two person show of Ashley Landrum and Nano Rubio on Thursday, June 9th from 7:30pm to 9:30pm. Please join us for our inaugural exhibition on Artwalk night!

Ashley Landrum (detail)

Ashley Landrum

Landrum's practice as a sculptor relies on mirroring and moire effect that activate perception through shifting layers of allegorical information. Her sculptures are often constructed using metallic scaffolding, painterly substrates, fabricated surfaces or any number of welded materials. These items might be super-added to shimmering fabrics, delicate textures and taught systems of suspension that invite a type of looking that is simultaneously pleasurable and restricted - or even pleasurable in its restrictions. Moving between the discourses that surround transversal painterly spaces and deconstructed sculptural effects, Landrum's work offers us a contained interaction that isn't overly about its status as-such. Instead, her pieces play with a mixed genealogy of historical and contemporary precedents that challenge the ways in which we consider the sculptural object, its phenomenological precepts and its epistemological comport. The fluctuating boundaries of Landrum's works evidence a rare instance of complexity that exceeds the common conditions of historical measure and dialogic interlocution - a sure mark of their purchase in the present.

Bio: Ashley Landrum holds an M.F.A. from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and a B.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. She was the recipient of the Armory Center for the Arts Fellowship Grant and the Gluck Fellowship for the Arts. Landrum has recently has shows at One Colorando in Pasadena, D-Block Projects in Long Beach and AC PRojects in Pomona. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Installation shot.

Nano Rubio

Rubio's abstract Paintings unfold a logic of performative designs and gestural actions that display an incongruent topology of time based inscriptions. Often reading as different lines of code - linear, scrapped, squeegeed and imposted - his works operate as a virtual catalog of conflicted cartographies. Playing with stark oppositions between light and dark space, rich and muted color, and theatrical figure/ground relations, Rubio's aesthetic program courts a distinctive neobaroque sensibility centered around issues of translation and transference. By working with an expanded vocabulary of non-traditional tools, Rubio's images produce forms of misidentification that renew the radicality of process-based work by towing the line between fracture and virtuosity. Such paintings represent a profound meditation on the dialect relation of self and systemicity, affect and dictation, performance and enactment. In such an inquiry, every form of visual refrain marks a new relation to systems of information display that extend from the programs of seventeenth century painting to the digital worlds of today.

Nano Rubio

Bio: Nano Rubio is a 2011 MFA graduate of Claremont Graduate University. Nano recieved his Bachelors of Arts in Studio Painting from California State University, Bakersfield. Awards and nominations include the Emerging Arts Scholarship from the Arts Council in Kern in 2007, Claremont Graduate Fellowship 2009-2011 and a faculty nomination for the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant in 2011. Nano's work's can be seen New American Paintings (MFA issue #93). He is also currently showing at ANN 330 Gallery and DBA 265.