Originally published on: October 30, 2008

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In the decade since her breakout success in 1996, Liza Lou has won a $500,000 genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, kept a studio in Durban, South Africa, and continuously mesmerized the world’s critics and collectors. She works with millions of tiny glass beads, taking the traditionally craft-oriented medium and elevating it to astonishing artistic heights.

Liza Lou is currently showing work at L&M Arts in New York City, where two stories of her complex and captivating sculptures and installations can be viewed. The artist works with accumulations of tiny beads, meticulously applied with the help of studio assistants. The works exhibited at L&M Arts reference themes of injustice, captivity, and religion.

Entering the gallery, one encounters Continuous Mile, 2007-2008, a large circular sculpture composed of cotton and white beads, resembling densely coiled and intertwined rope. The beads send light dancing into the eyes of the viewer, creating a tension between beauty and bondage. The rear room houses the dramatic Security Fence, 2005-2007, an imposing and elegant cage structure composed of steel and glass beads. The work stands at over 10 feet tall, crowned with glistening concertina wire and theatrically placed in a room by itself and situated at an angle. The threatening connotations of confinement are tempered by the jewel-like quality of the surface. The silver beads reflect light and visually entrance the viewer despite this undercurrent of violence.

As you ascend to the second floor via a grand winding staircase, you are able to circle Tower, a latticed steel structure composed of five cages stacked on top of one another and covered with white beads. Tower extends over thirty feet, into the third story of the gallery, which is roped off, adding a forbidden quality to the work. On the walls of the front and rear rooms of the second floor, Liza Lou presents her new series, Reliefs. These are vertically oriented panels that represent Muslim prayer rugs and mix strict geometrical patterning with abstraction, such as in Offensive/Defensive, 2008. They are larger than human scale and are executed with an impressive precision. The panels have a topographic surface, carefully and meticulously constructed to achieve stunning variations in depth and color.

Self-Portrait (Face Down), 2006 is a cast resin pillow covered in glass beads with the impression of the artist’s face, an uneasy suggestion of suffocation. This work of art captures the qualities that are pervasive throughout the exhibition, the tension between the threat of imprisonment and the astonishing beauty of the works themselves. The architecture of the gallery itself provides an interesting juxtaposition to the glistening contemporary works of Lou. The winding staircase, the crown moldings in every room, and the arched windows provide a formal environment for her sparkling works.

Liza Lou’s choice of medium, her incredible compulsion to create, and the dedication to her process are truly amazing. While she often receives the label “obsessive,” Lou shrugs this off by stating, “What’s far more frightening for people is to consider the possibility that I’m completely aware of what I’m doing.” Liza Lou transforms the bleak apparti of bondage and imprisonment into astonishing works of art, evoking, at once, the tragedy and beauty of life.

LIKENESS is the current group exhibition at the Mattress Factory Museum of Installation Art that examines human depiction during a post-Warholian era in which new technology has played an influential role. It includes the work of artists Jim Campbell, Paul DeMarinis, Jonn Herschend, Nikki Lee, Joseph Mannino, Greta Pratt and Tony Oursler. Elaine A. King, who is a freelance critic and curator as well as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University teaching Art History/Theory/Museum Studies, has guest-curated the exhibition.

Among the offerings is Paul DeMarinis’ new work, Dust.  With this work DeMarinis explores facial similarities, pairs of faces, and the abstraction of images into the dust. DeMarinis presents a fragment of this collection of likeness-pairs, scanned sequentially into the light-memory of phosphorescent powder. After a few minutes of exposure to the projected image, the powder retains a faint green image of the two faces on its surface, something akin to the ‘latent image’ of photographic film or the veil of memory. Unlike photographic film, though, the image starts to distort. Propelled by low frequency sound vibrations, the powder starts to flow and dance, first distorting the faces and erasing their likeness, then distorting them into patterns of abstract light in motion, with form and beauty all its own.

On the other end of the spectrum is Jonn Herschend’s many-sided conceptual, Self Portrait as a PowerPoint Proposal for an Amusement Park Ride.  The installation is characterized by a strong sense of narrative, not strictly limited to straightforward vignettes or mimetic representation. In his complex self-portrait one finds a narrative that resembles fantasy, role-playing, fiction and a touch of reality. Herschend’s choice of subjects and materials contribute to the kind of story he opts to tell and show his audience.

Catherine Wagley, DailyServing’s longest standing contributor is no stranger to the Los Angeles art community. Since our inception in 2006, Wagley has regularly contributed to the massive list of artist’s featured on DailyServing, while also building insightful commentary on the art happenings of Los Angeles, including the recent articles Another End to Irony, The Third Chapter of Blum and Poe and Faux Koons. Thanks to her dedication to DailyServing and the Los Angeles art community, I am proud to announce that Ms. Wagley will now be conducting a weekly column for DailyServing. It only seems fitting to start this new column with the recent news that has set the art world ablaze this week, Jeffery Deitch’s relocation to L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Make sure to visit the site each Friday for new commentary by Catherine Wagley on anything and everything L.A.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Jeffrey Deitch was officially named MOCA’s director early on Monday; by the afternoon of the same day, the web homes of leading papers, art mags, and blogs were Deitch-driven blurs of cultural commentary. MOCA held a press conference  on Tuesday (I was there, along with a painfully small handful of others), at which  philanthropist Eli Broad, who bailed MOCA out of destitution last year, gave a speech unnervingly similar to the one he gave at the opening of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary two years ago. He again celebrated L.A. as the emerging art capitol of the world, only this time, MOCA, not LACMA, helmed L.A.’s rise.

Deitch spoke last, with a voice that wavered slightly and eyes that almost looked watery. He said he “was happy to lead” and not, as video artist Diana Thater duly pointed out, “happy to join” MOCA, its curators and its artists. He corroborated Broad, saying he would “continue to build MOCA so that, over the next decade, it is indisputably the leading contemporary art museum in the world”— it’s the sort of  thinly veiled domination rhetoric that seems more unsettling coming from art executives than from world leaders.

Keith Haring, "The Ten Commandments," Deitch Projects, 2008

Bravado aside, the list of what Deitch, who’s championed many of the same artists DailyServing has featured over the years, could bring to MOCA probably outstrips his conflicts of interest: business savvy, fundraising experience, a staggering reserve of energy, contacts galore, a likable persona, familiarity with a wide range of cultural outlets (he interviewed actress Chloe Sevigny for Paper Magazine the same year he entered the Smithsonian’s Oral History Archive). Still, it’s hard to say how venture will play out in reality.

Roaming around before Tuesday’s press conference, I ran into an old timer from L.A.’s Arts District, a man who’d arrived on the scene long before MOCA opened its doors in 1979. Downtown has changed, he said. It’s been evacuated in favor of the city’s Westside, but there are young people, young partiers, who are setting up camp down here, and they’re the crowd Deitch could reach. Then, almost with the same breath he’d used to tell me of the young downtowners, the man switched gears, talking about attending Pharmaka’s exhibition of Warhol prints last year, and seeing all the young “Snoop Doggs” at the opening. After seeing these kids, and hearing the owner of the prints carelessly discuss their value, he was, of course, unsurprised when the high-priced prints went missing a few months later.

I felt I’d been handed the perfect argument for why Deitch matters—Deitch may be flashy and financially vested in a few too many ways, but he certainly knows how to disrupt stereotypes about visual culture (this is the man who championed surf/hip-hop/punk energy of the 90s, and made minimal distinction between imagery from People Magazine and actual artwork in the catalogue for his Posthuman exhibition). I don’t see him blindly equating young people who [purportedly] listen to Snoop Dogg and look at Warhols with theft.

“Los Angeles has a remarkable, young audience who responds to art in a fresh way and wants to get involved,” Deitch said on Tuesday. “Young audience” doesn’t mean the 20-somethings graduating from BFA and MFA programs in SoCal (that demographic will attend MOCA with or without Deitch); it means a graffiti-savvy demographic with street cred.  If he can make that audience MOCA’s audience, he’ll have accomplished something memorable.

British artist Lucy Williams is further developing the definition of collage. Her detailed, low-relief work focuses on mid-20th century Modernist architecture and involves the careful layering of materials such as card, Perspex, fabric, thread and pillow stuffing. Each material is layered precisely by the artist to illustrate railings, lamp cords and other structural elements. In an interview with Wallpaper Magazine Williams said she sees her vacant images as spaces to be inhabited. “The era was about belief, ideas that we now no longer hold, of social cohesion through the design of a building, Utopian dreams long dissipated,” Williams says in her interview. She had her first solo exhibition in London in 2007 titled Beneath a Woolen Sky, at the Timothy Taylor Gallery. Williams has also exhibited with the McKee Gallery in New York in 2004 and 2006. She has her B.A. in fine art from the Glasgow School of Art and her postgraduate diploma in Fine Art and Painting from the Royal Academy.

This article has been updated from its original posting on October 25th, 2008.

The playfully grotesque characters found in Berlin-based artist Stefanie Gutheil’s paintings act out scenes from her daily life. Many of the subjects in her paintings are directly based on artists, musicians, dancers and poets that live and work in Berlin, alongside the artist. Gutheil has lived in Berlin for over 10 years and has witnessed the city blossom into an international center for contemporary art. Her studio, which is centrally located near much of the city’s nightlife, has provided the artist with fertile ground for artistic inspiration, exposing her to some of Berlin’s most eccentric individuals.

Gutheil’s recent paintings are the subject of the artist’s first solo exhibition with Mike Weiss Gallery and her first exhibition in New York City. Titled Kopftheater, meaning theater of the mind, the exhibition features luscious, yet imperfect paintings that are composed of oils, acrylics, spray paint and even aluminum foil, all employed to produce her larger than life scenes and characters. The artist received both her Masters and Bachelors degrees at the Universität der Künste, Berlin and has exhibited extensively in Germany including recent exhibitions at Galerie Winter in Wiesbaden and Schultz Contemporary in Berlin.

Currently on view at PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, OR is a solo presentation of new work by John Mann. The exhibition, entitled Folded in Place, represents Mann’s recent eponymous series of photographs. The shallow depth of field images present curious constructions of maps made by the artist—maps which now take on different roles than those once dictated by their previous lives as simple geographical guides. These new constructions seem to trade function for form as they morph into miniature architectures. Mann’s work is also currently in the group show Geography at Rayko Gallery in San Francisco.

John Mann lives and works in Tallahassee, FL, where he teaches at Florida State University. He received his MFA in Photography from University of New Mexico. His work has recently been exhibited in Crossroads at Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA; Group Photography Exhibit at JK Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; NOW: Art of the 21st Century at Phillips de Pury, London, UK; Haunts at Privateer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and Hey Hot Shot at Jen Bekman Gallery, New York, NY.

San Francisco-based artist and curator Brion Nuda Rosch creates subtle, yet powerful collages, paintings, sculptures and conceptual projects, which often pair disparate but poetic associations. This ability to provide insightful connections shines through Rosch’s playful but pensive collaborative and curatorial projects as well. Rosch often partners with other artists on creative exchanges through a one-day residency program in his own home called Hallway Projects, while curating more extensive exhibitions in other venues. Earlier this month, Rosch closed a solo show at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, simply titled New Work by Brion Nuda Rosch, featuring work which investigates the value of materials and the idea of the non-monumental. The artist recently sat down with DailyServing.com founder Seth Curcio to discuss his recent Artadia Award, the next installment of his curated exhibition series, Paper! Awesome!, and his recent solo exhibition in San Francisco.

Seth Curcio: So Brion, you were notified a few weeks ago that you are one of the recipients of the Artadia award for San Francisco this year. Congratulations on your award. Tell me a little about the works that were included in your application and about the process that led to the selection.

Brion Nuda Rosch: I included a selection of collages and documentation of several assemblages. At the time I was also in the process of selecting work for my first solo exhibition and for an upcoming book project. Ultimately, the works included in my application were the starting points for the work shown at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco, CA from November 18 – January 2, 2010. I was short-listed as a finalist while preparing for this exhibition. The process was rather swift. First, a social with the jurors and other finalists, then a studio visit, then an announcement.

SC: Your creative practice is very diverse and includes curatorial projects as well as impromptu galleries and online projects, such as your blog Something home Something. Do you feel that your decentralized practice made your work more attractive to the panel at Artadia as they reviewed hundreds of artist applications? How do you feel that each of these different modes of working help to inform your greater practice?

BNR: The focus for my application was primarily centered on my art making. My curatorial efforts were only represented in my Curriculum Vitae and were discussed only briefly during my studio visit. In any discussion about my work, conversation will not remain on one topic, such as painting, or collage. I feel I could easily assert different categories for various works, however doing so would prove to be a shortcoming. I balance the roles of both art making and curating — both practices relate to one another, each sharing similar starting points. Somewhere the boundaries fade and a project initiated from a curatorial standpoint becomes a work of art, and vice versa.  It is not a priority to identify each action with defined labels. Most of my work simply involves a selection of material and then a relationship to that material within a new situation.

SC: Thinking about your recent show with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions and the statement that ‘most of your work simply involves a selection of material and then a relationship to that material’, I am curious about both your humbly-constructed images and sculptures. Talk a little about the concepts that play out in that exhibition, both through your image and object construction.

BNR: The images and the collages are both humble and monumental. Minimal adjustments have been made, a waterfall placed over a waterfall, a new ridge placed over a mountain range, a vague monument placed over a field. These ideas are monumental in scale, almost impossible, while also positioning room for our own reflection into the world around us. The monuments I create are non-monuments; they lack distinct meaning. The materials lack value, found book pages, recycled dump stock paint, wood and drywall. The assemblage works are a direct reaction to accumulated materials within my studio. The assemblage titled, Contents of Studio, Gathered, Painted Brown is just that, the contents of my studio gathered, painted brown and placed in a pile. I accumulated a collection of unsuccessful and unfinished works, and painting them all the same neutral color resolved the conflict I was having with them, placing them in a pile offered a solution for their arrangement and physicality.

SC: In addition to your studio practice, I am also interested in your other more social and collaborative projects. I know that you have produced the ‘Fluxus Coloring Book’, you are now conducting day-long artist residencies out of your home, and you are in the process of curating the third installment of Paper! Awesome!, a show that features an impressive line-up of artists that work with or on paper.

BNR: The Fluxus Coloring Book was produced while in residence at Southern Exposure. During my residency, I worked with a group of artists to build The Portable Ice Cream Stand, part art object, part functioning ice cream stand, part social happening. Visiting artists and guests initiated the direction of the project. A worktable was built to make handmade fliers, later the table functioned as a place for conversation and art making. A few artists made coloring book pages, and guests colored in them. All of the work created at the table was left behind. As a reaction I wanted to develop something that could be taken away from the project. I have an interest in Fluxus art, and felt there was a relationship between the childlike tendencies of a coloring book and the humor of Fluxus art. The coloring book consisted of blank pages and non-representation lines. There was nothing to color in or around; the coloring book was failure, a document for it’s own joke.

One-Day Artist Residencies will take place within the context of Hallway Projects, which exists in my home. During these residencies, an interaction will take place in private, and then later be shared with the public via on-line documentation and distribution of printed materials. During each residency the contributor is offered both a physical venue and a reasonable timeline to execute direct actions in art making. Within the modest time frame and hospitable environment, I hope to interview each contributor and produce either collaborative works or investigate shared sensibilities in our interests as makers. For example, in a conversation many years ago, Amy Rathbone and I discovered we both dislike the colors yellow and blue. For her residency, we plan to explore the colors, and our reaction to them now. We plan to evaluate various tones of each color and rank our tolerance. In addition, we plan to directly tackle our fears by submersing ourselves in the colors and sharing our experience with the public in efforts to gain a better understanding of why we dislike the color yellow and the color blue.

And, Paper! Awesome! was first produced out of necessity for an exhibit within a short timeline. It took place at the now closed Mimi Barr Gallery in 2003. I put out a call to artists to submit work on a letter size piece of paper. I figured with the upcoming deadline, a letter size piece of paper was the most approachable form for both the artists, and my vision for installing the work in a cohesive manner. The works were hung on two walls in a quilt-like fashion. The second installment took place two years later, and involved an open call and a jury process. The range of artists selected added an important element to the exhibit. Artist who were established within the art world and artists who have not shown their work before were hung alongside one another and the proximity of the works offered a slightly anonymous experience for the viewer. For the third installment at Baer Ridgway this spring, I have invited an interesting range of artists who have shown extensively in the international art world, and I am in the process of working with members of other organizations to provide another element to the exhibit. Again, the timeline here is important, I invited the artists to participate nearly six weeks prior to the deadline of submissions. Like the One-Day Artist Residencies, I am interested in what can be produced within a limited time frame and limited space.

SC: So what can we look forward to from you in 2010? Do you have any exciting new projects that you have been wanting to tackle?

BNR: 2010 is shaping up to be very productive. I will be a curator in residence for a short period of time with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions. Little Paper Planes is publishing a book of my collages and assemblages. The book will be released in February. The Andy Warhol Foundation has funded the catalog for Artadia Awardees. I’m looking forward to returning to the studio, and having a lot of conversations about the potential to do larger projects. A very ambitious year to come!