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

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 2009. Drape-formed plastic with acrylic lacquer & glitter.

Craig Kauffman has a shoe fetish. He’s had it since he was a child. “My mom wore high heels,” Kauffman explained in a 2008 interview, the same interview in which he talked about the affect campy lingerie ads from Frederick’s of Hollywood had on his adolescent mind. (“Blow up bras, stuffed padded bras, rear ends,” Kauffman recalled. “[Frederick] was a genius.”) The work that stems directly from Kauffman’s fetish—dumb-fisted, transparent paintings that L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight recently referred to as “rather tepid”—is far from compelling. But the fact that the artist known for sleek, vacuum formed abstractions lusts after stilettos and patent leather pumps? That is compelling, especially since freshly lacquered custom car parts are more often assumed to be Kauffman’s main muse.

New Work, Kauffman’s soon-to-close exhibition at Frank Lloyd Gallery, features two paintings of shoes, but these hang on an unobtrusive side wall. The central attraction, a series of delicate, drape-formed plastic shells that look like glitter-filled candy dishes, hang in the main gallery. The glitter is real and, like the acrylic wall reliefs Kauffman began making back in the 1960s, each shell has a perfectly smooth surface. The hot pink, aqua, Astroturf green, and lavender that color these sculptures have the manicured gloss suited to a Prada showroom.

Liz Craft, "Candy Colored Clown," 2010. Metal, bronze and yarn.

Similar colors characterize Liz Craft’s current exhibition Death of a Clown, on view four doors down from Kauffman’s in Patrick Painter Inc. Caft’s show includes imposing metal screens on which clown faces have been created out of bronze vases, ceramic dishes and thick colored yarn; two clowns, one laughing and one crying, impressionistically sculpted with Giacometti-like license; a tiered table; a witch face; and an orange-haired girl who looks like Milais’s Ophelia might have had she died a hippie on a grandmotherly pink couch. Bruce Hainley once wrote, “Craft is never not crafty in her deployment of materials,” the double negative mimicking the way Craft’s aggressive material choices negate her domestic, decorative subjects. Loopy and comedic though her subjects are, Craft’s perversion of bronze, steel and fiberglass is dead serious and it’s also part of the reason Death of a Clown speaks to Kauffman’s New Work.

While Kauffman’s sculptures are ethereal, Craft’s are industrial and opaque; while Kauffman’s are abstract, Craft’s are representational. While Kauffman belonged to The Cool School, the group of ‘60s artists who equated artmaking with machismo and made Los Angeles a scene, Liz Craft was Too Cool for School, according to a catchy Spin Magazine article Dennis Cooper wrote about her and her UCLA cohorts. Yet both sculptors fixate on material objects, both have a notoriously Californian obsession with commercial material and fetish-finishes, and both work in the realm of warped whimsy (though I’m not sure if Kauffman means to be as warped as Craft does).

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 2009. Drape-formed plastic with acrylic lacquer & glitter.

When I imagine Kauffman and Craft’s exhibitions merging–and I often do, even though I know the two wouldn’t and probably shouldn’t ever come together–it’s a deliciously disjointing opus in which Kauffman’s dishes protrude from Craft’s clown faces, or sit on top of her fiberglass furniture. The work of Kauffman, once associated with machismo, plays the stereotypically delicate, feminine role. The work of Craft, always prodding the domestic, plays the more heavy-handed stereotypically masculine role. This inversion is satisfying.

On the edge of Culver City’s industrial area sits Scion Installation L.A. Space, currently hosting a group exhibition of artists whose mission was to transform the gallery into eight individual rooms.  Each room is indicative of a theme set forth by the artist or team of artists who designed and built it.   Artists and their rooms show an appetite for the urban, likely due to the exhibition curator’s own passion for street art.  The artists were chosen by Roger Gastman, best known for his assistance in bringing graffiti art into the limelight of the contemporary art world.   Gastman’s many art publications, like Swindle Magazine and his latest book, Freight Train Graffiti, often highlight street art as a prized aspect of pop culture.  Gastman also served as executive producer of the recent graffiti documentary, Infamy.

Within Chris Stain’s installation, the viewer briefly navigates the nooks and crannies of a constricted space between two buildings. His corridor-like construction embodies subculture with multiple depictions of bricks, graffiti, and graphic renderings of telephone poles and electrical wires. Stain thinks of the space as “…a 3-D representation of the smaller paintings I make on metal, which capture the story of the struggling American.”

Similarly, Dan Monick and Caitlin Reilly collaborated to make their room into a bus stop with a partially enclosed waiting area and bench.  The team installed lighting meant to mimic the overhead illumination of a street lamp.  In addition, photographic images are installed on light boxes that surround the perimeter of the room.  These images, which are approximately the same size as bus windows, are portraits of passengers and their surroundings.

In contrast, some of Rooms’ artists indulged in investigating their own style as opposed to recreating a specific urban-inspired space.  Adam Wallacavage’s installation is saturated with curving tendrils and undulating arms, both signatory elements of his personal aesthetic.  Four of his plaster cast octopus arm chandeliers are suspended from the ceiling.   Custom sconces, furniture, wallpaper, and candelabras function to unify Wallacavage’s eccentric room.

In addition to the aforementioned artists, works by Bill Daniel, Dueling VHS, Justin Van Hoy, Kime Buzzelli, and Rocky Grimes are also exhibited.  Rooms will be on display through May 15th, 2010.

Cory Arcangel, The Sharper Image, installation view. Image by Steven Brooke.

On view through May 9th at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami is a retrospective of  work made by Brooklyn-based artist, Cory Arcangel, from 2002 to present. The solo exhibition, entitled The Sharper Image, examines the prolific artist’s diverse practice, featuring a virtual grab bag of media—video, print, sound, performance, sculpture, drawing and web-based work. An artist, computer programmer and web designer, Arcangel was first featured on DailyServing in 2007. He is best known for his explorations of consumer technology and digital culture, including cheeky modifications to old-school Nintendo games, such as in the 2002 piece I Shot Andy Warhol—an interpretation of the 1980s NES game Hogan’s Alley. Other works on view in The Sharper Image include: several prints of Photoshop Product Demonstration Gradients; Space Invader (2004), the modification of the old Atari Game Space Invaders; and a temporary re-design of the MOCANOMI website by changing the font to Comic Sans, which is live throughout the tenure of the exhibition.

Cory Arcangel, The Sharper Image, installation view. Image by Steven Brooke.

Cory Arcangel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions such as Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, New York (2009), The Possibility of an Island at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2008); Color Chart at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Speed 3 at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia, Spain (2007); Time Frame at P.S. 1, New York (2006); Database Imaginary at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada (2004); and the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004). A solo show of his work just closed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. He is represented by Team Gallery in New York.

Ron van der Ende, Limo 1, 2009

A Shallow Wade is the title of a new exhibition that shows Americana distilled through an outsider’s perspective, that of Rotterdam artist Ron van der Ende.  Through his process of assembling large wall-hung collages of wood, he has salvaged doors, furniture, and other building fragments and deconstructed them, leaving worn paint in tact on skinned timber. These parts are collected and cut to fit into exact spaces.  Finding evidence and scenes from Western societies and mass media, he examines cultural monuments which have informed identities globally.

Ron van der Ende, Taylor-Burton, 2009 (Installation View)

These six wooden hulls, made big and light, are feats of intricate detail that would satisfy a model maker’s desire for exactitude.  They show us icons raised from the dead – a diamond worn by Elizabeth Taylor, the Cadillac Limo I driven by R. Reagan adorned with crumpled striped flags, and the shell of a Dodge, the Number 12 not in working order. Finishing nails make seams as rivets or stitches. Van der Ende is aiming at surface and alluding to depth, making image-products akin to those found in print and video media, with a few added inches of reality.

The NASCAR car is white from a distance, and a mosaic of color and texture up close.  Beige and gray expand upon approach to reveal dabs of rainbow’d light, bold pixels on a glossy surface.  But it is ghostly, a relic of frivolous gas consumption as sport, an emblem stripped of its power.  In “Limo I” the car appears tank-like in shades of tombstone gray, steel on black matte plates, and silvery reflections in the chamber.

Ron van der Ende, NASCAR Charger, 2009 (installation detail)

Mounted photographs next to Limo I show guns, jets, flags, and landscapes dominated by human presence.  Other images between the sculptures include scenes of mud, flood and piled up junk, interiors of gutted cars, explosions, collapsed plywood homes, and plain shacks standing steady.  These images might be meaningful, strengthening pathways between common symbols and forms, or maybe they are red herrings, disparate sources of inspiration for the artist that propel us to draw up connections.  Images display famous characters, workers, and their things, and in wood we see flags, products of factories, and items of sport and luxury. And, in front of us is art for sale, participating in the wealth-making world it critiques.

Ron van der Ende, Shotgun Shack Row, 2010

A street of rowhouses in New Orleans is imagined and remade by the artist in miniature in Shotgun Shack Row. Prairie Church is another homage to simple, effective architecture.  Design practices that used to be common knowledge have gained mystical qualities here, becoming ancestors that tell of colonies who have survived and flourished.

Ron van der Ende, On Re-Entry (Burning Log), 2010

The artist has been honing his skills making these intricate models for years now and collecting many tiny parts for use. A Shallow Wade will remain on exhibit until May 2nd at Ambach & Rice Gallery in Seattle, WA.  It is Ron van der Ende’s second solo show in the US.  He graduated in sculpture from the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam, NL in 1988. He has had numerous shows in the Netherlands and exhibited extensively throughout Europe, and participated as a member of artist collective/gallery Expo Henk until 1997. Public and private collections that own his work include Bouwfonds Kunstcollectie and Historisch Museum Rotterdam.

The translation of information from an original event to a digital screen takes many forms. While the process of transferring data from the camera to satellite to analogue broadcast to a digital screen device occurs countless times each day, we usually absorb this information with little to no awareness of the process. Fueled by this topic, painter Kathy Grayson is currently presenting a new body of work titled Bangalore on view at Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles. The artist has taken televised sports footage of professional tennis matches for the subject of her new paintings. Utilizing YouTube footage of the matches, the artist examines the abstraction that occurs from the digital compression of data. Grayson runs footage through computer applications to distort and abstract the images, reconfiguring the digital remains to create what she calls a “stirring up of the video data to make interesting ruptures in figurative painting.”

Grayson is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist serves as the director of Deitch Projects in NYC and works as an independent curator, essayist and book editor. Recent exhibitions include works at Park Life in San Francisco and D’Amelio Terras in NYC.

Each Sunday we reach deep into the DailyServing Archives to unearth an old feature that we think needs to see the light of day. This week we found a feature of artist Leslie Hewitt’s On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance. If you have a favorite feature that you think should be published again, simply email us at info@dailyserving.com and include DS Archive in the subject line.

Originally published on March 29, 2010

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

The Kitchen in New York City is currently showing On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance, a Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition curated by Rashida Bumbray. The exhibition features new and recent work by Hewitt in photography, sculpture and film installation. The Kitchen writes that in this exhibition Hewitt’s ‘…long-standing interest in non-linear perspective merges with W.E.B. Dubois’ theory of double consciousness, to create visually elegant and thoughtfully composed situational works’.

On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance brings together a selection of images from three of Hewitt’s photographic projects. Riffs on Real Time (2008) features sculptural, layered collages with mundane objects created to be captured in photograph. These sculptural creations reflect the condition of existence through a shared temporality. In the Midday (2009) series she creates contemporary still-life arrangements that reference our consumerist society through repetition. Hewitt creates and documents multiple times – making each photographic image of the same still-life arrangement subtly altered in perception. Hewitt’s newest photographic project, A Series of Projections (2010), breaks down and simplifies the artist’s structural complexities. In a departure, black and white photographs capture photographic fragments projected onto the studio wall in addition to honing in on objects placed on wooden surfaces.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Like much of Hewitt’s work, her new film installation, created in collaboration with experiential cinematographer Bradford Young, is inspired by a literary source – in this instance Claude Brown’s Harlem migration text Manchild in the Promised Land (1965). This film installation engages the landscape of a particular place (Harlem) and the manifest implications and effects of movement through this space. Hewitt and Young drew visual inspiration from Harlem’s dense urban grid, its architectural features and through the study of its street archives. The Kitchen describes this film installation as featuring ‘a series of silent vignettes’ where ‘time is marked through oscillations between the still and the moving image’. The passage of the gallery visitor through the installation mirrors and completes the work. This theme of human movement is as particularly definitive to our global age as it was to the formation of 20th century Harlem.

Leslie Hewitt graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2004. She also undertook Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University from 2001-2003. Hewitt received the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands and, more recently, the 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant. She is currently in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Leslie Hewitt is represented by D’Amelio Terras in New York and is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hewitt has shown extensively across the US and was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and MoMA’s New Photography exhibition in 2009. Hewitt’s work has also been shown internationally – notably at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. Look for Leslie Hewitt’s work in the exhibition After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City (organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta). This exhibition is on view 28 March – 11 August 2010.

The Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance will remain at The Kitchen through 20 May 2010. A discussion between Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young, moderated by Rashida Bumbray, will be held Sunday, 9 May at 4.00 pm.

Lithuania-born artist Zilvinas Kempinas creates site-specific installations that re-contextualize materials such as video tape to transform physical space into utter illusion. The physical and optical impact on the viewer is caused by precise geometry that utilizes both structure and light. Illusions of velocity and vibration are echoed through the space to accentuate the architecture and provide a new way of experiencing a familiar and otherwise non-descriptive space.

The artist has been living and working in New York City since the completion of his MFA at Hunter College in 2002. Kempinas has experienced rapid growth since his entire 2006 exhibition at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery was purchased for the Margulies Collection in Miami. Developing an international reputation, Kempinas has recently completed exhibitions with Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.