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

knives 2009, Steel, wood and plastic, 36 x 60 x 24 inches. Courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery

In the new FX series Justified, a quick-to-draw marshal who wears a skin of coolness over his pent up anger nearly always shoots to kill. That’s the show’s conceit: at the end of each episode, someone is either shot dead or left alive by a carefully calculated hairsbreadth. The shootings are, of course, always justified. This would be a cheap shtick if not for the obsessive precision and confidence with which U.S. Marshal Raymond Givens handles his firearms; Justified tells the story, not of the law versus the lawless, but of guns and those who use them best. The inevitable deaths, never messy, stack up like side effects for the lawmen who, like virtuosic athletes, play their game too well.

That Robert Lazzarini uses weapons as the subject of his mind-bending metal sculptures is no small thing. A New York artist whose first Los Angeles show opened on April 9^th, Lazzarini has mounted kitchen knives, Smith and Wesson revolvers, and gold-plated brass knuckles to the walls of Honor Fraser Gallery. The sculpted weapons in the exhibition, all mounted at eye-level and fabricated with brass, steel and wood, look like photoshopped distortions of themselves. Which is more or less what they are. The distortions have been precisely, mathematically executed by Lazzarini, using Photoshop and 3-D digital modeling tools, so that the fabricated sculptures, while wonky, present as perfectly as ready-mades. The gallery walls, which slant in a way that’s at first imperceptible and later insidious, add to the effect of the already skewed guns, knives and knuckles.

gun (iv) 2009, Steel and walnut, 8 x 9 x 10 1/2 inches. Courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery

Lazzarini plays with perception as shrewdly as Robert Irwin before him did, yet, while Irwin’s project could easily be read as one’s man’s dogged attempt to understand the optical and outsmart the sublime, Lazzarini’s subject lends itself to more of a pop narrative. Clint Eastwood used a Smith & Wesson revolver in Dirty Harry (though Clint’s was a Model 29 and Lazzarini’s is a Model 10); brass knuckles recall Nelly’s fifth album; and kitchen knives, especially eerily suspended like Lazzarini’s are, could hail from a horror flick as easily as from a Magritte painting. Yet no low-brow references make Lazzarini’s work any less smart and impenetrable. The weapons feel preternatural, like they hold some insight that makes it impossible for them to misfire. Each sculpture shrink-wraps the kind of confidence Marshal Givens takes from his holster and presents it as a surreal packaged good.

But what makes Lazzarini’s work most interesting is that, the more you look, the more the three-dimensions recede into two-dimensions. The sculptures become images, photoshopped mirages.  Their smooth, practiced confidence makes them unbelievable as objects, just like, eventually, Marshal Given’s unblemished aim will make it impossible for us to accept his heat-of-the-moment, spot-on shootings as justified.

brass knuckles (i) 2010, Brass, 13 x 16 x 8 inches. Courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery

The objects of sculptor Peter Iannarelli are seemingly commonplace in nature, yet the artist cleverly liberates the forms through the tinkering of their materiality. By utilizing both logic and abstraction, Iannarelli reduces the forms to a common denominator linking and balancing concept with form. The work, which is seemingly accessible to a wide audience, offers depth beyond its initial appearance. Using familiar materials, the artist draws the viewer into the work and then flips the meaning in a way that re-contextualizes both the physicality and the meaning of the object. The work is often summed up by a very clever title that neatly ties together any conceptual loose-ends.

Peter Iannarelli received his BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He has attended the DIA Center as a visiting artist and has a grant recipient of the Vermont Studio Center. The artist recently completed exhibitions at Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon, NY,  the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY and the Albany Center Gallery in Albany, NY.

Up for the Down Stroke is the title of a new exhibition of paintings by artist David Leggett. The exhibition, which is on view at 65GRAND in Chicago, makes use of humorous yet irreverent imagery and text that confronts everyday issues of race, class, sexuality and religion. While the paintings hardly offer any solution to these issues, they do provide a tension between humor and disgust that demands engagement from the viewer. Leggett’s social observations of the commonplace shed light on cultural byproducts such as lyrics from rap songs and contemporary and historical cartoons to reveal certain absurdities in our daily lives which often are so widely accepted that they become rarely examined.

The Chicago-based artist was born in Massachusetts and is a graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Up for the Down Stroke marks the first solo exhibition for the artist, who recently completed group shows at the Hyde Part Art Center and the Zolla Lieberman Gallery, both in Chicago.

Currently on view at Blindside in Brisbane, Australia, is the collaborative exhibition, At the time of atmospheric precipitates—exhibition is not function. An exercise in creative flexibility of sorts, the collaboration between Brisbane-based artists Danielle Clej and Ruth McConchie consists of a constructed “kaleidoscopic labyrinth,” which explores the architectural boundaries of the space. During the short installation period, the duo arranged and rearranged objects and improvised the form of the elaborate installation, which will continue its fluctuating state of development throughout the course of the show. This is not the first collaboration between Clej and McConchie—they’ve constructed spaces in site-specific installations before. As Blindside notes, “Clej and McConchie have distinct, individual art practices; yet share a desire to shape provisional, sensuous systems of order. These works are mutually driven by their obsessions with creating spatial-object-bodily dialogues within the structure of gallery sites. Employing formal and conceptual tactics of compulsively working to the excess, they play with repetitive processes of material collection to arrange stuttering rhythms of form, colour and light.” At the time of atmospheric precipitates—exhibition is not function is on view through April 24th.

Danielle Clej recently earned a Ph.D in practice-led research at the Queensland University of Technology. She is a co-director of Brisbane based artist-run-initiative inbetweenspaces and recently co-curated the international art project, Constellations. Her work has been exhibited at Block Gallery, QUT, Brisbane; First Draft Gallery, Sydney; Karen 19 Gallery, Gold Coast, and beyond.

Ruth McConchie is a current MA candidate at Queensland University of Technology. She is a co-director of Brisbane based artist-run-initiative inbetweenspaces. She has exhibited at No Frills Gallery, Brisbane; !Metro Arts, Brisbane; Accidentally Annie Street Space, Brisbane; and First Draft Gallery, Sydney.

In February 2010, Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu was named the Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year.” Her accompanying exhibition, My Dirty Little Heaven will open later this month at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin. Recently, DailyServing’s Aimée Reed had a chance to catch up with Mutu at her studio in Brooklyn to discuss her upcoming show, as well as the con-current exhibition This You Call Civilization?, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

Wangechi Mutu, "Royal Blue Arachnid Curse", (view of piece installed with damaged wall), 2005, ink, collage, contact paper on Mylar, 77 1/2 x 51 1/2 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Photo credit: Joshua White. Collection of Henry Kravis, New York

Aimée Reed: Tell me about the two exhibitions. Will both shows at AGO (open until May 23^rd, 2010) and Deutsche Guggenheim (April 30^th – June 13^th, 2010) feature works from the same series simultaneously?

Wangechi Mutu: No. They both come from quite a wide range of different works. AGO happened to have contacted me to work with them earlier than the Berlin folks. For example they have installation works such as The Ark Collection (a work that consists of four large vitrines displaying postcard-sized imagery of women from African Art) and Sleeping Heads (drawings of severed heads that are installed on a “damaged wall”, or a wall containing perforated holes that evoke wounds), which are both memorable and significant pieces. They also have a lot of my larger collages, the catalog Shady Promise (published by Damiani) and video works.

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Originally Published on May 22nd, 2008.

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 Assume Vivid Astro Focus’s 2008 exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York City. 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.

Deitch Studios in Long Island City is currently showing assume vivid astro focus‘ Absolutely Venomous Accurately Fallacious (Naturally Delicious) until August 10th. avaf is a collaborative group of artists, designers, filmmakers, and performers that creates different projects based on each institution and space they visit. They have exhibited all over the world, including at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, and will be participating in the 28th Sao Paolo Biennial. The number of people working on each project varies, and the group always wears masks to encourage the viewers to focus on the work and not their personalities. The exhibition at Deitch is a combination of murals, collages, sculptures, video, and installation, as well as a special zone for experience and interaction (included in every avaf project).

In the center of the gallery space is an enormous gender-bending figure lying belly down across the floor. The massive trannie sculpture (with high heeled strappy shoes, a meandering phallic symbol, and two heads) loudly references change and is trapped beneath the facade of an old Brooklyn house. This architectural inclusion references the reconstruction (and destruction) that is taking place throughout the city and into Long Island. The walls are covered with a beautiful mix of printed wall papers and neon sculptures, which are juxtaposed with harsher materials such as raw plywood and cardboard.

avaf believes in a philosophy of viral contamination, which asserts that as contemporary cultural participants, we are bombarded with an incessant stream of information and imagery. This bombardment leads to the development of a new human species, one which is capable of digesting unbelievable amounts of information through various media. In avaf’s opinion, music is the medium that comes closest to perfection because of the way it reaches the listener. With no physical presence, music manifests itself in our bodies, giving us a somewhat abstract, but intensely sensorial and corporeal understanding of what we hear. Visually, avaf uses abstraction and figuration and a wealth of materials and information to construct an environment to envelop us. The fusion of elements, actions, and artists creates a synergy and abundance that consumes us, much the way music does.

Philip Johnson’s Glass House has often served as the subject and inspiration for other artist’s work. Photographer, James Welling, has chosen to document the house for a new series of images, simply titled Glass House. The exhibition, which is currently on view at David Zwirner Gallery on West 19th St. in New York City, has developed over a three year period (2006-2009). Welling’s images capture the house through a variety of color lens, leaving the structure semi-obscured by a series color fields. The images are exhibited as large-scale inkjet prints which continue to explore the artists interest in color phenomena and trichromatic RGB vision.

Welling has an extensive exhibited history that spans nearly thirty years. He has completed recent exhibitions at Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, Wako Works of Art in Tokyo, Galerie Nelson-Freeman in Paris and Maureen Paley in London. Glass House will be on view at David Zwiner through April 24th, and will move to Regan Projects in Los Angeles later this year.