Los Angeles based artist Chris Beas is currently presenting a new exhibition titled Tamburello at Martha Otero Gallery in L.A. Similar to previous exhibitions by the Beas, Tamburello consists of several flat works which are bridged by a larger freestanding sculptural installation in the center of the gallery. The exhibition focuses acutely on the events of May 1st 1994 when Formula One driver Ayrton Senna crashed his vehicle and died taking a sharp turn during the San Marino Grand Prix. Driving at nearly 200 miles per hour at the time of the crash, the Tamburello corner marked the last site of the driver’s spectacular career.

For the exhibition, Beas has created ten new paintings that feature die cast metal replicas of race cars driven during Senna’s first ten years of F1 driving. The paintings simulate the affect of driving a vehicle at such high speeds. In the center of the gallery, a 1/32 scale model replica of the F1 circuit rack at Imola serves as the site of the San Marino Slot Car Grand Prix for which the driver had his last race.

Chris Beas was born in Sierra Modre, California and received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego. The artist has previously exhibited at the Prague Biennale 3, Parc Saint Leger Centre D’Art Contemporain in Pougues-les-Eaux, France, and Casey Kaplan, New York, NY.

Originally published on May 4, 2008

All images Evan Holloway Project Series 35, 2008, Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Polka dots aren’t typically transcendental. They aren’t autonomous and they aren’t monumental. Yet in Evan Holloway’s current exhibition, Project Series 35 at the Pomona College Museum of Art, polka dots take on some serious questions.

Holloway’s installation seems like the perfect place to listen to Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” or Lou Reed’s “Heroin” – it’s portentous and lulling, just like 70s rock at its best. But Holloway’s work also has the calculated restraint associated with minimalism. Pages of black dots cover nearly every inch of the gallery walls and a lightly gridded metal screen, installed to hang a few inches from the wall, adds a layer of empty holes. The holes and dots move in and out of each other, turning the exhibition into a brain tease that reconfigures itself every time you turn your head. The room only stops moving if you stand still and pick a spot of wall to stare at. At first, the installation seems like a lighthearted foray into the haphazard vernaculars of classic rock and youth culture. But an undercurrent of indecision and mistrust tampers with the fun.

Pomona College’s Museum of Art devoted its 2007-2008 season to James Turrell, an artist who took the Light and Space movement to an extreme by constructing craters and natural light observatories. Turrell openly traffics in the language of spirituality and sensory experience. His sculptural spaces exist to illicit a sensory experience that transcends our typical perceptions of light. He does this expertly, with well-crafted, big-budget projects. On one hand, Turrell’s work has a compelling serenity that can fascinate any audience with five senses. On the other hand, Turrell’s transcendental aesthetic can be alienating and insincere, too much about the illusion of spirituality and not enough about the world and the way people live. This is where Holloway enters the picture.

Holloway’s installation currently lives across the hall from Turrell’s End Around, a work that relies on neon lights and pristinely painted surfaces to create the illusion of endless space. To enter “End Around,” viewers must wear little blue slippers over their shoes and be accompanied by a gallery attendant. Still, the transition from Turrell’s work to Holloway’s is agreeable enough. Project Series 35 engages our sensory perception, even if the installation has more to do with the here and now than celestial light.

In a pseudo-catalogue that accompanies Holloway’s installation – it’s a newspaper-like pamphlet with sixteen pages of dots and two pages of text – Holloway and writer Bruce Hainly engage in an email dialogue about Turrell, baby boomers, contemporary poetry and gay porn. The emails have a biting earnestness, perhaps because Holloway and Hainly are as opinionated as they are uncertain. They have plenty to say about Gertrude Stein and pop music, but neither knows exactly how to respond to the monumental, poignant quality of Turrell’s work or to the contrived “poignancy” of art in general.

Near the end of the dialogue, Holloway explains his own use of perceptual phenomena, saying that he finds the mistrust of perception and illusion more interesting than revelation. He comments, “It was quite irritating to me that Turrell is often framed within a soft-core, new-age belief system. I always present my work in a context of skepticism.” Holloway prefers to pose question: why should art aim for poignancy and transcendence when perception is already rife with inconsistencies?

Holloway’s response to Turrell does something uncanny. The room of dots achieves the scale and experiential potency of monumental art without seeming epic. Like Turrell, Holloway holds viewer’s attention by engaging them in a large-scale sensory experience. But while Holloway does not require his viewers to put in time, Turrell’s work requires a commitment. It seems to say, “I can offer you a new perception of the physical world if you sacrifice your time to my work.” Viewers who spend an hour or two in Turrell’s skyspaces experience an ever-transitioning vision of light that they couldn’t have seen with their naked eyes.

Holloway’s installation is more immediate. He engulfs his audience in an experience but he doesn’t require anything of us, nor does his work offer us anything that we don’t already have. He essentially says, “Here, look at how this familiar vocabulary of dots and holes can conjure up an experience.” Just one look around the gallery leads to a trippy sensation. The installation begs for free-association – it’s pixels gone gaga, a psychedelic trip in monochrome, or your favorite polka dot t-shirt stretched across the length of a room.

By the end of their email correspondence, Hainly and Holloway haven’t really reached any definitive conclusion. Sure, Turrell makes mesmerizing, epic work that relies on illusions of authenticity and revelation. But does this mean that his work needs to be challenged? What Holloway ends up doing is proposing an alternative. His installation gives us a foray into what perception-bending work can look like when it takes a straightforward, immediate route: a head-spinning but somehow uplifting sea of polka dots that broaches what’s going on in our heads and leaves the celestial realm to its own devices.

Closing next weekend at Regen Projects II in Los Angeles is new work by Catherine Opie. These photographs titled Twelve Miles to the Horizon document Opie’s trip on a container ship from Korea to Long Beach, capturing the sunrise and sunset across the ten days of the trip. Each image is composed with equal amount of water and sky, deliberately placing the viewer in the time and place documented in the image, allowing for both consistency in relation to the experience and variation in color and texture within the image. What remains is a sensation of solitude within this documented time and place, allowing the viewer to sense the duration of the work through these highly seductive and reductive photographs.

Although compositionally this body of work reflects her Icehouses (2001) and Surfer (2003) series, conceptually, these horizon photographs move in a different direction.  Although the series maintains both aesthetic consistency and variation as these earlier series did, what strikes more is the repetition of the action — a sensation of documenting time rather than just the beauty and stillness present in the earlier series. What remains in the viewer’s mind is the constraint embedded in the image, reaching more to the limitations present in her self portraits than to her more aesthetic and experiential photographs. These photographs allow the viewer to witness her self-imposed restrictions, revealing the decisions that created the series of images rather than just a documented experience. What remains are sensations of time and place, bound in a beautifully seductive series of photographs.
Catherine Opie received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and her MFA from CalArts in 1988. She is currently a tenured professor at UCLA, and her work has been exhibited internationally. In 2008, she had a mid-career survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York — and the New York Times has a feature corresponding to the show. She has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis; Photographers’ Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. An exhibition of Opie’s football, surfer, and landscape photographs will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July 2010.

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

Elana Mann, "Can't Afford the Freeway."

In the only photograph I have ever seen of her, Kajon Cermak  looks omniscient. She is sitting in a white sedan and glancing sideways at something worthy of a half-smile. But only a half-smile. The main traffic reporter for the public radio station KCRW, Cermak has a been-there-done-that cool to her voice which softens her otherwise feisty mien. She is very good with words: “if you’re northbound on the 405 right now, forget it,” “it’s bummer to bummer out there,” “pack-a-snack folks,” and  it’s “one long, non-stop, never ending rush to stop or so it seems.” Sometimes, what she says will make me drop whatever I am doing—hopefully, I am not driving—and wonder if I’ve heard quite right. “There’s a metal bar in lanes,” she said last Tuesday afternoon, “and people are pulling up and ordering cocktails.” This made the freeway sound expensive.

It’s no small thing to be a traffic reporter in a city where a person could feasibly spend a sixth of a day on freeways (“First there was rush hour, then there were rush hours,” Cermak has said) and freeway driving  has moral undertones too–a friend of mine sees glares every-time her Mercedes 240D lets out black smoke, and even if the glares aren’t actually there, the fact that she sees them says enough. L.A. artists fixate on cars, what you drive, whether you drive, and whether you should. I don’t know of another city in which art world folklore involves Robert Irwin leaving a critic on the side of the road after said critic denied the aesthetic acumen of a boy rebuilding a hot rod: “Here was a kid who wouldn’t know art from schmart, but you couldn’t talk about a more real aesthetic activity.”

The day after Cermak turned stuck-in-smog-time into cocktail-time, I took the Red Line to RedCat in downtown L.A. and sat in one of two Subaru seats set up in front of Elana Mann’s video installation. Called Can’t Afford the Freeway, after the chorus of an Aimee Mann song, Mann’s video includes abundant car time but no drive time. Mann bends across and over car seats, sometimes merging with her car’s body, and other times fighting the car’s body. The freshly washed white Subaru Legacy Outback, sits in residential streets, shopping districts and barren lots as Mann tangles herself in the seatbelts–at one point, it’s like she’s in a seatbelt straight jacket–, caresses the headrests with her cheeks or lets herself roll head-first out the window, like a pool of lotion sliding over the  edge of the counter-top.

Lisa Anne Auerbach, 2009.

As Mann maneuvers, the soundtrack of her voice questioning Captain Dylan Alexander Mack, an Iraq war veteran who goes by Alex, plays out. Mann’s voice sounds polite, maybe even guarded, and Alex sounds more matter-of-fact and barefaced than he should, given what he says. At first, the interview seems like a distraction from the intensely physical dialogue Mann is having with her Outback. But then the overlaps between what Mann does and what Alex says become stronger: “Everyone was snaking and weaving” (Mann snakes and weaves around the gray upholstery), “you have resentment towards them because they’re the one’s closest to you” (Mann attacks her car sometimes, like when she throws herself on the hood), “I felt alone in the emotional attachment” (Mann is alone in every shot), “your car becomes a metaphor for your life” (for Mann, it seems to be a cocoon-like forum for acting out your feelings), “finally, I can steer my life” (Mann never steers the car), “I didn’t feel like I did anything for American culture” (Subaru may be owned by Fuji Heavy Industries, but the Outback is an American car; it doesn’t do anything in Mann’s video, though).

Car art has been more skin-deep than guttural lately. Artist Lisa Anne Auerbach, an adamant bicyclist,  recently bought herself a car to drive to her new job in Pomona. In response to her own digression, she knitted a green sweater. On the front, above  bicycles and happy hand-holding accordion people, it says, “I used to be part of the solution”; and on the back, which is bogged down by knitted cars, it says “Now I’m part of the problem.”  This Spring, artists Folke Koebberling and Martin Kaltwasser began rehabilitated sedans by turning them into bikes at Bergamont Station. On designated days, visitors could come watch a process that resembled a mini demolition derby. Jedediah Caesar turned a red pick-up truck  into an overgrown, inorganic ecosystem for the California Biennial last year. The pick-up felt apocalyptic.

Cars into Bicycles, 2010, Bergamont Station, Santa Monica.

Mann’s installation is too melancholic and probing to be apocalyptic. It susses out of the need for comfort and control, using the car as a proxy for trauma, war, anxiety, desire and affection. Given the emotional baggage her white Subaru carries, it’s no wonder Mann can’t afford the freeway.

Anthony Discenza, Teaser #1 (2009)

Opening Thursday, May 13th and running through Saturday the 15th is a flash project at Catherine Clark Gallery’s New York space, the 14th Street Studio. The show, entitled Everything Will Probably Work Out OK, will feature recent work by Oakland, CA-based Anthony Discenza. Discenza’s text-based work is both literary-minded and low-brow laugh-inducing, and references the artist’s interest in what he calls an “internal viewing experience,” which is born of the freedom offered when one steps back from the constant heckling of image-based culture. His aluminum “street signs” offer the sort of one-liners that the Age of Twitter has become known for, though their enigmatic sentiments require a deeper dive into the murky waters of the wasted adult imagination than most 140 character witticisms.

When I spoke recently with gallery Owner/Director, Catherine Clark, she responded to Discenza’s new work—his so-called “non-visual source material”—by noting that “the new body of text-based projects, while in some ways a media or stylistic departure from his videos, remains consistent with his interests in appropriation and re-contextualizing cultural information.”

Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is the second pop-up exhibition being held at the 14th Street Studio—which is not so much a gallery in the classic sense (there is no “Catherine Clark Gallery, New York”), as an experiment into the way collectors and the public commingle with work. The first show at the space opened in March of this year—during the swarming of Manhattan that is New York art fair week—inspired by the idea that this season the gallery would like to present work in a more personalized setting in lieu of doing a fair.

The Discenza exhibition is a similar, though slightly altered, East Coast incarnation of an eponymously titled show at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco in January/February 2010. According to Clark, while many of the pieces from the original exhibit will be re-presented in the new space, “there are some significant additions and changes,” including the addition of a large digital photo-based work featuring the Olsen Twins. Additionally, she notes that “some of the text-based signs and works on paper are either newer pieces or feel more appropriate in relationship to the space and the other works selected for the exhibition.” While Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is only on view for three days this weekend, including during several cocktail receptions, the body of work will be up through the beginning of September and can be arranged for viewing by appointment.

Anthony Discenza, ELECTIVE PROCEDURE (2009) and LOW-KEY BASICS (2009)

Anthony Discenza earned his BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and his MFA in Film and Video from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Getty Center, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and at the 2000 Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Ryan Gander Felix provides a stage #8-(Eleven sketches for 'A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor'), 2008

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s current exhibition, Production Site: The Artist’s studio Inside-Out takes a look at the studio not only as a location for production but also as a place where experimentation, performance, failure, and meditation can occur. Organized by Domonic Molon, this exhibition is in connection with the yearlong city wide Studio Chicago project which brings forth the studio as a site and subject. The show consists of a diverse group of artists that work both locally and internationally including; Andrea Zittel, Amanda Ross-Ho, Bruce Nauman, Deb Sokolow, Justin Cooper, Kerry James Marshall, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Nikhil Chopra, Rodney Graham, Ryan Gander, Tactia Dean and William Kentridge.

An overarching playfulness is found throughout many of the works in the gallery; most noticeably in the works of William Kentridge, Justin Cooper, and Amanda Ross-Ho. Kentridge’s video installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003) shows the artist working in his studio in seven different projections. Referencing the French filmmaker Kentridge plays with early special effects and stop motion as he paints, destroys, and interacts with his own creations.

Amanda Ross-Ho, Frauds for an inside job, 2008

Amanda Ross-Ho’s installation, Frauds for an Inside Job (2008) is in fact her former studio. Cut apart and reassembled as leaning “paintings”, a presentation that she often uses, Ross-Ho presents the objects that are often found on her studio walls. A poster of Puff Daddy and Notorious B.I.G., paint splatters, buttons, a basket, and a Beijing Opera Mask are all disclosed as references and inspiration.

Justin Cooper’s Studio Visit (2007),shot while the artist was in residency at Skoheagen, is shown through the perspective of the artist in a state of frenzy. As Cooper attempts to create a still life and fails, miserably might I add, we are shown a vulnerable side of the artist as they create. The studio becomes a site of private failure.

Kerry James Marshall, 7am Sunday Morning, 2003

Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out will on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago until May 30th.

Long May You Run, 2010 synthetic polymer on canvas 64 x 64 inches

Mark Moore Gallery’s current exhibition, Decade, signifies Tim Bavington’s tenth year of representation by the gallery, as well as the fifth solo presentation of his work at the gallery.  Bavington synthesizes aural and visual stimuli, organizing chromatic variations of both worlds onto the picture plane.  The artist pays homage to his favorite musicians, often by selecting one of their songs to interpret. In the work, Long May You Run, two rows of vertical stripes represent separate elements of Neil Young’s musical composition. The lower half of the painting denotes the bass line while the upper portion shows the guitar solo.  Another way the artist references music is by choosing album covers and mirroring their compositions.  Paintings like Blue Monday and Give ‘Em Enough Rope are Bavington’s interpretations of New Order and Clash album covers, respectively.  In addition, Bavington includes art historical references by emulating Kenneth Noland and Mark Rothko, tying the concentric circles of Noland to the New Order cover and Rothko-like horizons to the Clash album.

Bold As Love, 2010 synthetic polymer on canvas 72 x 72 inches

When discussing his conceptual process, Bavington stated “I generally read sheet music and start with that as a sketch.  Then, I go from there.  The color palette is pretty subjective, it’s not scientific or mathematical. You can’t imagine what sounds will come out when you look at a score.  Basically I do the same thing as a musician (when reading music), except I interpret the score with color instead of sound.  I’m not trying to capture sound– the nature of sound waves and light waves are completely different.”

Installation View

Bavington received his M.F.A. from University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1999.  His work is represented in prominent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Portland Art Museum.  Decade will be on view through May 29th, 2010.