Rachel Zoe, 32" x 24" , oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The art world. It’s way more serious and important than every other industry! This thinking at least seems to persist even though the field of contemporary art has maintained an open flirtation with its sassy sister, the fashion industry, since long before even Andy Warhol trotted his wacky wigs around Studio 54 with the likes of Diane von Fürstenberg. There is a mutual fascination between the two fields, and yet it seems that the art world would prefer to keep its consorting with the fashion industry confined strictly to social events, rather than consider fashion (so low-brow!) as a worthy subject matter for actual works of art.

Los Angeles-based artist, Kimberly Brooks‘, current solo show at Taylor De Cordoba gallery in Culver City breaks with this norm to explore the intrigue of the fashion industry’s most iconic stylemakers—without the precept of farce or condemnation. The Stylist Project (on view through April 3rd) presents Brooks’ latest body of work—a series of oil painted portraits of fashion industry insiders, including stylist to the starts and Bravo TV fixture, Rachel Zoe, and award winning costume designer and Madonnaʼs personal stylist Arianne Phillips, among others.

The work on view blends the fields of art and fashion astutely, presenting the fashionable set as they have styled themselves, while at the same time drawing upon the ages-old artistic tradition of portraiture. The regal positions of some of the sitters recall Renaissance royals, and the sprawled poses of others touch on the early Modern depiction of courtesans, such as Edouard Manet’s Olympia.

Arianne Phillips, 30" x 24", oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The Stylist Project is the third solo show for Brooks at Taylor De Cordoba. The first two, Mom’s Friends (2007) and Technicolor Summer (2008), explored much more personal subject matter than the present show. Brooks’ outward shift to now document the fashion industry with this latest series has garnered a lot of attention from media and publications that wouldn’t normally publish gushing articles about fine artists. At the Taylor De Cordoba gallery, they’ve laid out a stack of glossies with Brooks’ name inked onto them. When I asked Heather Taylor, Director of Taylor De Cordoba, to discuss the widespread reception that this exhibition has received, she told me, “The bottom line is that people are hungry for this dialogue and Kimberly is pulling the curtain back on the fashion world, which up until the past year—with the popularity of [the film] ‘The September Issue’ and [the TV show] ‘The Rachel Zoe Project’—had been fairly mysterious.”

New York born, Los Angeles based, Kimberly Brooks maintains her studio in Venice, CA. She earned her BA from UC Berkeley and trained in fine arts at Otis College of Art and Design and UCLA. Her work has been included in numerous juried exhibitions, including at Pleiades Gallery of Contemporary Art, New York; Risk Press Gallery, Los Angeles; and Phillips de Pury Auction House, Los Angeles.

Currently on view at Raid Projects in Los Angeles is the group exhibition Default State Network. The exhibition is curated by artist Ryan Wallace and features works by Glen Baldridge, Alex Dodge, Chris Duncan, Elise Ferguson, Joseph Hart, Andrew Schoultz, Leslie Shows, Ryan Wallace and Will Yackulic.

As with many artist curated exhibitions, Wallace has decided to explore the interests that are inherent in his own work, such as current trends and advancements in science, technology and consciousness through the work of the group mentioned above. Borrowing its title from the network of regions in the brain that become active when “an individual is not focused on the outside world but rather in a wakeful-resting state such as daydreaming, speculating, or contemplating the past”, Default State Network playfully explores creative production through a variety of media, methods and systems. Collectively, artists exhibited offer insight into their own creative process as it derives from either premeditated thought or pure intuition that takes over during the production process. Either way it is undeniable that much of the work is built on a language that is mysterious, cryptic and visually seductive.

Default State Network will be on view at Raid Projects through February 27th. In addition, Wallace will be exhibiting new works in a solo exhibition at Morgan Lehamn Gallery in New York City which will be on view through March 20th.

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

Joe Sola, "In a Kitchen", 2008

In a Bridgestone Tires ad that aired during last Sunday’s Super Bowl, a car resembling the Batmobile speeds along a dark, rainy highway. It turns a corner and slams on its breaks to avoid hitting a brightly lit roadblock set up by eccentric-looking villains. The villain in charge says, over a loud speaker, “All right here’s the deal. Your Bridgestone Tires or your life.” A shivering blond in a leather bodysuit is shoved out of the imitation Batmobile, which then spins around and speeds away. The punch line? The slighted villain whimpers, “I said ‘life,’ not ‘wife.’”

In a Dodge spot that also ran Sunday, a series of men with glazed over, submissive eyes, say things like “I will take your call,” “I will listen to your opinion of your friends,” “I will put the seat down.” But being put upon by their women can’t keep the men from making their “last stand” and driving cars they wants to drive. The ads end with a shot of a speeding car on a lonely highway. Apparently, there is only one kind of legitimate masculinity—the kind for which fast cars are metonymic—and women are its natural foils. That Super Bowl Sunday would arrive hand-in-hand with advertisement misogyny shouldn’t have surprised me, but, still, I expect more gender nuance even from my commercials.

In 2001, artist Joe Sola put himself at the mercy of a high school football team when he made the film Saint Henry Composition (2001). Included in LACMA’s 2008 exhibition Hard Targets, the film showed Sola, wearing no gear, being tackled by well equipped award winning football players. It was a weirdly contradictory performance—on the one hand, Sola had taken on an impossible task (success would have been supernaturally heroic, an alpha male triumph); on the other hand, his failure made him looked foolish, like he lacked a certain intuitive knowledge of sport that real guys should have.

Sola’s soon-to-close exhibition at Happy Lion Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, called I found some Bic pens by the railroad tracks, takes gender into a more whimsical but still confrontational arena. It includes a lighthearted collection of self-referential watercolors, a brutally funny video pitting a [male] artists against a [male] collector, and, on January 30th, it also included a performance by Sola and collaborator Michael Webster. The performers—though it was mainly Sola that we watched, while Webster sat behind the piano and provided a perfectly timed soundtrack—wore red and yellow striped vests and black pants that made them look like circus performers. Their slapstick personae were reminiscent of a Charlie Chaplin-Marx Brothers’ hybrid, totally masculine but mocking of masculinity at the same time. Sola had typical junk food, glitter, feathers, and some explosives hidden inside a top hat that had been affixed to a table top (there was no attempt to maintain an illusion as Sola reached through the hat to pull out his props). He also had a blow torch, and the night consisted of dancing;  the placing of containers, filled with milk, cheerios, glitter, and the like, on precarious platforms around the gallery; and periodic explosions.

Toward the end of the performance, Sola set us up to expect something big. He’d built a contraption out of carboard, feathers, and glue that looked like a miniature horse. And he’d pulled out the blow torch, wordlessly warning people in the front row to don the protective glasses he’d passed out. In preparing for the big explosion, Sola accidentally slipped onto the floor, and he stayed down, waiting for an eruption that never happened. Then, like an injured and disgraced warrior, he pulled himself along the floor with his arms, stopping under each platform, letting bowls of milk and cheerios that had been placed on precarious platforms around the gallery fall on his head. By the end of the evening, his pants were collages of feathers, glitter and food, glued together with milk. This was as rewarding a game as any Super Bowl I’ve ever watched, because it showed how much the failure to perform could hurt, but it also showed failure to be an inevitable part of performing gender or anything else.

Note: Images from Webster’s and Sola’s Happy Lion Gallery performance are not yet available. The above images depict a 2008 performance at the Hammer Museum, called Bananas at the Hammer.

Currently on view at The Company in Los Angeles is Predicting the Present—a solo presentation of work by Tacoma, Washington-based Elias Hansen. Showing concurrently at The Company with a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist, Adam Janes, Hansen approaches his chosen artistic medium of glass in much the same way as Janes does his wax, due to “a shared interest in the alchemic conversions in sculpture,” as the gallery notes, meaning that “both artists engage the process of altering solids into liquids and back into solids by their respective glassblowing and candle making.” Hansen’s work is made up of various reassembled pieces of discarded furniture and other items, which he has then attached hand-blown glass circles to. These convex windows—whether attached to furniture or the gallery wall—allow the viewer to peer into a sort of proverbial rabbit hole, wherein the other side reveals an aged-looking photograph taken by Hansen of a rundown house or vehicle. With titles like Just because you’re careful with your meth lab, doesn’t mean your house won’t burn down because of bad wiring and “Blame your son,” he said, slamming the door on his way out to the truck, the pieces recall disturbing narratives from the supposed lives of each item. It’s as if these are the dialogues you might hear whispered up from a desk in passing at a flea market or yard sale, if it could speak.

Elias Hansen studied glass at the New Orleans School of Glass and Print in New Orleans, LA and printmaking and bookarts at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows, including Kodiak at Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Wood at Maccarone, New York, NY; Sack of Bones at Peres Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Suddenly: Where We Live Now at Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; Kultur der Angst at Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany; and more. He was the artist in residence at Tacoma Museum of Glass in 2007 and 2008, and his work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Seattle Weekly, Seattle P.I. and elsewhere.

Marc Horowitz, a self-described “maximalist,” has permeated American culture with his socially-oriented projects and playful enterprises. His work includes video, drawing, cultural experiments, and the dynamic use of networks like twitter and youtube. In 2004, while working as a photo assistant for Crate & Barrel, Horowitz wrote “Dinner w/ Marc 510-872-7326″ on a dry erase board that was included in their fall catalog. He received over 30,000 requests for dinner dates, and began driving around the country to dine with people. The National Dinner Tour garnered attention from numerous press outlets; Horowitz appeared on The Today Show and was named one of People Magazine’s 50 Hottest Bachelors in June 2005.

In 2009, Horowitz embarked on The Marc Horowitz Signature Series, for which he signed his name on a map of the United States and drove that route, stopping at 19 towns along the way. He documented these adventures in short webisodes. In Nampa, Idaho, Horowitz established the first Anonymous Semi-Nudist Colony (complete with complimentary jean shorts and ski masks). In Battle Mountain, Nevada, he pitched an idea to local politicians that involved changing the name of the town to something less pugnacious, suggesting the gentler alternative “Tender Pie Hill.” Other notable projects include Google Maps Road Trip and Talkshow 247.

In December 2009, Horowitz participated in a panel discussion as part of Art Basel Miami Beach’s Video Art Program, “Video Art and Mainstream Distribution,” curated by New York’s Creative Time. Short films from The Marc Horowitz Signature Series were shown prior to the discussion. DailyServing’s Rebekah Drysdale was able to ask him a few questions about his past projects and future pursuits during an interview conducted over Skype in December.

Rebekah Drysdale:  At your discussion in Miami, you mentioned you studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute after leaving the business world. Do you think the tools you are using now, such as YouTube and Google maps, are the new media for this generation of artists?

Marc Horowitz: I think so. Painting and drawing will never die, obviously, but with the advent of the internet and the accessibility of video and broadcasting, I think that there is going to be such an insurgence of artists using these media.

RD: Your work engages the public, but seems very personal as well. What is the most influential encounter you have had in the making of your films?

MH: Omigod, there are so many of them!

RD: Can you pick one or two?

MH: The most memorable project is probably one you have never seen before. It was one I did while at the Art Institute, called Free Ideas. I went down to the corner of Market and Powell streets in San Francisco, where they turn the cable car. There are all kinds of tourists and homeless people there, the Seven Galaxies guy, preaching about the end of the world, religious people, preaching about God, and then there was me. I had two blank white sandwich boards that I made. I was handing out blank sheets of paper saying “free ideas.” People were confused. Most of the business people didn’t want to deal with me. One guy came up to me and said I was doing God’s work, for whatever reason. Several tourists thought that I was always there and wanted to have their pictures taken with me. Homeless people wanted me to write letters to their family members, so we would, and when we were done, they wouldn’t have their address. Kids wanted to have paper airplane throwing contests. I honestly think that project was what got me started in most everything I’m doing now.

RD: How did Free Ideas influence your later works?

MH: It was just taking such a simple idea as a blank sheet of paper and putting yourself out there in the world with that one element and then seeing what happens. I think that notion informed a lot of my projects after that. The Dinner Tour is the simple idea of dinner, at its least common denominator. Driving your signature across the United States is just a signature, something we use everyday. The Google Maps Road Trip was me and my friend wanting to take a simple road trip together, but not having the time or money, so we had to do it virtually.

RD: Tell me more about the experience and execution of the Google Maps Road Trip.

MH: The Google Maps Road Trip was a fascinating way of seeing America. It was also a really great way to get to know Peter (Baldes). In 2003, he e-mailed me saying I should have a blog. I had no idea who he was and why he was contacting me. Nevertheless, I immediately called him up because he put his phone number in the e-mail. We talked for a bit and he seemed nice enough, so we loosely kept in touch. I didn’t actually meet Peter in person until last year at a friend’s wedding. So all in all, we had only spent about twelve hours together in-real-life before we executed GMRT, and then we shared 40+ hours together “driving” across the country virtually. For me, it was like the Dinner Tour, except I got to know a single person, Peter, much more in depth.

The technical aspects of the project get a little complicated, but basically we left my house in LA and began driving together to Pete’s place in Richmond exclusively on Google Maps. For nine straight days, we “virtually drove” across the country by zooming in all the way on Google Maps and continuously pressing the Google Maps arrow keys eastward. We broadcast the entire experience live on googlemapsroadtrip.com. This meant that folks were able to not only see and hear us as we traveled, but also join us in a real-time chat room. Just think of it as an invitation for someone to hop in the backseat and ride along with us for part of the adventure.

RD: It sounds like your interaction with Peter during the Google Maps Road Trip was similar to what travel buddies may experience on a real cross country road trip. Do you think virtual travel will become more popular?

MH: Google Maps Road Trip is very lo-fi and basic. I would love to see it be implemented in schools. You could have an American fourth grade class travel around Europe, and (time zones permitting) they could travel with European students. They could go back and forth and talk about the things that are local to them. With the accessibility of Flickr photos, YouTube, and Panoramio (Google’s photo program), you can see all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t otherwise see. You can even bring up peoples’ live broadcasts while you are traveling. So, yeah I definitely think it is the start of something.

RD: In terms of your creative process, it seems that projects like The National Dinner Tour or the Marc Horowitz Signature Series would require much more planning than something live like the virtual road trip. Do you prefer to work with a plan or broadcast live?

MH: The Dinner Tour involved a serious amount of logistical planning more than anything else. Getting places on time, setting up dinner dates, etc. And I had no help. It was just a one man army. But that was a not-for-broadcast type of project. It was more experiential. Then I did the Signature Series, which was highly planned. A lot of it was written. We had to have all of the props, the locations secured, etc. It was a different way of working for me, but I really enjoyed it. Through all of the planning, there was still a lot of room for chance because we were doing the project in public, and in that way it felt very improvisational, like my previous works.

After that, I did Talkshow 247, where I broadcast myself live for three months, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on talkshow247.com. This project about destroyed me. There was always a live audience chatting away, commenting on my every action. It made me feel like I constantly had to be entertaining an audience that wasn’t even physically there. I really just wanted to live my life, but it became addictive to look at the chat and see what the audience was saying, and then do things to make my life more exciting. I didn’t really like that. So, to answer the question, I would much rather do some more planned out projects in the future, like the Signature Series. That is the direction I want to head with these projects.

RD: What type of work do you show in galleries?

MH:  I had some shows in Europe that were mostly drawings and sculptures because it is really hard to sell video art. It’s almost impossible. At some point, you have to make a product if you want to make a living as an artist, which is weird, you know? I did a show in Italy, called More Better. In it, I had made a drawing on how to make a helicopter out of a disassembled brick house and GMC truck. Really futile stuff, like a remote control bearskin rug. I made a suit of armor out of kids’ shin guards that is designed for people with a fear of sharp objects who are on a budget. Also included was The Tragedy Car Series, drawings of cars dedicated to terrible moments in history. For example, The Titanic Car.  The drawings are interesting to me because I can really go way far out there, without actually having to execute these proposals. For a show I had at Nuke Gallery in Paris, I did a series called At Least You Don’t Have it This Bad. One of the drawings is a guy with circular saws for hands, and he’s trying to eat chicken McNuggets. That stuff is more fantasy-based. It’s really one big joke, they’re one liners. I like that.

RD: What are you working on now?

MH: I’m about to launch a new project called The Advice of Strangers. I’ve been working on it for about a year, but haven’t told anyone about it yet. Basically folks will be able to vote online on all my life decisions, small to large. Should I comfort the girl across from me who is crying? Do I tell my mom she should work out? Should I eat the noodle that fell on the floor that my roommate jokingly offered me? Should I start looking for a new place to live cause my landlord is an asshole? Do I move in with my girlfriend? Each decision will have a time constraint depending on the magnitude of the choice. And when the poll closes, I’ll post photo and/or video documentation of what happened as a result of the poll so people can see how their vote has effected my life.

The website for the project is www.theadviceofstrangers.com. If you are interested in participating, please check the site for the launch date.

RD: Your work certainly has a refreshingly witty appeal. Is there one last thing you would like DailyServing readers to know about you or your practice?

MH: A big component of my work is my blog, www.ineedtostopsoon.com. I am always posting fresh stuff there. Another thing that I am really into is Twitter. I’m so addicted to it. I’m using it as sort of a diary! You can follow me at www.twitter.com/marchorowitz.

Swedish painter, Sigrid Sandstrom, exhibits twelve of her newest abstract paintings at The Company in downtown Los Angeles from March 14th through April 18th. Sandstrom’s strength is revealing the paradoxical in both painting and nature. Even the artist’s preferred technique is an oxymoron–the transparent layering of opaque whites. Decision making, editing, working, and reworking are crucial elements of Sandstrom’s finished work. She purposefully leaves behind squeegee smears, paint drips, and brush marks that not only reference her process, but also signifies her work. Milky acrylic washes, often of snowcapped mountains and angular glaciers, sit underneath layers of planar geometric shapes. The polygonal shapes contrast in a variety of ways: irregular vs. regular, convex vs. concave, and rough/torn edges vs. hard/masked edges. Though the shapes are painted, they are made to look as though they are torn paper collage, textured pieces of wood, or see-through strips of masking tape. The shapes’ faux edges are yet another reference to painterly fabrication and thus, process. In her artist statement, Sandstrom mentions ” the cumulative activity of adding layer-upon-layer is the evidential aftermath of mental engagement which, in turn, insinuates and provokes the next painterly response.” By constantly juggling interactive variables, the artist explores the self-reflexive nature of decision-making and the creative process.

In 1997, Sandstrom received her B.F.A. from Academie Minerva in The Netherlands, and in 2001, an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University. She is the 2008 recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation: Painters and Sculptors Grant as well as the 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Sandstrom’s paintings are in permanent collections at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita KS; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Currently, she lives and works in Stockholm.

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

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

“Becoming a human being isn’t just something you get with your birth,” novelist Zadie Smith told Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt in 2006. “It’s an exercise and it takes your whole life.” Smith said this following the publication of On Beauty, her relentless opus in which 450 pages of identity-searching ends in disaster—slander, scandal and death, all somehow stemming from the characters’ frustrating fixation on the question, “who am I?” The better question, according to Smith, and the one art should really help us ask, is, “Do other people exist in the same way I do?”

I thought of Smith earlier this week, while viewing Joint Dialogue at Overduin and Kite. This new exhibition of old work by Lee Lozano, Stephen Kaltenbach, and Dan Graham certainly treats being human, like being an artist, as a lifelong project. But, more provocatively, it also questions whether people can exist through each other and refuse to be each other at the same time.

Curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, the exhibition looks deceptively pragmatic, with text pieces tastefully spaced on each wall of the first gallery and a series of old Artforum magazines placed on wall-mounted pedestals in the second.  But Joint Dialogue (the title, a double entendre, refers to joining together and smoking together) is actually irreverently curious and funny, and it  traces a convergence that would make even Lawrence Weschler proud: in New York in the late 1960s, Lozano, Graham, and Kaltenbach were all grappling with the difficulty of living honestly and using drugs, sexuality and money to pull others into conversations about being artists (and just being in general). In fact, the explorations of Lozano, Graham, and Kaltenbach seem so entwined that, at time, it’s easy to forget they are three distinctly different personalities who would go on to have three distinctly different legacies.

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

The psychology of Dan Graham’s Income (Outflow) Piece (1969/1973), in which Graham attempted to sell shares in himself and to become solvent by “coming on” in the right way, seems to extend into Lee Lozano’s Real Money Piece, in which she offered a jar of money to other artists, who could either contribute or extract funds at will. Lozano wryly recorded people’s reactions; some, like Brice Marden (who apparently laughed at the idea), refused to take anything; others, like Graham, took and returned money on loan.  It became a document of artists’ divergent opinions about money and its distribution. Lozano’s Dialogue Piece (1969) worked similarly (and again, Graham played a key role: “Dan Graham and I have important dialogue in that definite changes were immediately effected because of it,” Lozano wrote). She contacted, or tried to contact, art world all-stars like Robert Morris and (less successfully) Jasper Johns, simply inviting them to talk.  The openness or aversion her peers had to this idea of dialogue, coupled with the fact that Lozano made herself vulnerable in order to draw others into an undefined, possibly precarious experience, give the piece its backbone. Lozano’s diaristic descriptions, which pointedly omit the actual content of each conversation, give the piece its  charm. One of my favorites: “we discuss ‘the Revolution,’ Brice [Marden] talking almost entirely abt shitty business practices in the art world, & shitty treatment of artists by each other.“

Around the same time Lozano made her Dialogue Piece and Graham made Income (Outflow) Piece, Stephen Kaltenbach was attributing his work to others–he attributed a clock he made to Lozano–and gifting to and borrowing from the practices of his peers. His mostly steel  Time Capsules, two of which he included in Joint Dialogue and some of which he dedicated to friends or acquaintances, were often engraved with pithy instructions (one said “open before my retrospective at the Tate in London”) and gave his seemingly transient, interaction-based art a comical permanence. Like Graham and Lozano, he set himself apart by wholeheartedly engaging other people.

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles