Window Dressing 2020
Badly Licked Bear
CASSANDRA
Jan 27 – Feb 7, 2020
A dialogue between two prophets, concerning that which has all happened before and
will all happen again. Art consumes life and life consumes art, and it's ouroboroi
all the way down, snake-tongues licking our ears with whispers that are heard, spoken,
and, and as tragedy and then farce, willfully ignored. What does a Bear want -- for
ears, eyes, tongues, noses, and skin, curious and open. Badly Licked Bear is, literally,
an animal, and, fictively, not as ursine as desires spoken. Their work has been and
will be shown, "Where you find it" as the song goes, like "beauty"
Molly Schulman
THIS IS NOT A BALLOON DOG
(CECI N’EST PAS UN CHIEN BALLON)
Feb 10 – Feb 21, 2020
Molly Schulman’s installation, This Is Not A Balloon Dog, provokes a playful sense
of revolution against the art world’s status quo by riffing off of the work of two
highly-regarded Surrealist artists and one over-hyped commercial artist. André Breton,
in his noteworthy diatribe “Away with Miserabilism” (1956), questions a sense of safety
and complacency through a consumerist and capitalist culture that in reality masks
an individual’s dulled misery. Likewise, René Magritte, in his iconic painting “Treachery
of Images” (1929), paints a pipe along with the text “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, questioning
the oppressive conventions of language and more broadly of the bourgeoisie itself.
The art world, Schulman posits, acts as a microcosm of miserabilism with its notion
of artist as celebrity, auction sales with skyrocketing highs, and the marketing of
not just the art, but an entire line of merchandise that accompanies almost any artist
with major success. The installation will include three elements, each representing
an aspect of today’s art world, all dancing together on stage: columns (the Institution),
balloon dogs (Capitalism, as
symbolized by Jeff Koon’s record-breaking sales), and a performance (the Avant-garde).
Mimicking a fanciful shop window display, Ionic columns will be placed at varying
heights, depths, and in unexpected directions throughout the vitrine. Balloon dogs
will be strewn throughout. During the night of the opening reception, the artist will
perform in costume, blowing up and twisting more balloon dogs, and releasing them
into the space of the vitrine, where they will be set to float randomly around the
space, made active by multiple fans blowing in various
directions. The effect will resemble a dream-like snow-globe that plays with the idea
of hierarchy in the art world, blurring the lines between art and commodity, form
and function, the real and surreal. The levity of the balloon dogs floating around
the columned vitrine will spark curiosity in the passersby as they consider what it
all means and this very act of questioning one’s surroundings is the necessary antidote
to miserabilism and the true purpose of art itself.
Originally from Upstate New York, Molly received her B.A. in Studio Art from Bard College. She then drove across the country landing in Los Angeles where she continues to live and work. In 2016, Molly co-founded Maiden LA, a network of happenings that aims to dissolve hierarchies in the art world with its inclusive decentralized format. Most recently she has participated in FORUM, a 10 month residency program at the Torrance Art Museum, B-LA Connect, Other Places Art Fair, Every Woman Biennial, Kamikaze at PØST, has been featured on LA-based art podcasts What’s My Thesis and Art Traffic, and is a member of Monte Vista Projects, an artist-run collective.
Jody Zellen
THE HUMAN TOUCH
Feb 24 – Mar 6, 2020
Wherever Jody Zellen travels throughout the United States and abroad, she documents
the distinct graffiti and other wall markings she encounters. When she later views
these photographs upon her return home, she often imagines what might happen if the
graffiti could come alive and the figures and faces could become animated. To that
end, she has recently been working with augmented reality software to create animations
that extend the life of the original images. For her installation, The Human Touch,
she will install a grid of large-scale digital reproductions of her photographs. A
QR code posted nearby with instructions will allow visitors to download a free augmented
reality application that will let them view the photographs along with an overlay
of animations that bring the individual images to life.
Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist who works in many media simultaneously making
interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings,
photographs, public art, and artists' books. She employs media-generated representations
as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations. She received a BA from Wesleyan
University (1983), an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (1989) and an MPS
from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). Her site
specific interactive installations include: “The Unemployed” which debuted at Cerritos
College Art Gallery in 2009 and recently was exhibited at Los Angeles International
Airport; “News Wheel” created for Long Beach City College, 2017; “Time Jitters” a
commission for the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston,
SC, 2014 and “The Blackest Spot” created for Fringe Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 2008.
Among her numerous interactive net art projects are “Spine Sonnet,” 2011 (commissioned
by LACMA); “Lines of Life,” 2010; “Without A Trace,” 2009. Other net art projects
include “Ghost City,” 1996-present, an ever changing poetic meditation on the urban
environment; “Urban Fragments,” “Talking-
walls” and “Disembodied Voices.” Recently she has been creating mobile apps as artworks.
These projects available for free in iTunes include: “Time Jitters,” “Spine Sonnet,”
“Art Swipe,” “4 Square,” “Episodic,” “News Wheel” and “The Unemployed.” Zellen was
awarded an Artist Fellowship from the City of Santa Monica in 2011 and 2016. She is
also the recipient of a 2012 California Community Foundation Mid Career Fellowship,
a 2011 Center for Cultural Innovation Artistic Innovation Grant as well as a 2004
COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship.
Caroline Clerc
SOME FORM OR OTHER
Mar 9 – Mar 20, 2020
Caroline Clerc’s installation, Some Form or Other, uses recycled and found materials
to represent photographs as both drawings and sculptural objects. Considering and
using waste is the conceptual criteria for this work; tree branches and cardboard
packaging (former trees) function as precarious display supports for a series of recycled
landscape photographs in an effort to intersect the natural world with repurposed
packaging forming a cycle of consumption. Each sculptural form originates with a rejected
test prints, which are recut into mechanical shapes that belie the organic nature
represented in the photographs. Drawn elements trace over the underlying natural forms,
creating negative spaces the natural imagery, and juxtapose a color palette associated
with the 1980s, a decade of excess and a burgeoning conservative political backlash
and denial of the scientific consensus on climate change. Neons, metallic, pinks,
and purples point to the artificial and reference the bright colors found in commercial
packaging. Found materials combine with these manipulated photographs, activating
the entirety of the space within the vitrine with a density of both larger and smaller
sculptures and wall pieces.
Caroline Clerc is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. Her work responds
to natural environments in the production of a large-format photograph and sculpture.
Her work is first performed though an immersion in the natural environment in long
walks. Images are then digitally composited into a single photograph. Her anxious
images evoke imminent collapse and reflect a precarious relationship with environments
under perpetual threat by the effects of climate change. Her MFA is from University
of California, Santa Barbara and her work has been exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles,
nationally, and internationally. Artist residencies include Obracadobra, Mexico; Millay
Colony, New York; Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale, Norway; ‘Nature, Art and Habitat’,
Italy; Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Studies, Montana; Caetani Cultural
Centre, Canada; and the NAIRS Foundation, Switzerland. She is an Associate Professor
of Teaching, Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.
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