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December 8, 2001 - January 19, 2002
For the past six years Marlene McCarty has researched, traveled to and trespassed violent crime scenes involving adolescent girls. Out of this research has grown a series of monumental figure drawings executed between 1995 and 2001. The series is entitled YOUNG AMERICANS. This will be the first exhibition of these works on the West Coast.
The YOUNG AMERICANS series is comprised of large scale drawings of young girls in the early stages of puberty whose lives have been drastically altered by violence in some way. The figures act as icons for the forces that McCarty is interested in—adolescence, sexuality, violence, and identity. Their faces are as real as possible, taken from sources of public record. Their bodies are constructed and imaginary. The figures are not presented as ‘heroes’ or as ‘victims,’ in a way that makes the viewer’s position secure and clearly defined. Instead the drawings explore a moment when early sexuality is compromised and teenage innocence is taken over by aggression.
McCarty obsessively works the drawings with ballpoint pen in the style of her own teenage attempts at self portraiture. The materials, graphite pencil and ballpoint pen, are common and base. The act of drawing with such small instruments on such a large surface creates a process of art making that is essentially durational and conceptual. Each portrait is accompanied by a text which tells each girl’s story.
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November 20, 2002 - December 11, 2002
Bas’ recent drawings are a result of his fascination with love sought by supernatural means. His interest in love spells and the perennial search for ‘the one’ combine with his attraction to mystery novels, daytime soaps and horror comics to result in sensitive dynamic drawings that are at once familiar and fantastic.
Growing up I remember how the majority of memorable ghost/horror stories had a romantic angle. Specters roaming hallways in search of lost mates, dead war widows appearing in windows waiting for husbands to return. All these stories tell a tale of loss, they’re the one’s I’m consumed by, they’re repeated over time as reminders to the living: We live for love.
We are all haunted, by the one your with, by the one’s you lost and lastly, by the idea that the ‘one’ could still be out there. With this latest series of work I’m trying to encapsulate that moment right before we take that extra leap, the seconds before the spell is cast, those final thoughts before desperation takes over completely; all the while knowing that it will.
Hernan Bas, 2002
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October 18, 2002 - November 16, 2002
"Within murky, watery settings, my recent photographs cast my own image as a group of identical boys. These works address issues of age and gender, self-love and self-hate, discipline and impulse, technology, religion and science, all within a framework of homogeneity and mass production. The aquatic environments limit the viewer’s ability to interpret the semi-artificial world on display, an underwater world in which real people could not exist for extended periods of time. Submerged in an underworld that soaks through and covers everyone and everything, muffles sound, and blurs vision, the uniformly dressed boys are reduced to anonymous, bloated figures floating in a womb-like environment."
-Anthony Goicolea
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September 7, 2002 - October 12, 2002
The exhibition will consist of paintings on panel that explore brown’s interest in the far-reaching influence of hip-hop music on youth culture. Specifically, brown’s imagery is inspired by the ‘Ganguro’, a part of Japanese and Korean youth culture that often go to extreme lengths to transform their appearance in an attempt to emulate the perceived ‘coolness’ of the musicians they admire.
brown feels, that often times the elements that seem to capture this ‘coolness’ are the same elements that often form the concepts of what signifies ‘blackness’. This desire to emulate manifests itself in various ways, from the simple act of wearing hip-hop gear to the more dramatic acts of changing their straight hair into afros, getting cornrows and even darkening their skin. brown paints these characters in the true Japanese Ukiyo-e style of the late Edo period in Tokyo, Japan to comment on these impersonators of the Far East. The art of ukiyo-e (which translates roughly as "pictures of the floating world") is closely associated with the urban pleasures of teahouses, restaurants, theater, geisha and courtesans. brown maintains the original urban sophistication of the art form but brings her own subversive spin to the figures.
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June 8, 2002 - July 20, 2002
Giersbach explores the dynamic interplay of culture and nature and the tensions inherent in manufactured and wild spaces.
The work begins from photographs taken by the artist that are digitally enhanced to convey a vision of a place where nature and artifice merge and distinctions between abstraction and realism, the factual and the fantastic, are blurred. This imagery is the inspiration for the final paintings in vivid enamel on panel. In several instances, pictures bleed off their supports and onto the walls of the gallery.
The paintings offer glimpses into a world that exists at the juncture of the exotic and the mundane. Paintings may suggest remote locals, familiar places, or evoke the internal conflicts that arise as our own wild tendencies are tamed. The force of nature as it is subsumed in culture remains constant, unruly and strong.
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April 18, 2002 - June 1, 2002
Using translucent and reflective vinyl film as her medium, Monique van Genderen creates ethereal abstractions in the form of drawings, paintings and site specific installations. Incorporating the surroundings and combining a varied palette with both geometrical and amorphic elements, van Genderen’s “wall paintings” literally animate the environment, as well as invite the viewer into the dialectic of the historical, political, and social function of works of art in our culture.
Van Genderen’s most recent work incorporates both reflective film and gradational color films. The seemingly ephemeral qualities of these materials addresses the constant revelations to the surface of the plane in painting and the inescapable influence of advanced technology on art making today.
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January 26, 2002 - March 2, 2002
Soo Kim photographs the spaces in between places and the moments between events. By focusing her camera onto our peripheral consciousness, she exposes the instants that are seemingly forgotten and passed over but that, in actuality, create our realities and memories. The act of travelling takes a central role in Kim’s photographs. As she explores dislocation, transience, desire and our notion of home, she distills travel into a series of ordinary and simple moments where location and destination are unimportant.
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