A new, regular post dedicated to awesome Art happenings in Southern California

UPCOMING OPENINGS

The Zen Effect: A Little Winter Peace

The Zen Effect: A Little Winter Peace is a transformative experience exploring sound, image, movement, and stillness. The evening, centered around the release of a collection of ambient drones by film score composer Rolfe Kent, will give attendees the opportunity to participate in an intimate performance involving classically trained instrumentalists, meditative wordplay, inspirational mind/body creative micro-workshops, and a gallery reception featuring the works of several Los Angeles artists.

Wine, beer, and snacks will be served.

This is an intimate performance – just 50 tickets available total so make sure to visit Eventbrite asap to claim your spot!

http://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-zen-effect-a-little-winter-peace-tickets-19919534865

Red carpet reception at 7:00pm
Performance begins at 8:30

Introduction:
Meditation for Embodiment – Natalie Baack
Your Weirdness is Beautiful – Sterling Powers

Performance:
Rolfe Kent – words, gincello
Craig Richey – guitar
Isaiah Gage – cello
Claire McKeown – vocals
Bebe Iontchev – movement

Artwork:
Sheli Silverio
MC Johns
Natalie Obermaier
Dana Bean
Christopher Moloney
Sterling Powers

Photography by Simple Studio

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The Zen Effect is a collection of ambient drone music for meditation, focus, anxiety relief, and creative inspiration from acclaimed film score composer Rolfe Kent. For more information, or to purchase the drones directly, please visit RolfeKent.com/TheZenEffect

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4th Year Anniversary Show

Flower Pepper

Opening: Saturday, December 19th, 6:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Exhibition: December 19th, 2015 – January 19th, 2016

Artists:
Ania Tomicka, Chelsea Gustafsson, Corrie Gregory, David Chung, Desiree Fessler, Graham Curran, Heather Nevay, Jacob van Loon, Jaclyn Alderete, Jaesun Kim, Jeong Woo-jae, Joanne Nam, KiSung Koh, Kwon Kyung-yup, Lauren Marx, Liza Corbett, Mab Graves, Mandy Cao, Matthew J. Levin, Misia Armstrong, Neal Breton, Nicole Bruckman, Paul Barnes, Phil Santos, Philip Lumbang, Sally Deng, Sean Chao, Susanne Apgar, Tim Conlon, Valerie Pobjoy

Window Installation by Amy Van Gilder and Luciano Martinez

On Saturday, December 19th, Flower Pepper Gallery is pleased to present our 4th Year Anniversary Show featuring an exciting collection of works from a diverse group of local and international artists whom we have had the immense pleasure to show throughout these past four years

We would like to take this chance to thank and celebrate our artists, collectors, and friends who have helped build the community we are so thankful for here in Old Pasadena. It is our privilege to work with artists both near and far and we look forward to many more years of showcasing some of the best art LA has to offer.

Each artist in this exhibition has been carefully selected for both their unique artistic voice and ability to translate their perspective in a way that speaks volumes to the viewer. Whether it is the doe-eyed melancholic characters of Mab Graves, the exquisitely undisturbed natural world of KiSung Koh, or the immensely relatable and humorous creatures of David Chung, each artist has something to say and uses their impeccable talent to start conversations and explore their uncharted imaginations.

For instance, Paul Barnes playfully combines imagination with his own surroundings to inspire even more mythical worlds and characters that allow us to separate ourselves from reality and be transformed through folklore and legend. On the other hand, Susanne Apgar finds inspiration through psychology and surrealism and combines the two in a flourish of highly rendered textures and hidden details that sparks our desire to look more closely.

Each artist in his or her own way has inspired us time and time again and this exhibition is yet another exciting opportunity to meet with their work face to face, to see and listen once more.

Join us for the opening reception of our 4th Year Anniversary Show on December 19th, from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm, as we celebrate the past four exhilarating years and look ahead to all that’s still to come!

Email contact@flower-pepper.com for Preview Link
Email pr@flower-pepper.com for Press Release

Flower Pepper Gallery
121 E Union Street, Pasadena, CA 91103

On-street metered parking or parking structure: Holly Street Parking Structure, 150 East Holly Street, Pasadena, CA 91103

http://www.flower-pepper.com, contact@flower-pepper.com, 626-795-1895

https://www.facebook.com/events/1527759547541874/

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Lossless Summit: Kate Parsons, White Boy Scream, Stephie’s Castle, Carmina Escobar, Pauline Lay

Sunday December 20th, 7pm

Experimental Half-Hour Presents Lossless Summit, a live multimedia night of experimental video and musical performances by artists Kate Parsons, White Boy Scream, Stephie’s Castle, Carmina Escobar, and Pauline Lay.

Kate Parsons is a video artist, videographer, and editor living in Los Angeles. She obtained her M.F.A. in Media Arts from UCLA in June of 2015. Her work has appeared on MOCA.tv, Hammer.org, MTV, FringeArts in Philadelphia, and Summer Stage in New York City. She has had the pleasure of working with musicians such as Silversun Pickups, Kid606, Dawn Richards, Daedelus, and Brainfeeder/Ninja Tune’s RYAT. On this night Kate will be doing a videowall installation in the storefront.
http://sheisanimagemaker.com/

White Boy Scream is a solo experimental-music project that dissects the operatic qualities of the voice through a series of electronic effects pedals and looping stations. Micaela Tobin aims to dismantle and ultimately, reconcile, the construct of the classically-trained soprano within the genres of noise and drone
http://www.micaelatobin.com/wbs

Stephanie Cheng Smith is a multiple-media artist, composer and violinist who often works and performs with massive textures, small motors, tactile objects, and light. She studied composition at the University of Chicago with Kotoka Suzuki and has earned an MFA in Experimental Sound Practices and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, studying with Mark Trayle, Sara Roberts, and Ulrich Krieger.
music.stephiescastle.com/

Experimental vocalist Carmina Escobar is a creative performer, interpreter of contemporary music, improviser, sound and intermedia artist from Mexico City. Her work focuses primarily on sound, the voice, the body and their interrelations to physical, social and memory spaces. She has intensely explored the capacities of her voice developing a wide range of vocal techniques that she applies not only to her performance and creative practice but also to investigate radical ideas and concepts regarding the voice.
www.carminaescobar.com

https://www.facebook.com/events/1917660821792682/

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SAVE THE DATE- JANUARY

BIRD – Art Show to benefit LA’s Audubon Center @ Debs Park

The BIRD art show will hold its opening reception on January 9, 2016, from 6 – 10pm at MuzeuMM, which is located at 4817 West Adams Blvd. in Los Angeles. The show will run until the end of January.

The Audubon center is part of a nationwide network and the one at Debs Park is Los Angeles’ “hometown” center. The BIRD art show artists and organizers hope to help keep the sanctuary open for beautiful, rare birds and to continue to provide education on these creatures.

Featured Artists:
Noah Saterstrom
Eve Wood
Lena Wolek
Joe Wolek
Anna Stump
Cherie Benner Davis
Cynthia Minet
Greg Rose
Siobhan McClure
Lena Moross
Becky Stafford
Collin Stafford
Bibi Davidson
Christian Kasperovitz
Lori Pond
Eva Ryan
Sam Smith
Malka Nedivi

40% of the proceeds will be donated to the Audubon center at Debs Park; a nature reserve and regional park in the Montecito Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Contact Name: Mishelle Moross
Phone: 323-979-3136
E-mail: mishelle@muzeumm.com
www.muzeumm.com
facebook/muzeumm

https://www.facebook.com/events/1656195334645929/

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“TEN TOP ARTISTS”, Juried by Tulsa Kinney

Coagula Curatorial presents:

“TEN TOP ARTISTS”

A Group Show, juried by Tulsa Kinney (Artillery Magazine)

Featured Artists:
Jill Emery
Annette Hassell
Reagan Lake
Jennifer Lugris
Vanessa Madrid
Kate Oltmann
Jeremie Riggleman
Same Source Photography
Michele Vavonese
Daggi Wallace

Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 9
7-11pm

Exhibit Dates:
January 9 – February 14

www.coagulacuratorial.com

https://www.facebook.com/events/989209827804254/

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Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years | George Porcari

Opening January 9th 2016 7-9pm
Exhibition runs January 9th through February 20th

Haphazard
1543 Sawtelle Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90025
T: 213.610.4110
http://www.haphazard.co/

Beginning the 9th of January, 2016, haphazard presents Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years, a new collection of photographic collage work by George Porcari. Greetings includes 24 large-scale collage works. Each collage, titled by the location and year, is comprised of a photographic image of Los Angeles organized around a blank space or “void” with similar scale and resonated by a graphic “footnote” at the bottom. These images are taken in Los Angeles between the years 1964and 2015; they are not digitally manipulated except for the bottom “footnote” which has been radically compressed to virtual non-existence. Robert Frank once said, “I leave it up to you. They don’t have an end or a beginning. They are a piece of the middle.” Like Frank’s The Americans, Porcari’s Greetings is a collection of personal meditations on the world around us while exposing the emotional rhythms of Los Angeles in the middle.

George Porcari is an artist and photographer based in Los Angeles. Born in Lima Peru, George emigrated to LA in the 60s and begun his lifelong vocation in observing, documenting and greeting his cities and his surroundings. Porcari attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena where he has also taught film and collage history classes and worked as an acquisitions librarian for many years. Porcari has exhibited widely and internationally since his very first solo show in New York back in 1988; among the most recent were solo exhibitions at Tif’s Desk in 2012 and at China Art Objects in 2010. His numerous critical essays and other writings have appeared in such places as CINEAction, NY arts, Inflatable Magazine and many others.

An exhibition catalogue is being published to commemorate the exhibition. The catalogue will include the photo¬graphic collage work from Greetings From LA and essays by George Porcari, Jorge Pardo, Sylvére Lotringer, Veronica Gonzalez Peña and Colin Blodorn.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1632114063721575/

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Dwora Fried | BIG BOX / little box

Dwora Fried
BIG BOX / little box

Opening Saturday, January 16th 6-9pm
Exhibit runs through February 19th

Los Angeles Art Association
825 N LaCienega Blvd.,
Los Angeles, CA 90069
www.laaa.org

www.dworafried.com

Dwora Fried creates tiny tableaux inside glass fronted boxes. She populates them with miniature vintage furniture, dolls, toys and fabrics from the 50’s, adding photographs, plastic ,wood, metal and paint. Her small rooms evoke what it was like to grow up as an outsider in postwar Vienna: being jewish, lesbian and a child of holocaust survivors, she learned to see everything through the prism of loss, danger and secrecy. “I inherited a sense of isolation, displacement and an appreciation for the surreal.” At first glance, the pieces seem to be colorful miniature doll house rooms; however their small size forces the viewer to get closer and share that intimate sense of alienation and solitude of the artist. Although Fried has been living in Los Angeles for over 30 years, her art is still haunted by the remembrance of her early childhood in Vienna, the whimsy and the not so imaginary dangers she experienced on a visceral level.

In addition to her small mixed media boxes, there will be a life size box that viewers will be invited to sit in and feel part of the artwork.

BIG BOX / little box will run from Jan. 16 to Feb. 19, 2016

For bio and more information please visit
www.dworafried.com

https://www.facebook.com/events/132045677162743/

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Watts

Loft at Liz’s

Opening Reception SAT. JANUARY 16, 2016
7PM – 10PM
Exhibition from 1.16.16 – 2.15.16

Features works from Charles Dickson, Cynthia White, Dale Brockman Davis, David Hammons, John Outterbridge, John Riddle, Noah Purifoy, Timothy Washington.

Curated by Stan Sanders

https://www.facebook.com/events/1746876915547112/

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Farewell Eden: Nature in a Post-Wild World

On view January 10 – April 3, 2016

Reception Sunday, February 21, 4 to 6 pm

The Sturt Haaga Gallery’s first exhibit of 2016, “Farewell, Eden” will present the works of contemporary artists who are grappling in their work with the changing nature of Nature in a human-dominated world. The exhibition is curated and presented in conjunction with “Urbanature” at Art Center College of Designs’ Williamson Gallery in Pasadena. Both exhibitions will feature works of art by contemporary artists who are seeking to divine and define the emerging new relationships between nature and the city, between nature and humankind.

The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; closed Mondays. Free with admission

https://www.descansogardens.org/calendar/farewell-eden/?date=2016-02-21

"Population Density Core" by Jennifer Gunlock — “Population Density Core” by Jennifer Gunlock

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Joshua Hagler: The Adopted

www.jausart.com

Opening Reception January 29 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm
Runs January 29 to March 6, 2016

JAUS is very pleased to present “The Adopted”, the first Los Angeles solo exhibition by artist/painter Josh Hagler. Employing a virtuosic arsenal of marks, scrapes, brushstrokes and drips characteristic of his more recent paintings, Hagler responds to Western genre films with works that transition effortlessly between figuration and abstraction from passage to passage, and piece to piece. Filmic references serve as departure points into meditations on the spiritual condition of the “Colonist,” a recurrent archetype within the artist’s oeuvre. In addition, Hagler will present a new video piece entitled “Between Winds” that follows the same conceptual thread as his paintings.

Like his mark-making strategies, Hagler utilizes a similarly diverse array of surfaces and media such as canvas, wood panels, polyester film, ink, latex, silicone, wax, plaster, and oil paint in the realization of his painted works. Quotes and situations within the films from which the artist appropriates often dictate the manner in which the paintings are conceived. For example, in a fight scene from Little Big Man, the protagonist, a Cheyenne warrior played by Dustin Hoffman, beckons to his cavalryman assailant, “Do I have to cut your throat for you to see that I’m white? Now give me something to wipe this paint off with!” Considering this line his cue, Hagler made the decision to scrape away at the surface of one of his paintings-in-progress, removing layers of paint in order get to some essential quality that resists discovery. The palette knife thus becomes an instrument to uncover hidden layers, a process the artist likens to picking at scabs or dry skin in an attempt to disclose something hidden within the work’s history both literally and figuratively.

The twelve-minute single-channel video entitled “Between Winds” collages and re-contextualizes moments from iconic western films. Hagler draws attention to parallel motifs that recur in these motion pictures, revealing underlying themes of cultural amnesia, self vs other, and what anthropological philosopher Rene Girard refers to as “conflictual mimesis” in the process.

Both Hagler’s paintings and video piece reference imagery from films in which either white characters are adopted into American Indian tribes or white actors play native roles. His work points to a post-colonial anxiety which resides within a greater cultural and societal desire for simpler and less morally ambiguous relations between ‘self’ and ‘other’ as expressed in the source material. This relationship between anxiety and desire is tempered by the artist’s own self-conscious need to reconcile historical atrocities with the often distorted and anesthetized mainstream narratives.

The Adopted is a travelling exhibition initially presented at La Sierra University’s Brandstater Gallery in Riverside, CA.

POSTS

https://www.facebook.com/events/174591436223412/

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Rebecca Campbell & Samantha Fields: Dreams of Another Time

The University Art Museum presents Dreams of Another Time, a two-person exhibition featuring the drawings, paintings, and other works of Los Angeles based artists Rebecca Campbell and Samantha Fields.

Dreams of Another Time opens with a public reception on Saturday, January 30 from 6-8pm. Also opening is the permanent collection exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Prints in Process, and the Museum & Curatorial Studies curated Frenemies: Art and Commodity.

Campbell and Fields often draw upon personal history to create familiar imagery that both comforts and unnerves. Each produces “believable” yet “not real” space in their paintings, of things viewers already “know” but are compelled to reconsider in a new fashion, as the subject of the works can seemingly be outside of the frame. Skillfully employed compositional devices—such as the lens flares and digital blurs by Fields and the superimposition by Campbell of “tape-like” palette-knife strokes upon an already meticulously painted portrait of a reclining nude−serve to alert the viewer that any act of representational composition is always already an act of artifice. And yet, through this act, other realities arising from the imagery and pigment-based technique can be released.

Also on view will be the fruits of a time-based, improvisational “call-and response” collaboration between the two in the 18-month period leading up to the exhibition. Through reciprocity and generosity, Campbell and Fields have been producing these new pieces while inspiring dialogue with one another about the nature of shared creativity.

The creative collaboration will be extended through student engagement. Between the UAM (CSU Long Beach), Fields (CSU Northridge) and Campbell (CSU Fullerton), there is access to three drawing and painting programs. In Spring 2016, there will be 15-week call-and-response coordinated between the graduate students at CSUN, CSUF, and CSULB, culminating in the exhibitions of student output on each campus.

https://www.facebook.com/events/916689315033679/

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Ongoing exhibitions

Galleries

Common Thread
Artshare LA
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/1667444296821820/

Change is the Only Constant | Linda Sue Price
TAG Gallery
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/987254374664621/

Generations: 40 Hues Between Black and White
Orange County Center for Contemporary Art
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/737237329742953/

Emily Sudd, Vanessa Y Chow and Alexandra Rose
LAM Gallery
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/735706876574120/

Chris Finley- New Work
Chimento Contemporary
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/1676401005909433/

Camilla Taylor
Bermudez Projects
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/1513236952302744/

Timothy Nolan
CB1 Gallery
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/1645906095689416/

Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia
CB1 Gallery
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/684744188329554/

Kristine Schomaker | Mirror, Mirror!
Gallery H Phantom Galleries LA
Through December 19th
https://www.facebook.com/events/919141484787709/

Good Luck Gallery
Art Moura
Through December 20th
https://www.facebook.com/events/530626217106419/

BLANK CANVAS, United Cerebral Palsy’s Annual 100% Benefit show
Washington Reid Gallery
Through December 21st
https://www.facebook.com/events/540902352731258/

Ten Year Anniversary
GAVLAK
Through December 23rd
https://www.facebook.com/events/1519649175013648/

Vignettes
Gloria Delson Contemporary Arts
Through December 26th
https://www.facebook.com/events/432186376978472/

Dani Dodge | PEELED & RAW
LA Artcore Brewery Annex
Through December 27th
https://www.facebook.com/events/757935487650054/

THE CARDBOARD ART SHOW!
Artist & Craftsman Supply in DTLA
Through December 31st
https://www.facebook.com/events/915478598530472/

Ox Pull Revisited – Cynthia Minet
Valley Performing Arts Center Gallery
Through December 31st
https://www.facebook.com/events/446976408836923/

PACIFIC DISSENT
Haphazard
Through December 31st
https://www.facebook.com/events/560130687475282/

Gregorio Escalante Gallery
Aaron Smith “In the Snuggery of Airs & Graces”
Through January 3rd
https://www.facebook.com/events/881823958582760/

Coagula
Karen Finley “Love Field”
Through January 3rd
https://www.facebook.com/events/1639767702957192/

Fiberlicious
LA Municipal Art Gallery
Through January 3rd
http://www.lamag.org/?page_id=958

GREEN
Loft at Liz’s
Through January 4th, 2016
https://www.facebook.com/events/142539332764582/

Genevieve Gaignard: Us Only
Shulamit Nazarian
Through January 7th
https://www.facebook.com/events/1503010523325914/

The OPEN SHOW
Los Angeles Art Association
Through January 8th
https://www.facebook.com/events/511127492389331/