Art and Cake’s weekly art calendar has changed. Facebook was getting too tedious trying to cull through so many events each day with their new feature of adding many days to an event. We have decided to post only that weeks events and add more in depth information to help you decide where to go each week. In addition, each week will be a different contributor to keep the content fresh, relevant and edgy.
Enjoy and as always thank you for your continued support!!
(If you would like to submit an event or press release, send to artandcakela@gmail.com with a high res jpeg for publication)
This weeks Lineup contributed by Lorraine Heitzman
Tuesday, November 6
Found/Missing, curated by Curtis Stage at LA Mission College
Opening November 6th 5-8pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/2193669264256267/
Found/Missing is a Gallery Exhibition at Los Angeles Mission College in our Arts, Media, & Performance Gallery featuring the works of Los Angeles Artists: Carlos Beltran Arechiga, Rochelle Botello, Dion Johnson, Hagop Najarian and Devon Tsuno. Curated by Curtis Stage
Wednesday, November 7
Virginia Katz hosts John Millei at Eastside International / ESXLA
Wednesday November 7th 7-9pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/280906312548585/
Please join the next Art Discussion with JOHN MILLEI and me Wednesday, November 7, at 7:00 at Eastside International, 602 Moulton Avenue, Los Angeles when John will initiate discussion on: “Neither Here nor There: Painting in the Liminal Space.” John quotes a poem by Robert Creeley:
“The Measure
I cannot
move backwards
or forwards
I am caught
in the time
as measure.
What we think
of we think of-
Of no other reason
We think than
Just to think-
Each for himself.
It has been several years since the last time there was a unified set of questions driving the direction of painting. Since the end of post-modernism artists have been working in what can only be described as a period of hyper pluralism, it’s a kind of free for all of style mashups executed with reckless abandon with no signs of a unifying philosophy in site. My hope is to create a lively discussion around the upsides and pitfalls to what has become a relativist approach to painting.
John writes about his own work: Though the aperture of both painting and drawing, I navigate the question of liminality and memory as it pertains to the history of painting as well as the personal. Always blurring the boundaries between representation and abstraction looking for what can be seen or surmised in the threshold of our collective narrative histories and my all too subjective but cryptic personal sources. I am searching for a metaphor that gets close to how feelings shape both perception and meaning. What has been reviled to me through my practice is that both memory and perception are active processes which makes meaning unstable and renders the naming of things useful only so far as it can help to locate the collective verbs and nouns used by the art practitioners at the time in which the works were being made. Everything that is meaningful about the world at any given time is something we impose on the things we are viewing and making, meaning is always subject to change at a moments notice.
Truth
I have learned that truth
Is an omnipresent, omnidirectional,
Evolutionary awareness,
One of those myriadly multiplying facets
That discloses that there are no “absolutes”
-no “ends in themselves” -no “things”
-Only transitionally transformative verbing.
Buckminster Fuller”
John Millei is a self-taught artist who lives and works in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara California. John has taught both at grad and undergraduate levels at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont California. His work has been exhibited internationally with two, one-person exhibitions this year: “Something Almost Imperceptible” Galerie PCP Paris France and “Interrogations” (selected paintings) Fredric Snitzer Gallery Miami Florida USA.
The program is an open forum, roundtable discussion. The initiator opens the discussion with his or her topic and then the floor opens to discussion. Each person in attendance may be an active participant in the topic at hand. Hope you will join us!
Instagram
@johnmilleistudio
Website
Johnmilleistudio.com
Thursday, November 8
Artist talk: April Bey at Art + Practice
November 8th 7-830pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/524219761353615/
Join Art + Practice on November 8 for a talk with Bahamian raised, LA-based multidisciplinary artist and educator April Bey. Bey will discuss the ideas addressed in her “Made in Space” series, which explores female and queer afrofuturistic millennial entrepreneurialism via social media and the Internet. Blerdy in nature, juxtapositions of Star Trek and hip-hop culture also manifest in this series. Looking to the future acts as a therapeutic excretory practice in dealing with current day issues around race and discrimination globally. She will touch on the British colonization of West Africa and The Bahamas in comparison to the current Chinese colonization of black countries.
This work is a focus but is part of a generalized exploration of the actual resilience of women as they navigate through high-impact experiences of the body, psyche and demands of womanhood. There’s an ironic hypocrisy in the expectations of women and specifically black women to be sovereign and robust while at the same time inept and emotionally weak/unpredictable when leadership roles are sought.
Friday, November 9
Tomoaki Shibata and Loren Philip, Year One at Castelli Art Space, curated by Peter Frank
November 9th 6-10pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/633859513678822/
Castelli Art Space is proud to present “YEAR ONE” a collaborative exhibition between Loren Philip & Tomoaki Shibata curated by Peter Frank.
“YEAR ONE” is the public debut of a year long series of large scale collaborations between Los Angels artist Loren Philip and Tokyo’s Tomoaki Shibata.
The large scale works are presented as individual “chapters” of a twelve part abstract expressionist narrative produced together and simultaneously by the artists without verbal direction or pre-conceived concept with the only acknowledged reference point being the ancient art of Japanese story scrolls.
The exhibition opens Friday, November 9th from 6-10PM at Castelli Art Space in Los Angeles and runs through November 27th with an artist walkthrough on Sunday November 18th from 1-4pm.
https://www.castelliartspace.com/upcoming-exhibitions
A portion of all proceeds from the exhibition will go to support the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in their mission to protect and defend the oceans and sea creatures of the world. .
https://www. seashepherd.org
Saturday, November 10
Inglewood Open Studios Artists’ Reception
November 10th and 11th 12-5pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/2213713738913257/
Inglewood Open Studios enriches the community through exposure to local artists and art professionals. On both Saturday, November 10 and Sunday, November 11, 2018, artists and galleries throughout Inglewood will open their doors to the public. Visitors will be invited to personally tour private artist working spaces and enjoy art created in all media–drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media, photography, printmaking, installation, video and performance.
Some spaces will also host events such as workshops and talks, which will be listed on printed flyers with tour maps, available at all tour locations. The weekend will kickoff with an artists reception at Residency Gallery in Downtown Inglewood on Friday, November 9, 2018 from 5-8pm. Free shuttle transportation will be provided on Saturday and Sunday by Inglewood Open Studios sponsor, The City of Inglewood. Maps will be available mid October.
Download the map: http://inglewoodopenstudios.com/?fbclid=IwAR3FVZYpC4mVYee2t6MnE5fvQSgWbeY3DtsHeEzavfUVNRe_9Cc18Vux-YU
Synthetic Shorelines at Durden and Ray Gallery
Opening November 10th 7-10pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/1562593740553068/
Artists from Iceland and Los Angeles explore their relationship to self and coastal existence in Synthetic Shorelines at Durden and Ray
Curated by Freyja Eilíf of Ekkisens Art Space, Reykjavik, Iceland
Artists: Sara Björg, Dani Dodge, Lan Duong, Freyja Eilíf, David Leapman, Katrína Mogensen, Sean Noyce, Kristín Morthens, and Ty Pownall
Synthetic Shorelines are a living thought and manmade boundary between elements, where textures and forms are combined in novel mindshapes.
In this exhibition, artists from different shores—Los Angeles and Reykjavík, Iceland—meet and lead an expedition where no boundaries exist except the self in its human condition.
In our gender-conscious, emotionally-trodden world of unexplained confines, these artists create a journey that merges two different shorelines and leads the viewer further into the unknown: an oceanic bottom of subconsciousness where the otherworld takes over, where time is ripe to search for clues about our new-age-media, post-humanistic existence.
The artists exhibiting work at Synthetic Shorelines share use of abstract imagery while digging into dimensions of the self through processed-based and medium-specific art. Many of the artists share an animist spirituality through materials.
Marie Thibeault , By Water, By Fire, at Launch LA
November 10th 6-9pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/734351440268533/
Launch LA is proud to present By Water By Fire, a new exhibition of work by California artist Marie Thibeault. Thibeault examines the power of natural forces pitted against the vulnerability of architectural structures. In this ongoing conflict between man and nature, both our natural and built environments exist under the strain of environmental collapse.
Within this group of paintings, Thibeault explores the consuming qualities of fire and water, both increasingly destructive forces affecting our precarious ecosystems. Although fragmentary, such appropriated imagery expresses ongoing environmental events such as floods and wildfires. As a reference to the industrial landscape surrounding the ports of Los Angeles, the inclusion of these locations impacted by trauma or extreme transformation express themes of flux, change and environmental instability. Color is both symbolic and associative and clearly the most expressive element in the work. The paintings are the result of a sustained contest between structural references and their exposure to intense color fields, that creates both a linearity and an atmospheric presence in the work.
Ultimately, Thibeault arrives at a sense of balance and stasis, in order to allow the viewer a space in which to hold and to contemplate the intense changes taking place in the environment, and in particular, within this place in this moment in history.
Uncommon Materials, Artist walk-through with Aubrey Ingmar Manson, Garry Noland and Ann Weber at University Art Gallery, Dominguez Hills campus
Artists present November 10th 12-4pm Walkthrough at 2pm
https://ymlp.com/z4hCAx
Uncommon Materials, an exhibit opening Oct. 24 in the University Art Gallery at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), features contemporary Los Angeles artists Aubrey Ingmar Mason, Garry Noland, and Ann Weber who transform unexpected materials to create unique mixed media works. The exhibit runs through December 15, 2018.
The exhibit will include Weber’s large biomorphic sculptures created from discarded cardboard, Noland’s assemblages of found and reclaimed materials, and Ingmar Mason’s use of $0.99 store napkins to mold large scale wall sculptures reflective of feminist and political themes.
Weber’s sculptures are woven together from strips of cardboard boxes she culls from local grocery store dumpsters. Her universal forms present the viewer with a series of organic forms reminiscent of the art ofJean Arp and Louise Bourgeois.
Noland explains his combination of the old and new in his art. “Base materials, such as PVC pipe or dark foam, are combined with new materials, such as bubble wrap, marbles, paint and duct tape. The resulting combination sets up the inevitable dialogue between the new/old, purposeful/accidental, and play/toil.”
Ingmar Mason wrote that her layered and sensuous sculptures offer lush and playful femininity, yet a vein of unease running through her molded surfaces. “This anxiety shows through with the material transformation of cardboard, $0.99 store napkins, plaster and ceramic that is accumulated, preserved, battered, or fawned over. The resulting form is pillowy and can represent distorted female bodies, beds, and blankets.”
Keystone Fall Open Studio 2018, Keystone Art Space
November 10th 6-10pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/280361752816823/
Keystone artists open their studio doors wide once again and welcome you to come explore their art & process! We will have an exhibit in the gallery, plus you can wander the halls and purchase directly from the artists…just in time for the holidays!
Keystone Art Space has over 50 artist studios featuring painting, illustration, printmaking, jewelry, photography, sculpture and more.
KEYSTONE ART SPACE
338 S. Ave 16
Los Angeles, CA 90031
This event is free and open to the public. Street parking, ride-share encouraged. Light refreshments served.
Ryan Fenchel, Odd Bouquet at The Landing
November 10th 6-9pm
http://www.thelandinggallery.com/upcoming/
The Landing is pleased to present the first Los Angeles solo show for Ryan Fenchel, Odd Bouquet. Fenchel’s wondrously colored canvases feature vessels, often flower-filled, in various shapes; these urn-like forms reference traditional paintings of handled jars and vases. But, in a strong departure from the traditional, Fenchel’s vessels are anthropomorphized—some feature apparent faces in profile, as well as handles curved by what seem like human elbows. One particular vessel recurs throughout Fenchel’s paintings—a unique jar called “the adept,” which he uses as a protagonist and stand-in for himself. From painting to painting, this humanoid vessel explores various settings that reference mystic spiritual traditions, as if on a pilgrimage of exploration through a literalized landscape of esoterica.
The word “adept” comes from the Medieval Latin word “adeptus,” which means “one who has attained the secret of transmuting metals”: an alchemist. The connection between alchemy and vessels is why Fenchel uses that form as his stand-in. Fenchel’s adept is a character journeying through a landscape decorated with references to ancient mystical traditions—suns, moons, pools of water, chalices, the tree of life, figures doubled in reflective pools, triangles or pyramid shapes, disembodied eyes. A viewer feels they are present at a secret rite, an initiation, a moment of ritual—but the occasion’s details remain unclear. Fenchel told the magazine Maake that he intends his viewers to experience “a confused pleasure. I’d like them to walk away feeling drawn to the beauty of the image but unsettled by the inability to pin down what is going on. I want a viewer to enter my work feeling as if they know what they are looking at—everyone has used a vessel, it’s a familiar object—but the longer the viewer sits with the piece, the straightforward reading is upended, and the viewer is left with more questions than answers.” Elsewhere, he speaks of the intention of transitioning the “known into the unknown or mysterious.”
Fenchel creates these works by using oil stick and pastels on thin washes of paint. The resulting surface is waxy and multilayered, with the pasteled areas raised above the picture plane. His use of bright, brilliant, wondrous color—as well as his penchant for yellows, mustards, golds and flecks of metallic—bring to mind the works of Klimt, as does Fenchel’s willful flattening of the picture plane and use of heavy decorative flourishes, like floral patterns, triangles, circles, and painted areas that feel like wallpaper or fabric. At the same time, Fenchel’s spiritual subject matter references the canvases of French surrealist painter Odilon Redon, with their mythic figures, waxy surfaces, and floating, dreamlike otherworldliness—and especially Redon’s penchant for floral bouquets. Fenchel’s flowers themselves reference the Japanese practice of ikebana, where the unique, organic and off-kilter are celebrated.
Katrin Korfmann at Kopeikin Gallery
November 10th 6-8pm
https://www.kopeikingallery.com/exhibitions/katrin-korfmann1
Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to present Back Stages by Internationally recognized artist Katrin Korfmann; the artist’s fourth exhibition at the Gallery. Originally from Germany, Korfmann has been based in the Netherlands for the past 17 years and is now considered a Dutch Artist. She is best known for her intriguing birds-eye imagery, for which she has won numerous awards, residencies and commissions. The exhibition will open on Saturday, November 10th with a reception with the artist from 6:00 – 8:00 pm, with the show continuing through December 22nd.
In their newest body of work, Back Stages, Katrin Korfmann, worked in collaboration with Jens Pfeifer to document the mostly unseen world of artistic production; light to heavy manufacturing essential to the creation of artistic and culturally important objects, but where the factory could just as easily, and at the same time, be producing decorations for a restaurant. Korfmann and Pfeifer capture various busy production grounds, dye factories, welding workshops, and installation sites.
Korfmann explains the genesis of the project; “During our recent residency in China we visited several workshops where colleagues have their art works produced. We were fascinated by the process of industrial manufacturing of art and culture as opposed to the romantic notion of the lonely artist in the studio. Therefore, we became interested in places where art is manufactured; where objects, as a proof of cultural identity are materialized.” Following this idea, we photographed three workshops in China producing a wide range of art, craft and kitsch.
Korfmann’s photographs examine the photographic concepts of framing, perspective, and the social dimensions of perception. The element of time is an important determinant in her work, which is made visible by presenting different sequential incidents in a singular spatial arrangement. Korfmann’s work can be characterized by a formal level of composition, structure and spatial-temporal experience, which culminates in a visual investigation of social constructions and behavior in a communal space.
Sunday, November 11
Divided Brain at LAVA Projects
November 11th 5-8pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/255530721777493/
“Divided Brain” is an exhibition of drawings, paintings, and sculpture by 15 Los Angeles artists, updating traditions of surreal and imaginative figuration and representation.
Among these artists’ many concerns, their work converges as a balancing act between two opposing impulses: one encompassing control, detail, and skill, the other embodying an odd sense of dark, unbridled imagination. For each of them, a sense of mastery must be challenged by the presence of something feral. At the same time, this unrestrained quality must be enhanced by some element of grace. This equilibrium could be interpreted as a simultaneous depiction of what is sure and of what is uncertain—a mirror of the two hemispheres of the brain.
In his 2012 book “The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,” Iain McGilchrist points out that the brain’s left hemisphere is concerned with the known, while the right hemisphere is focused on the unknown. One is a manager, the other an explorer. It is on the threshold between the two where a psychological “feeling of meaning” occurs. Too much attention to the known world, and one becomes listless and oppressed by familiarity. Too much attention to the unknown, and chaos reigns.
The artists in the show approach this idea from diverse viewpoints. Some—like Susan Logoreci, Greg Ito, Brian Robertson, and Robyn O Neil—depict landscapes as semblances of psychic or symbolic spaces, tenuously connected to the physical world. Others, like Michael Alvarez and Wendell Gladstone, produce allegorical representations of the human figure, laced with subtle disruptions of normalcy and stable appearances. Still others, like Winnie Truong, incorporate the body into psychedelic arabesques, where hair and flesh are transformed into ornate filigree.
Many of these artists—like Jim Shaw, David Jien, Brian Cooper, and Colin Roberts—work with dreamlike imagery that veers into fantasy and myth, while retaining sublimated criticisms of our social order. Others, like Eric Beltz and Ron Rege Jr., explore idiosyncratic notions of spirituality and its complex, sometimes bizarre intersections with the secular. Still others, like Erik Frydenborg and Ben Jackel, produce sculptural objects that foreground handcraft, even as they hint at menacingly obscure technologies like hi-tech weaponry or mysterious alien devices.
In some ways, “Divided Brain” hints at our current state of political and cultural polarization. In generalized terms, good managers tend to be conservative, while good explorers tend to be liberal. This show may provide a modest symbolic pathway out of conflicts between left and right. Jonathan Haidt, in “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion” writes about how we can borrow from eastern philosophies like Hinduism and Daoism to see that within a group, or even within one’s own mind, a balance between destroyer/creator, explorer/manager, must be reached to achieve a sincere sense of purpose and direction.
Zoe Leonard: Survey at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
https://www.moca.org/exhibition/zoe-leonard-survey
New York–based artist Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) is among the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation. Over the past three decades, she has produced work in photography and sculpture that has been celebrated for its lyrical observations of daily life coupled with a rigorous, questioning attention to the politics and conditions of image making and display.
Zoe Leonard: Survey is the first large-scale overview of the artist’s work in an American museum. The exhibition looks across Leonard’s career to highlight her engagement with a range of themes, including gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. More than it focuses on any particular subject, however, Leonard’s work slowly and reflectively calibrates vision and form. Using repetition, subtle changes of perspective, and shifts of scale, Leonard draws viewers into an awareness of the meanings behind otherwise familiar images or objects. A counter-example to the speed and disposability of image culture today, Leonard’s photographs, sculptures, and installations ask the viewer to reengage with how we see.
Laura Owens, at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
https://www.moca.org/exhibition/laura-owens-2
For more than twenty years, Los Angeles–based artist Laura Owens has pioneered an innovative approach to painting that has made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her bold and experimental work challenges traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction, as well as the relationships between avant-garde art, craft, pop culture, and technology.
This mid-career survey, the most comprehensive of Owens’s work to-date, will feature approximately 60 paintings from the mid-1990s until today. The exhibition will highlight her significant strides over the past few years, showing how the early work sets the stage for gripping new paintings and installations.
Owens emerged on the Los Angeles art scene during the mid-nineties, at a time when many in the critical establishment viewed painting with skepticism. Her early canvases upended the traditions of painterly abstraction by incorporating goofy personal allusions, doodling, and common craft materials. These works often demonstrated her keen interest in how paintings function in a given room and used illusionistic techniques to extend the plane of a wall or floor directly into the space of her pictures. More recently, she has charted a dramatic transformation in her work, marshaling all of her previous interests and talents within large-scale paintings that make virtuosic use of silkscreen, computer manipulation, digital printing, and material exploration.
Doug Harvey’s Return of the Moldy Slides Show
November 11th 4-8pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/348132735732844/
Renown LA artist Doug Harvey brings exotic Moldy Slides prints to the walls of Cubist Spinoff on Sunday November 11, enhanced by a special slide show of new moldy slides with live instrumental soundtrack at 6PM sharp by Alan S. Tofighi. Entropy never looked so good, so don’t miss this event! Refreshments and yeast-derived libations will be served! This is a free event (and it’s free spirit too).