Installation View:


curated by Micol Hebron
Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles CA
I have curated this show because I want LA to know more about the contemporary art scene in Utah - which is really fantastic! You need to meet these artists and see their work! Many of them will be at the opening, and I really hope everyone in LA will come out to meet them and check out this gorgeous body of work! --- Featuring 26 contemporary artists from Utah, West of Center has over 50 works in all media. This is a selection of both emerging and mid-career artists, intended to introduce Los Angeles to the vital and flourishing art scene in Utah. This is not the scene you might imagine, however - there are no plein-air landscapes or traditional quilts, no saccharine nature photographs or hokey, pseudo-indigenous crafts, but an array of contemporary subjects presented with vision, talent, wit, and innovation. You WILL see animals, landscapes, and even Joseph Smith-but in ways you likely didn't expect. The landscape in Utah is indeed stunning , and it's hard to avoid - whether you’re an artist or not, it just seeps into your consciousness, aesthetic, and activities. Several of the artists in West of Center address landscape: Adam Bateman's altered photographs explore the confluence of modernism and rural landscape, water usage, and our contemporary relationship with the land; Jared Latimer redefines plein air painting with observational paintings of the landscapes that he sees while touring his hometown and nearby areas via google street view; Davey Hawkins and Jan Andrews present uncanny and philosophical musings on land, body, and the personal relationship to landscape with stunning film and video sequences that recall sci-fi movies and structuralist films; Josh Winegar takes up classic notions of westward expansion, monumentality, and nostalgia in landscape photography with his stunning large format, manipulated photographs. Myranda Bair tackles the landscape through the aesthetics and language of rock climbing, merging the practicality and sublime of the outdoors with the artifice and economy of the gallery space. We've got animals too! Claire Taylor makes impeccably illustrated drawings of animals and the magical universe over which they reign; Cara Despain exercises her admirable cat whispering talents to lure live kittens to her modernist Pussy Grotto sculpture; Morganne Wakefield experiences and tracks cycles of life, commerce, and consumption in her videos and performances about work on a sheep farm with kick ass feminism that will make you jealous, and actions you could never imagine doing yourself. Mary Toscano's elegant and poetic drawings capture rural regionalism in a postmodern world. Several of the West of Center artists engage in seductive gestures of abstraction. Robert Mellor creates meticulous and multilayered paintings that are dynamic explosions of texture and space; Jason Metcalf stitches the unlikely histories of modernist abstraction and barn paintings to illuminate the role of superstition and religious lore; Laurel Hunter's drawings reduce golf courses and lawn sports to beautiful abstract compositions of line, circles, and color. Michael Ryan Handley's sculptures explore material, texture and structure to form social and psychological metaphors. Tessa Lindsey works in paint, ink, and collage to create imagery that is simultaneously narrative and abstract with Rorschachian subjectivity. Kenny Riches also fuses figuration and abstraction in his house-lath-cum-geometric abstractions and figurative portraits of his father's nostalgic past. Lenka Konopasek's paintings of disasters present a world that is aesthetically beautiful and physically traumatized. Daniel Everett's sleek photographs question the role of technology in the everyday. David Ruhlman's mystical paintings appear as alchemical rubric's to a secret world of human and animal codes. Stephanie Leitch's installation mines visceral, political, and social constructs of the body. Several other artists in the show present work about the body. Laura Decker's illustrations humorously venerate celebrity and bemoan social constructs of femininity. Alison Buck's performative videos are a tour de force of feminine strength and resolve and Amy Jorgensen's body is her subject in the documentation of a 48 hour performance. Joseph Christensen's biomorphic sculpture recalls a geode, but has uncanny allusions to the body as well. Aniko Safran's photographic self-portraits reperform the identities of historic male performance artists, and Jorge Rojas will be performing for the duration of the opening as insight to his interlocutor's psyches are revealed via tortillas.

1/6-2/5/11

Adela Leibowitz
Jared Latimer
Margaret Murphy
CJ Collins
Josh Peters
Lori Kirkbride

January 5th , 2010—hpgrp Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Emerging Contemporary American Painters, an exhibition of works by artists Adela Leibowitz, CJ Collins, Jared Latimer, Josh Peters, Lori Kirkbride and Margaret Murphy. Although all six artists work in a variety of styles, the show will focus on their paintings, proving that the medium is still relevant cultural world increasingly dominated by digital media.

Adela Leibowitz’s figurative landscapes are inspired by the artist’s memories of visits to ancient Zoroastrian fire temple sites in Persia, where purity rituals were once performed using fire and water. Obscured by fog, the unifying product of the two elements, Leibowitz frames the female figures in her scenes—some who bear animal heads, others who are completely naked—using gaping caves bearing teeth that mimic the shape of the vulva. Amongst these ethereal, spectrally anonymous female figures appear portraits of the American performance artist, rock musician and actress Kembra Pfahler, with whom Leibowitz did a photo shoot with in 2009. She is yet another addition to the cloistered, female-centric Edens that Leibowitz so successfully constructs in her otherworldly compositions.

Jared Latimer’s “Street View” series is inspired by his interest in exploring his own landscape using digital mapping technologies such as Google Street View. From the comfort of his own home, he virtually roams through the neighborhoods around him, searching for anomalies in the digitally replayed world. In Freyer House (2010), Latimer uses the digitally distorted image of the house of a fellow artist to break the line between reality and the world viewed through the lens of a camera. In Pigeon Hollow (2010), he paints a deer carcass lying on the side of a road divided by a yellow line, in an attempt to subvert the traditional, idyllic landscapes that are being painted by other artists in his neighborhood. Attracted both to the carrion and the line of the road which recalls Barnett Newman’s paintings of the sublime, Latimer combines references to figurative painting and high-modernism to create a new visual vocabulary for the digital age.

Margaret Murphy’s paintings, Couple #1, #2, #3 (2010) and Broken #1 (2010), feature broken porcelain figurines isolated on flat turquoise backgrounds. Although the figurines are throwbacks to a distant past (hey are clothed in Colonial American attire), they exist very much in the present, in a unique space frozen in the flow of history. In their isolation, they attempt to reconcile what has been fragmented—their own bodies from their original context, their missing parts—signalling the ability of objects, and perhaps the self, to persevere as time moves inexorably forward.

The color block paintings of CJ Collins, Islands of Thought (2010) and The Moon Never Gave Me Much Trouble (2010), buzz with the energy of lines converging and forming shapes by their own volition. Very much subjective, based on the artist’s internal responses to natural phenomena that she records in sketches and drawings, the paintings beckon for the viewer to ascribe their own emotional readings onto the expressionistic, vaguely figurative scenes.

Josh Peters work focuses on psychologically charged groupings of figures that mainly depict men and women living away from civilized society. His most recent paintings are inspired by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, whose two main characters—one who ruled by fear, the other by reason—struck him as being heavily parallel to the political figures in contemporary society. In Peters work, an impending sense of violence or spiritual awakening lurks just underneath the surface of the paint.

Lori Kirkbride’s heavily patterned works—Daisy (2010), Betty (2010) and Lily (2010)—are full of a great deal of joy, inspired both by the artist’s mood while creating them, and by the spectators reaction upon viewing them. Consisting mostly of painted daisies, which crowd and clump together on the canvas, the compositions have a kinetic energy. They are informed by Kirkbride’s continued fascination with the neon colors of her childhood, used in such objects as My Little Pony® and Barbie®, as well as the patterns of the textiles on her grandmother’s sundresses and furniture. By employing elements of play and experimentation, Kirkbride’s works emit a sense of real happiness that is rare to chance upon in every day life.