Post American L.A.
curated by Pilar Tompkins
Artists:
Carolina Caycedo | Hugo Hopping | Ashley Hunt | Vincent Johnson | Glenn Ligon | Adrian Paci | Vincent Ramos | Chen Shaoxiong
Artist Fellow in the Project Room: Sandra de la Loza
August 1 – September 26, 2009
ABOUT POST AMERICAN L.A.
In Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 book The Post-American World, he argues that the end of U.S. economic and cultural hegemony is upon us, as the growth of countries such as China, Brazil, India and Russia will lead to a balancing out of power across the globe. While these nations stake out their territory as dominant world powers, the United States is faced with its own increasingly unstable financial climate. It seems imminent that in the struggle for influence, the U.S. will no longer find itself at the helm as director of the rest of the world, but will have to learn how to exist as a team player, equal to or trailing other nations instead of dominating them.
In preparation for this major global shift, it is critical that the plans for the community we wish to see in ten years time should be considered today. With the economy in flux and a change of political power at hand we may examine what impact such changes will have on our city, neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and social services in the coming years. By 2019, the population of Los Angeles is projected to increase by several million inhabitants (projections vary, yet they are mostly slated to be immigrants from Latin America and Asia). As it stands today, the demographics of the city already reflect transitioning populations, such as soldiers returning home from war, increasing homeless and prison populations, and new hordes of unemployed and uninsured Angelinos. How will we find our footing in a new global society without fully examining our preparedness on the local level?
The exhibition Post-American L.A. features artists that question the scope, sphere and impact of American authority, from the international stage to municipal politics. As the power of influence exercised by the United States is waning, it is critical to underscore this changing course of history with realistic reflection. Drawing from a variety of strategies, such as installations rooted in community-outreach, research based video work, conceptual text-based interrogations, works on paper, painting and sculpture, the artists in Post-American L.A. are invited to consider distinct observations, proposals and strategies for our civic and national roles. Additionally, Los Angeles-based artist Sandra de la Loza, representing the collective The Pocho Research Society, will work as an artist-in-resident during the course of the exhibition developing a series of events entitled The Revolution Will… These encounters and discussions will include individuals from diverse sectors interfacing and dialoging about topics such as environmentalism, labor and alternative economies and the future of cultural production. Resulting materials including sound recordings, video footage, photographs, collectively created drawings and maps will be incorporated into an ongoing multi-media installation, in which the artist acts as a performative archivist.
ABOUT PILAR TOMPKINS
Pilar Tompkins is curator of the Claremont Museum of Art (CMA). Recent exhibitions include Multiverse, The Passerby Museum, Vexing: Female Voice of East L.A. Punk, solo exhibitions with Zoe Crosher and Maya Schindler at CMA and L’Ottava Tavola: An Etymology of Contemporary Codes in Cortona, Italy. Additionally, she is director of the Latin American branch of the Artist Pension Trust, APT: Mexico City, a program providing long-term financial and curatorial opportunities to artists around the world. In 2006 she was a founding director and curator of the MexiCali Biennial, a bi-national art exhibition and music event transcending the socio-poitical and physical constraints of the US/Mexico border. Ms. Tompkins has held positions as director of leading contemporary galleries The Project, MC, Anna Helwing Gallery and Patricia Faure Gallery where she worked with established artists from the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia including Julie Mehretu, Aernout Mik, Paul Pfeiffer, Jose Damasceno and Mark Bradford.
ABOUT THE ARTIST FELLOW: SANDRA DE LA LOZA
Sandra de la Loza utilizes a variety of mediums such as photography, sound, printmaking, video and installation to navigate ideas and spaces. De la Loza received her B.A. in Chicano Studies at the University of California, at Berkeley and her MFA at Cal State Long Beach. She has collaborated with other artists and activists to generate artist-led spaces for practice and critical dialogue. Such efforts have resulted in community centers, conferences, art events and discussion groups including Transitorio Público (2007), From the Barrel (2006-2008), The October Surprise (2004), and Arts in Action (2000-2004). She has received grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the California Community Foundation, the Durfee Foundation and the Department of Cultural Affairs. Recent exhibits include, Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Vexing: Female Voices from East LA Punk at the Claremont Museum of Art and Puerto Vallarta: Arte Contemporaneo 2008.
The Revolution Will…
Los Angeles 2019
A Project by Sandra de la Loza and The Pocho Research Society
The Revolution Will…looks towards the not so distant future of Los Angeles, to discuss the potential of art and cultural production as generative forces in radical social transformation. Author Edward Said, theorizing about the role of creative and social disciplines in de-colonialist liberation struggles of the 20th century, asserts that art, specifically African literature, serves as a “vital, informing and invigorating counterpoint to the economic, political machinery at the material center of imperialism.” He argues that the creation of liberatory codes, archetypes, images and languages contribute to the invention of new subjectivities that could re-imagine social, economic and political systems. While revolutionary “movements” tend to be dismissed as “utopian”, within this project the concept of “revolution” is not understood statically as an actual point of arrival, but rather as a dynamic shape-shifting process that engages the imagination, critical thinking, aesthetic gestures, actions and organizational efforts.
This project will explore histories, approaches and discourses related to art and social change, by bringing together contemporary practitioners from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. During the residency, the project space will function as a studio-laboratory, workshop space, and meeting place where urbanists, community organizers, activists and cultural producers will be invited to participate in conversations, workshops and an intervention that explore these ideas through theory, dialogue and action.
A blog will serve as a “virtual scrapbook” of sorts that includes postings of photographic and video documentation, resources, reflective writings, and other research and archival materials gathered during this project.
Born 1978, London, England; lives in Isabela, Puerto Rico
Carolina Caycedo responds to the effects of global capitalism with a practice rooted in processes of communication, movement, and exchange. Her varied projects— from street actions and itinerant markets to public marches— all germinate in dialogues with communities outside of the art world, and her works invariably refer back to the culture and economy of the street. For Caycedo, the site of artistic experience extends beyond the studio or the exhibition space into the wider world in which the artist lives and moves. Additionally, she considers her audience to be not just the typical museum- or gallery-goer but anyone she may encounter in daily life. The result is an art that consists in the creation not of objects for passive aesthetic contemplation but of opportunities for cooperation and conversation among a broad array of individuals and communities.
Hugo Hopping was born in Mexico, in 1974.
In 2005, He graduated from CALARTS with a BFA. Since 2000, Hugo Hopping has worked through various strategies in contemporary art to explore definitions of social identity and politics in his work. He often employs video, photography, installation, sculpture, product design and architecture to generate systems. These systems serve as metaphors for new approaches to representation and Hopping often combines collaboration as a strong feature in his work. Hopping has generated extensive cultural programming as an educator. Currently he is based between Copenhagen and Los Angeles.
Ashley Hunt is an artist, activist and writer who engages the ideas of social movements, modes of learning and public discourse. His works include the ongoing Corrections Documentary Project (correctionsproject.com), 9 Scripts From a Nation at War, made collaboratively with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sander and David Thorne for Documenta 12 (9scripts.info), and a continuing collaboration with dance artist, Taisha Paggett. His work has been included at the Tate Modern, the 3rd Bucharest Biennial, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, and numerous community-based venues throughout the United States. Recent publications include Radical History Review (’08), Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (’08 and ’07), the Art Journal (’07), An Atlas of Radical Cartography (’07) and Rethinking Marxism (’06).
Vincent Johnson’s work is a form of sustained cultural mining that explores the depths of his subjects. His photographic works created from 2001-2007 delved into architecture as fantasy, from the vernacular architecture of Los Angeles to that found throughout the American West. He has documented several of the no longer extant commercial vernacular structures in both South Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley that came into existence during the birth of long distance family travel by car.
In 2007 he presented a fully fabricated work of sculpture – a 12 foot long six foot high replica of a 1956 Chrysler Air Raid Siren. This project developed as he was both researching and documenting a former military corridor in the San Fernando Valley that included a retired military airfield. His newest photographic works, all created in 2008 and 2009, are large-scale photographic montages, each of which confront significant cultural figures and several dramatic signal events of Cold War era Western cultural history, including Television, the launch of Sputnik, the Soviet Space program, American home-based bomb shelter program, and Vietnam. He is currently working on large-scale photomontages of the several major American political figures of 1960′s, including Martin Luther King, the Kennedy family, and Malcolm X, as well the representations of both Communism and Capitalism, Hollywood and Los Angeles and numerous related Cold War era subjects. Johnson’s photomontages can take several months to create as he captures hundreds of images from online sources, before selecting those which most well index a particular historical moment, personage or event. The creative juxtaposition and scale shifts of the individual found images is what he most relies on to develop his potent and illuminating photographic works.
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960, New York. Lives and works in New York) frequently uses appropriated texts and images in a variety of artistic media that explore issues surrounding race, sexuality, identity, representation and language. He often quotes socially and politically charged material, including excerpts from the writings of African-American writers; appropriated news photos; and title pages from 19th-century slave narratives, which he contextualizes for greater meaning and historical revelation.
Glenn Ligon’s works have been featured in: Here is Every, Four Decades of Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2009); The 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, (2008); Progress, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008) and Repicturing the Past/Picturing the Present, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007). Solo exhibitions include: Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2009); Yvon Lambert, Paris (2008); Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2007); D’Amelio Terras, New York (2001); Kunstverein Munich, Germany (2001) and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2001).
Awards and residencies include: Academy Awards in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY (2006); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, New York, NY (2003); ArtPace International Artists-in-Residence Program, San Antonio, TX (1997); Residency, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy (1994); and National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artist Fellowship, Drawing (1989).
Adrian Paci (b. 1969, Shkoder, Albania. Lives and works in Milan Italy) is an artist whose works are rooted in collective and personal experiences surrounding mass expatriation. Recent exhibitions include: 8th Baltic Biennial of Contemporary Art, National Museum Szczecin, Poland (2009); ARTLV_08, Tel Aviv Biennale, curated by Andrew Renton (2008); Center for Contemporary Art CCA, Tel Aviv, curated by Edna Mosenson (2008); Prague Biennale 3, Prague (2007); Adrian Paci, Galleria Civica di Modena, curated by Angela Vettese, Modena, Italy (2006); Perspective 147: Adrian Paci, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2005); Venice Biennial (2005); PS1, MoMa, New York (2005); Looking Awry curated by the Croatia-based collective WHW at apexart (2003); In the Gorges of the Balkans curated by René Block at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2003); New Video, New Europe curated by Hamza Walker at Tate Modern, London; and the Biennial of Sevilla, Spain, curated by Harald Szeemann (October 2004). In 2005 solo exhibitions of his work were presented at Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Vincent Ramos (b. 1973, Santa Monica, CA) received his B.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design (2002) and his M.F.A. from The California Institute of the Arts (2007). He has had solo exhibitions at Crisp London Los Angeles (2008), The Mini Wrong Gallery @ LAXART, Los Angeles (2007), Sixteen:One Gallery, Santa Monica (2005) and 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles (2002). Group exhibitions include “NY/LA: Artists from New York and Los Angeles”, GBK Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2008), “A >B: A Field Guide To Urban Commuting” FOCA, Los Angeles (2008), “Always, Already, Passe”, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise @ Passerby, New York (2004) and “London Is Balling”, The Bart Wells Institute, London (2002).
Chen Shaoxiong (b. 1962, Shantou, Guangdong Province, China. Lives and works in Guangzhou, China) engages in social critique in a variety of media including video, photography, installation and ink painting. His subjects range from issues of urbanism, terrorism, propaganda and globalization. He is a founding member of the important Contemporary Chinese artist collective, the Big Tail Elephant Group.
Chen Shaoxiong works have been featured in: Up close, far away – Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2009); 7th Gwangju Biennale – Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2008); Xijing Olympics – Universal Studios – Beijing, Beijing (2008); China Power Station:Part III – MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2008); Asia Triennial Manchester 08 – Asia Triennial Manchester, Manchester (England) (2008); Tomorrow – Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul (2007); TOMORROW NOW – when design meets science fiction – MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2007); and all about laughter – Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2007).
Recent solo exhibitions include shows at: Art & Public, Geneva (2008); Visible and invisible, Known and Unknown – Universal Studios – Beijing, Beijing (2007); Chen Shaoxiong, Barbara Gross Galerie, Munich, Germany (2007) and Double Landscape, Grace Alexander Contemporary Art Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland (2005).
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