Painter
Carole Benzaken is a multimedia artist specializing in surreal urban settings. Most recent shows include: Contemporary, Cool, and Collected at the Mint Museum of Art in North Carolina, and Chalcographie Contemporaine at the Musee de Louvre in Paris (2007). Recent work Rush Hour (2006) was an installation at Galeries Nathalie Obadia in Paris. Six LCD screens framed in mahogany showed a series of action shots: a woman in a dark dress travels horizontally left to right, feet first, against a gray sky. She also took part in the group show Peintures/ Paintings in Berlin that same year. She received the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2004 at the Centre Pompidou at the Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne, in Paris. Her early paintings, Tulipes and Autoroute series, bear texture and color contrast that makes the images fairly leap out at the viewer. Of note are the stained glass windows she crafted for the church at Varennes-Jarcy in France. The tulip motif inserts colorful, contemporary sensuality into the ritual space: French journalist Benjamin Cherrière likened her to Marc Chagall in his web article, “Le Vitrail Contemporain/ Modern Window,” in the 2005 edition of web magazine, Banc des Savoirs/ Bank of Memories.
Interdisciplinary Artist
Writer, visual and video artist, Valérie Mréjen seeks out ways to evoke the strange emptiness behind our words through manipulation of dialogue in videos that present images from everyday life and relationships.
She is the author of three books: She wrote Mon grand-père in 1999, which she followed with the photography exhibit L’Appartement de Mon Grand-Pere in 2000; in 2001 she wrote the autobiographical novel L’agrume concerning the loneliness of love, which received the Second Novel Prize in France that year; and Eau Sauvage, written in 2004. She was asked to make a film about contemporary life in Tel Aviv and presented Pork and Milk at an art gallery there in 2002.
Valérie Mréjen presented Filmed portraits (14 memories), a series she started at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica (2001) to answer the self-posed question: how do you make someone’s portrait? She wanted to capture the surprise of the first glance, while scrutinizing this landscape we call L.A. By filming people in a context familiar to them (both indoors and outdoors), she extracted a story from the footage of their memories.
Multimedia and Digital Artist
Mixed media and digital artist Denis Brun makes avant-garde pieces concerning heroism and non-heroism that push the limits of the viewer. The video Overman was product of a collaboration through 18th Street Arts Center and EZTV (2006), and took part in the show, Hacking the Timeline: EZTV, Digilantism, and the L.A. Digital Arts Movement, presented by 18th Street Arts Center that same year. The artist cites David Lynch and Bret Easton Ellis as major influences. With an air of foreboding and mystery, Brun draws skulls in freehand on newspaper; creates intriguing digital art designs and collages meant to rattle the cage. He most recently exhibited work at Galerie Le Haut de L’Affiche in Marseilles, France.
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Plastics Artist
Plastic Technician artist, Valere Chanceaulme de Sainte Croix, handles dark subjects with levity through his “Screaming Chromatics” project that he completed in 2005 while in residency at 18th Street. Within this project, Chanceaulme investigated the culture of American gore cinema from the 1960s to 1980s, along side researching the codification instituted in the field of criminology. The findings of his research enabled him to create and deduce certain connotations relating to that certain era of film, which then furthered his project by allowing him to add various objects that enlarged the rhetorical field surrounding the “Gore” films. A French observer once noted that his work gave the viewer “strange, de-masked, or perturbing characters on a quest for dissolution or redemption.”
Video Artist
Sandy Amerio is a Parisian video artist who makes films dealing with social and economic issues. Says the artist on her website, amerio.org: “Most of my work is filmic, photographic and textual. My fields of research are wide-ranging and spring from my fascination with the signs given out by today’s society. They have to do with socio-political, economic and strategic phenomena. I constantly create aesthetic, theoretical and poetic links that reveal the deeply heterogeneous nature of our realities (documentary, fiction, re-enactment…). Resistance, disjunctions, tangles and digressions all serve a textual manipulation of reality… This is what can be seen through the magnifying and distorting filter I apply to the things of our existence and to what we commonly call the collective unconscious.” One such example is the 45-minute video entitled, Hear Me, Children- Yet- To-Be-Born (2004) which she developed during her residency at 18th Street Art Center. The film follows a man and woman in the middle of Death Valley, dressed in business attire. The film weaves together elements of the corporate storytelling world with the narrative of the creation story found in the bible. The film was co-produced by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and 18th Street Art Complex. Her latest film screening took place at the Festival de Cannes 2005. Other past works include: Surfing on (our) History (2000) situated in her family’s apartment, and Waiting Time/Romania, a collaboration with Alexis Davey both shown at the Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Art, in France.
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