Tierra del Sol artists at WLAC Art Gallery THURSDAY 4/20

"Soft Geometry, Random Texts, Ninjas, Dryads, and Other Entities: New Work by Five Artists from the Tierra Del Sol Progressive Art Studios"



Curated by Doug Harvey

Thursday, April 20 - Sunday May 7

OPENING THURSDAY 4/20 6 - 8 PM
(Also Saturday 4/22 for WLAC Earth Day Fair, 11:30 - 3:30)

And subsequent Saturdays, same times with live Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hours

WLAC Fine Arts Gallery
(FAA Exhibition Space 101)
Fine Arts Complex
9000 Overland Ave
Culver City, CA 90230
https://goo.gl/maps/v6P7fTRgEVpkhASBA

Admission and parking are free.

West Los Angeles College Art Gallery is pleased to announce "Soft Geometry, Random Texts, Ninjas, Dryads, and other Entities: New Work by Five Artists from the Tierra Del Sol Progressive Art Studios" – an exhibition curated by Doug Harvey.

The Tierra del Sol Progressive Art Studios are an example of the remarkable system of progressive art studios mandated by California’s 1977 Lanterman Act, which empowers people with developmental disabilities to live a more independent lives.

Art – including studio practice, art history, criticism, education – and museum, gallery, and art fair antics – has accommodated neurodiversity throughout its long and complex histories. Programs such as the Californioa community college system’s DSPS (Disabled Student Programs and Services) have allowed the differently abled to participate in the educational end of the conventional Art World. But in many ways, Art Education has been ahead of the curve, neurodivergent-inclusive from its inception.

The artists of "Soft Geometry, Random Texts, Ninjas, Dryads, and other Entities” are all highly fluent in the language of visual art. Julia Hagen Brenner’s radiant, saturated renderings of archetypal mythological figures and luminous natural landscapes, Kevin Bermudez’s mesmerizing, indexical Ninja drawings, Jeffrey Rinsky’s brut-cubist figures (including a suite of off-season Santa Claus portraits), Manuel Guerrero undulating fields of stained-glass geometrics, and Mary Lou Dimsdale’s pulsating bands of found text – all are bodies of work that would hold their own and thensome in any contemporary art gallery.

Soft Geometry, Random Texts, Ninjas, Dryads, and Other Entities opens Thursday, April 20 2023 and continues until May 7th, open Saturdays 11:30 - 3:30 and by special arrangement.

For more info contact harveyd@wlac.edu or gallery@tierradelsol.org

Thanks to Paige Wery and Maria Jones of the Tierra del Sol Foundation/Gallery, M.A. Peers of WLAC Fine Arts, and the students of Tuesday night Painting class.

OPENING FRIDAY APR &: 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS

Doug Harvey: 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS

April 7 - April 30, 2023

AC Institute’s The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected

2825 Dewey Road Building 202, Suite 201, San Diego, 92106 (Liberty Station)

Gallery hours: Saturdays 12 - 4 PM

AC Institute’s The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected is mildly chuffed to announce the debut exhibition of Doug Harvey’s 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS, an installation of a series of two thousand and twenty small acrylic-on cardstock works completed in the year 2020.

Sheep in Wolves' Clothing is a San Diego experimental music supergroup assembled specifically for this event, and consisting of
Nathan Hubbard - percussion, drums, synth
Mathew Raker - keyboards
Dylan Lee Brown - guitar, array, mbira
Sejal Janaswamy - drums, percussion
Sidney Merritt - clarinet, Qchord, theremin, guitar


Graphically compelling, the intricate black pareidolia-inducing forms and textures recall art historical precedents from Surrealist Automatism to Chinese shanshui hua landscapes, and are intended for intimate contemplation. Collectively installed as a wall-filling grid, their combination of chaotic visual signals and precise mathematical structure conjures additional associations, including Serialism and experimental graphic narrative.

While not explicitly referencing the Trump presidency, the ongoing social upheavals surrounding racial injustice or COVID, the artist states that “it sometimes seems that all you can do in response to the hyperarticulated absurdities of contemporary society is to punch open a portal into another world with a singular post-rational gesture. Or maybe two thousand and twenty of them.”

2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS is also one of Harvey’s “reservoir” painting installations, where individual units of the piece can be replaced without affecting the overall impact of the installation. Individual paintings are therefore available for immediate cash & carry purchase at the communistic price of $20, or the whole shebang for a more capitalistic $35,000.

Following the exhibition, AC Books will publish 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, a 520 page volume containing reproductions of the entire image sequence presented as an experimental graphic narrative, in an edition of 100, with explanatory and interpretive texts.
Doug Harvey is an artist, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Best known in the Art World for his 15 year tenure as Lead Art Critic for LA Weekly, other journalism, and extensive body of catalog essays, he has maintained parallel practices as an independent curator and multimedia artist while steadfastly resisting vertical integration into the Academy, Marketplace, or any other Art World institution.
Harvey's art work ranges across painting, collage, found objects, film and video, performance, installation, publications, and sound. He received his MFA in Painting from UCLA in 1994 and has exhibited extensively, including over a dozen solo shows at artist-run LA galleries including POST, High Energy Constructs, and Jancar Gallery.

His ongoing series related to a set of found moldy 35mm slides (projected, printed, and displayed online) has been exhibited internationally and at venues throughout LA including The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Jancar Gallery, LA Valley College Art Gallery, another year in LA, and the California Museum of Photography.

Reviewing his solo debut at POST Gallery, St. Sebastian Tom Sawyer Cathy Mishima Expo 67, LA Times critic David Pagel wrote "Harvey’s art makes the most outlandish conspiracy theorist look like a stodgy logician." Art in America critic Constance Mallinson said of his October 2010 solo painting show Unsustainable at Jancar Gallery “Harvey’s work reeks of rot and decay.” On the occasion of Untidy, Harvey’s mid-career survey at LA Valley College, LA Times’ Christopher Knight commented “the raging torrent of modern media-culture is his medium, and the paintings, collages, drawings and sculpture seem to regard it as a revealing cesspool of bleak but salvageable fun.”

Founded in 2004 by Holly Crawford, the AC Institute’s mission is to advance the understanding of the arts through investigation, research, and education. It is an art think-tank fostering experimentation and critical discussion through events, exhibitions, and publishing. It supports and develops projects that explore a performative exchange across visual, sonic, verbal, and experiential disciplines, encouraging critical writing that challenges conventional expectations of meaning and objectivity, as well as the boundaries between the rational and subjective. The AC Institute is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. After almost two decades in Chelsea (NYC), they opened their West Coast facility The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected in San Diego in early 2023.

Their publishing wing AC Books fosters experimentation and critical discussion by publishing unique, design-forward, books on a variety of dynamic subject matters, particularly concerning contemporary art history, criticism, and art practice, including Doug Harvey’s 2013 ‘patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3, a collection of pre-existing texts subjected to extreme stress to make them reveal their hidden meanings, reprints of key documents in ‘patacritical history, and original artifacts generated from new research.

2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS

OPENING Friday April 7th 4 - 7 PM at the AC Institute's new West Coast facility The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected located at 2825 Dewey Road Building 202, Suite 201 in the Liberty Station art district in San Diego, 92106

Live improvisational music from SD experimental supergroup Sheep in Wolves' Clothing with Nathan Hubbard, Mathew Raker, Dylan Lee Brown, Sejal Janaswamy, and Sidney Merritt!
The show consists of two thousand and twenty very small abstract paintings completed in 2020. More info and full catalog forthcoming.

Outsider Xmas Revisited

As long as these Outsider Xmas mixes I made over the years are still online, I'll keep posting them. Volumes 1, 3 & 4 are your traditional Outsider, novelty, song-poem, celebrity, weird kid records fare, while 3 &5 are "Hip-mas" compilations, so fair warned be ye says I. Dig in. Dig. (There's a couple of youtube playlists, too, but I'll post links to those separately)

https://www.mediafire.com/file/q6o13eff0ohr2c5/Outsider_Xmas.zip/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/f50ppaaw3pdz7h7/Outsider_Xmas_2.zip/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/d5ta1cni6vdet5s/VA_-_Outsider_Xmas_3_-_Hipmas_Vol_1.zip/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/fb6jwico5dl9u6b/Outsider_Xmas_4.zip/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/xter68flxuunzc8/Outsider_Xmas_5_-_Hipmas_2.zip/file

UPDATE: Mediafire seems to have gone all mental, so I migrated them over to zippyshare. Here are new links:

Vol 1: https://www90.zippyshare.com/v/gWSwwXsL/file.html
Vol 2: https://www90.zippyshare.com/v/O3R4Srmt/file.html
Vol 3: https://www90.zippyshare.com/v/CTCQd1Hg/file.html
Vol 4: https://www90.zippyshare.com/v/z56pusKt/file.html
Vol 5: https://www90.zippyshare.com/v/7lPR2oIN/file.html

50 years ago today

 

I should probably just cross-post everything, but a lot of what used to show up here is now appearing on my LESS ART blog at https://lessart.wordpress.com/

PLEIN AIR X DESERT LIGHTHOUSE opens OCT 1

Here's the skinny on my latest curatorial project, opening this Saturday. Hope you can make it! The main show's not half bad either. Spread the word!

October 1 - November 5, 2022 

PRJCTLA, 1452 East 6th St, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Opening Reception: October 1, 3-6pm

As an augmented reality to Daniel Hawkins’ Desert Lighthouse V exhibition at PRJCT LA, the Valley Plein Air Club is pleased to offer VPAC X DLV: Plein Air Views of the Desert Lighthouse, curated by Doug Harvey. 

Founded by Jeffrey Vallance, John “Mr. Let’s Paint TV” Kilduff, Victoria Reynolds, and Paulette Humanbeing, VPAC began by reviving the radical onsite in-person practice of the Impressionist painters in the context of Los Angeles’ legendary San Fernando Valley, but soon branched out to engage a variety of Western landscapes -- including Hawkins’ lighthouse at the edge of the Mojave Desert. 

Paulette Humanbeing Nichols, Doug Paints the Lighthouse, 2022, oil on canvas panel, 16” x 20” (in situ)

VPAC X DLV will include works by the core group, plus more than a dozen VPAC associate members, emphasizing the visual beauty of the Desert Lighthouse and adding yet another layer to its complex engagement with art history.

Valley Plein Air Club:

Paulette Humanbeing, John Kilduff, Victoria Reynolds, Jeffrey Vallance,

with
Jenn Berger   Jimmy Chertkow   Nancy Evans   Jeff Gillette   Daniel Greene   Katie Grip   Doug Harvey   Daniel Hawkins   Tim Hawkinson   Marjan Hormozi   Kelsey Kuykendall   Lorenzo Osterheim   Rick Potts   Dave Shulman   Lily Simonson   Young Summers   The Dark Bob   Alan Tofighi   Scotty Vera   Patty Wickman   HK Zamani

For more information about Daniel Hawkins' DLV exhibition, visit here and read this. For information on the concurrent exhibition of Val Kilmer's paintings, go there.

Men Weeping While Sniffing A Flower Series

 As seen, possibly at WLAC Gallery: 

MWWSAF: Tel Asmar FFFF

MWWSAF: Paul Stanley

MWWSAF: Narcissus

MWWSAF: Mumia

MWWSAF: Caliban

MWWSAF: Ike

My Star Trek Coloring Book Has Arrived!

 

Kirlian photograph of a whippet aura (subject Chloe) Santa Fe, NM, Oct 2021

 

HAVE YOU SEEN ME? (FLOWERMAN)

 New set of paintings in a rickety gif:

Have You Seen Me? (Flowerman) # 1 - 10, 2021, rubberized aerosol paint and india ink on paper, 24 X 18 ins. 

Last week of Online Moldy Slide Exhibit!

Another Year in LA Presents:

Doug Harvey

Moldy Slides: Romantic Landscapes Rearranged

July 1 - August 31, 2021

Roman Placenta Disc, 2021

Dedicated to Stuart Spence and Diana Zlotnick

Doug Harvey's Moldy Slides project began with a chance discovery of a cache of discarded amateur photographic transparencies dating to the 1970s in the piles of material being disposed of during an apparent hoarder intervention. The slides had been subjected to flooding and grown various types and degrees of fungal layers, altering the pictorial content of the emulsion -- sometimes slightly, sometimes transforming the image into a total abstraction. Harvey describes the resulting (washed and stabilized) artifacts as " a stochastically linked collaboration between the original vacation photographer, crazy hoarder dude, the mold, and me – plus the found and improvised soundtrack elements, and finally the audience."

The once personal narrative contained in the travel photographs had been altered, obscured and even destroyed by the natural processes of decay and the ravages of time in a manner analogous to the effects of memory loss. Harvey performs an act of détournement by transforming this pile of refuse back into a commentary on cultural amnesia and decay by using the apparatus originally intended for nostalgia.

In its performance iteration Harvey projects a curated sequence of 150 images in a slideshow accompanied by live improvisational noise music, taking on what art critic Shana Nys Dambrot called "a conceptual/semantic level, introducing issues of authorship, truth, transcendence, intention, control, chaos, narrative, meaning, and analog physicality" in a "larger conversation about photography in the digital era."

The original live Moldy Slide Show was projected at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Hammer Museum, UCLA, The Echo Park Film Center, and several other West Coast venues. A selection from that group were reproduced and exhibited in London through the Strange Attractor Journal, where they were hailed by cultural commentator Adam Harper (and subsequently by WIRE Magazine) as a visual counterpart to the "hauntological" music of The Caretaker, William Basinski, Indignant Senility, and others -- invoking the philosophical spirits of Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher.

Just prior to COVID, Harvey was engaged in a revival of the project, with several performances of a live show with a new selection of moldy slides and a solo exhibit at the California Museum of Photography, consisting of an edition made with an an anachronistic printing techniques in collaboration with The ƒ/Ø Project. Romantic Landscapes Rearranged picks up where The Erinnerungen an Verlassene Zukünfte Suite left off, wandering the ruins, forests and moors in a

Critic Lights a Way

 

Critic Lights a Way, 2020, dry transfer lettering (Letraset etc.), rubber stamps, collage, shoe polish on paper, 100 X 48 ins.

Critic Lights a Way is part of a set of recent bodies of work done in black & white (including Flash Fudd Black Box, 2020 Abstract Black Paintings, and other sub-series) that began hmmm… somewhere around late 2016!

CLaW is itself part of a series of similarly scaled painting/collages, but is different in the fact that it incorporates no painting, and was conceived and executed specifically for Khang Nguyen’s “5 Facets of Humanity: Intra-human, Meta-human, Post-human, Supra-human, Trans-human”

I read Khang’s explication of the philosophical underpinnings of his curatorial practice with great interest, percolated on them for a while, and was rewarded with an irresistible image of a figure, defined entirely by five dense and variegated fields of hermetic background data.

It is a self-portrait, consisting of a tracing of the outline of my body - lying flat on the floor - onto the paper. This was initially in the rough pose of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, with the intention of breaking the negative space into five sections corresponding to Khang’s facets. But I obviously revised it.

On the one hand, this plan was a little programmatic for my tastes -- improvisation keeps me awake -- and I had a second, irresistible hypnagogic vision, of the piece as it is now, more or less.

This version, while going all Mandelbrot on the facets, is also a direct homage to an oil painting by my wife, M.A. Peers, entitled Found Yuppie in Bear, 2008 (and by extension to Duchamp’s Etant Donnes and that dude on the inside of Led Zeppelin IV), which in turn was based on a radium-infused baby’s room serigraph of a bear cub tipoe-ing upstairs holding a candle.

In order to revise the figure along these lines, I deliberately repositioned and retraced my outline on my own (M.A. helped on the first version), producing an awkward and distorted figure, that nevertheless enacts an archetypal “Excelsior!”-type gesture.

Back from the Dead and Bigger Than Ever!

I can't believe it's been a full year since I posted here - but it has been quite a year! My lapse coincided with the recommencement of the school year, no duh, which took the concept of adjunct exploitation to new and unimaginable heights. Then there was that whole election thing. Plus I jump-started my "critical writing" blog LESS ART, which is where you'll find a lot of stuff that you normally would have found here.

But not everything -- I don't really post any of my actual art over there, or historical materials such as this recently unearthed photograph of the artist as a young writer (age 4? 5?) Anyhoo, I'm gong to try and post more stuff here, even if it's just random images, and maybe backdate some of what I've been up to since last August!

 

First time in the show ring, with Nessa at Lompoc

 

Archive: Return to Your Cells, 2018

Join the Mitochondrial Revolution! Unleash the Power of the Mysterious Krebs Cycle!

Return to Your Cells, ink on sketchbook page, 2018, 11 X 9 ins

Further reading:

Archive: Watchwork Ectoplasms, 1998

Enamel on paper with watchworks. I think there were about a dozen of these, give or take. I found a box of old dead watches on the street. Not really old, and not all dead. But old enough to have moving metal parts. Each ectoplasm contained all the bits from a single watch that I could take apart with a tiny screwdriver and exacto knife.

It's so obvious when you look at it this way...

 

Soviet Algorithms Gone Wild!

I've been locked out of Facebook for 24 hours because I've offended the algorithm again (the first time was when I posted a topless image of Sacheen Littlefeather)!

The craziest thing is that the link was to this video of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy (out of Lubbock, of Paralyzed fame) singing quite innocuously - if idiosyncratically - about Pahrump, NV!

...which was posted as an oblique rebuke to Kid Rock, who misspelled the city's name in his official Cowboy video from 1999, as seen below:

How is this Bullying or Harassment, I ask you! What are they trying to hide?! Why do they hate the Ledge?! America is waiting...

Oh yes, now this:

Archive: "Radial" 1986

Found postcard, plastic bag, plastic tape, sketchbook page, 9 X 5 ins

FB exchange: 

Will Amato: What was that when you made it? A formal exercise? Were there “ideas” of some sort accompanying it? I’m just curious. I was talking about your work - these early pieces of yours - to a friend of mine the other day and didn’t know how to explain them exactly other than they were “notions” you were putting down - like quick thoughts captured on the page.

DH: Long time ago - but yeah, spontaneously diaristic as ever. I knew that the tape would yellow, and the plastic was a sort of sad "archival" gesture, like it was a piece of forensic evidence I was obliged to attempt to preserve. I thought it was funny that some one would print postcards with a solitary car wheel- which appealed to my taste for Pop - but I was immersed in Jung in those days, and would have simultaneously seen it as a mandala archetype. Oh and yes, a formal exercise! Sorry you asked?

WA: Not at all. “Strangely enough” - if you know what I mean - I just posted a link about Jung and active imagination just before I read this.

DH: Mere coincidence! Keep your black tide of occultism in the high desert where it belongs!

Archive: When Danny Dosed Ronnie, 2013

Ink on paper, sketchbook page, 11 X 9 ins (documenting the first meeting of Daniel Hawkins and Veronica Lajambe, when V was convinced he'd snuck some crack into the herbal cigarette we were sharing)

Archive: "Burn in Hell" 2018

Ink and collage on notebook back cover

 

Somebody's gotta!

 Screen grabs from a home movie in the Prelinger Archives:

Archive: Space Baby (1999/2006)

Sculptural installation with painted found dolly blank, found aquarium, blue water, as seen in "space juice" Nov - Dec 2006 at INMO Gallery on Fifth Street. 1999 version was in a bathtub at the Farmer's Daughter during one of the pop-up One Night Stand shows.

Archive: Man Weeping as He Sniffs a Flower, 2017

Ink on sketchbook paper, 11 X 9" - part of the rather extensive Man Weeping as He Sniffs a Flower series.

Archive: Amanita Comet Entity, 1992

Collaged metal and cloth and spraypaint, sketchbook page, 10 X 7 ins - AKA Peter Comet-tail (for Gogo Godot)

Archive: Numbers/No Numbers, 2018

Collage and ink on paper, sketchbook pages

Archive: Diamond Tongue Surprise, graphite & ink on paper, sketchbook page, 2018

Young Love/Shooting Stars, collaged sketchbook pages, 1993

Beyond the Numbered Band a Silence Develops for Every Style

I once made myself a tee shirt with that catchy slogan - it's from Leonard Cohen's poem Style from his 1964 book Flowers for Hitler, and I've cued it up for you here, and pasted the whole poem ATJ:

The Old King, 2019, acrylic on construction paper

 

CCCP-SCC Report: Sextette

The CCCP-SCC Symposium Group spent the 4th of July reviewing Mae West's 1978 movie "Sextette" which delivered a sort of Ed Wood-pushes- Russ Meyer-down-the-stairs bedroom farce with an unintelligibility factor of 8.5!

The "plot" however, does have a curious timeliness as regards the antics of Jeffrey Epstein's recently incarcerated moll Ghislaine Maxwell - the film concludes SPOILER ALERT! with West's using the cassette-full of sex dirt she has on all the cranky global politicians to leverage world peace! A motion was entered to acknowledge that this may be or may have been Maxwell's secret agenda, but the vote was inconclusive.

"Sextette" was West's last movie, as well as Walter Pidgeon's and Keith Moon's, and features this jaw-dropping duet between the 84-year old West and future 007 Timothy Dalton:

                      

"When I see you floatin' down the gutter I'll give you uh bottle uh wine."

Deflated Patriot, Shadow Hills CA, July 2020 "I’ve fallen," commented Dan Chapman on Facebook, "And I can’t get up!" All healing vibrations to the United States of America!