Sunday, April 16, 2023

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.



Sunday, April 2, 2023

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.