Zlotnickmania 2-Nite!

Tonight is the opening of Intuitive Eye - LA Valley College's show of works from Diana Zlotnick's collection, which includes some of my work. I'll also be participating in the panel discussion. LAVC is just at the intersection of the 110 and 134 freeways.

Dennis Reed writes "A nonlinear thinker, Diana does not progress logically in even steps from one thing to the next. Rather she leaps, propelled by her inventive intuition and instinct. They have served her well. She has built a unique and enviable collection that includes early works by important artists: Andy Warhol, George Herms, Wallace Berman, and Richard Pettibone, to name but a few.

Her engagement with art is passionate and engulfing. Although she buys art from galleries, she prefers a more direct link to artists. She focuses on those whose careers are just emerging. She often visits their studios and befriends them, being among the first to buy their work. I have heard artists comment, years later, that Diana provided badly needed money and encouragement to continue working when they most needed it.

When she brings home new art, it is not placed carefully over the couch - I don't think she even owns a couch! The rooms in her house, even the bathrooms, are small exhibition spaces with rotating shows. New purchases join older works, so that a newly made piece, the paint barely dry, might hang next to vintage works acquired long ago by now veteran artists such as Andy Warhol, Edward Kienholz, or Lynn Foukles. She has been collecting since 1954, after all, when one of her first acquisitions was a John Altoon painting purchased from Walter Hopps at the now legendary Ferus Gallery. The work in this exhibition is but a small sampling of her extensive holdings."

Reception & Discussion with the Collector
7 pm, Wednesday, February 18, 2009

February 18 - March 26, 2009
Monday through Thursday
11 am until 2 pm and 6 pm until 9 pm


Images: Above: Don Bachardy, Portrait of Diana, 1982, acrylic on paper; Below:Doug Harvey, Precious Nuggets: The Happy Place, 2007, Mixed Media on found foam (Photo by Josh White)

Puppy Excursions

At the moment, Chloe's enrolled in a class which requires submission of weekly photodocumentation of her ongoing integration into the larger human social world. Above we see her shopping in For Pets Only on Hilhurst, sporting her newly purchased ultra-attractive pink raincoat - just too short enough! Portfolio, whose testosterone levels continue to surge to new heights on a daily basis, prefers more rugged leisure activities, as evidenced by this snap of him on a recent whitewater rafting trip to Arizona. Next port: Westminster!

Splitting at the Seems

Tonight, Thursday Feb 12th, is the night for LA's monthly Downtown Art Walk which this time includes the closing reception for Larry Pearsall's Beneath the Seam at the Downtown Art Center Gallery from 6 - 9 PM.

"There’s an abandoned warehouse near the heart of Ice Dirt Town, where a bald, bearded and extremely tall pedophile named Bon lords over a harem of barely teenage boys — Lapito, Alex, Day Day, Billy, Ralph, Kevin; amputees Earl (left arm), Fakebein (right arm) and Marleytom (right leg), and about a dozen others. The boys don’t seem to realize they’re being abused. In fact, the few times we see them out of their ubiquitous denim overalls — being tickled or posing for a snapshot — they remain chastely clad in shorts and socks. But the cats see all. The Applebaycats, led by Blato, creep through the broken heating ducts of the abandoned warehouse: observing, commenting and envisioning a better time. A time beyond Bon.

This is the underlying scenario for one of the most compelling exhibits of narrative-based art in recent memory, a tour de force titled “Beneath the Seams,” currently on view at the recently opened DAC Gallery on Main Street at the edge of downtown’s gallery row. Artist Larry Pearsall is soft-spoken but happy to talk about his work and the avowedly fictional world it depicts. “The cats can’t do much. Except this one called the police on Bon. He was the last one to call the police, and that’s when the police came,” recounts the artist. “Bon goes to jail. Him and Molly and Brures. And they were after Balisha and her boyfriend, Reggie.” Balisha leads a contingent of slightly older, mostly African-American teens, who seem to sometimes provide the boys’ escape from Bon’s predations — and sometimes participate in them.

It’s hard to get a clear picture about the exact chain of events, or the specific roles each character plays, because Pearsall unfolds his story in discrete achronological fragments: single-frame tableaux rendered in a flat, jagged cartoon style as acrylic paintings on paper or canvas (as well as sculptures not included in this show) that jump discontinuously between settings, times and characters. Moreover, the almost 100 works included in “Beneath the Seams” are only a fraction of the completed chapters comprising a complex epic that shows no indication of reaching completion anytime soon. Which is probably why writer/director/producer Obie Scott Wade thinks Pearsall’s work is perfect for an Adult Swim–style animated series.

“I fell in love with the notion of animating Larry’s brilliant work because he paints as if God were holding a gun to his head and he cannot tell a lie,” asserts Wade, whose résumé includes Baby Looney Tunes and a transgender version of Shazam!, called Shezow. Citing Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir, Wade believes that “if handled properly, animation is the perfect medium to deal with hypersensitive subject matter. Larry is painting a singular universe populated with fully realized characters dealing with some very grimy issues.”

Read the rest of On the Seamy Side: Larry Pearsall's Avant-Garde Graphic Narrative here

Retroactive Puppy Cuteness Megadose

Sorry for the lack of posts, been too busy battening down the hatches (it's actually raining in LA) and getting rid of art. I'll try and knock out some quick mostly photo posts to catch y'all up on important developments hereabouts. First things first, for those with a Portfolio jones, here are two shots from the cover photo shoot for his forthcoming psychedelic solo LP "Is This Real Life? Why Is This Happening to Me? Is This Gonna Be Forever?" (I also just realized that Portfolio could be seen to be inside the blue cylinder in my recent Mad Gregs post. What does this mean?) plus an array of attractive combinations of Nigel, Chloe, Portfolio, and various soft pieces of furniture. But let's start with Chloe's courageous expedition to the bowels of Baller Hardware, and the strange creatures she encountered there...








Whippet Good!

Have a Hangover

Actually the flu, and also swamped with puppies, fingerprinting, collapsing sheds, economies, and civilizations, and other distractions. Its all documented and coming here soon, but in the meantime here's my most recent LA Weekly column, on the Brewery Project wrap party...

"It’s hard to imagine this late in the game, but only a few years ago, it was possible for an enterprising and ambitious member of the art-world cognoscenti to open these storefront showrooms — known as “galleries” — to which middle-to-upper-class consumers would come and acquire decorative artifacts with their “disposable income.” Since those halcyon days, the art market has pretty much retracted into its shell, leaving only a slimy residue to mark its decade of giddy self-congratulations, and a vacuum of both qualitative (ka-ching!) criteria and exhibition opportunities.


But culture abhors a vacuum, and despite the fact that this may well be the end of The Art World as we know it, it behooves us to consider the legacy of an artist-run project space that sprang up the last time the beaux arts economy tanked. The At the Brewery Project (or AtBP) ran more or less continuously from 1997 to 2007 in the titular Lincoln Heights art colony (formerly the Pabst plant), shepherded by artist/organizer John O’Brien. Technically speaking, that specific decade coincided with the recent boom years, but the roots of AtBP lie in several of O’Brien’s earlier collaborative exhibition series created in direct response to the bottomed-out art economy of the early ’90s.

As much as the art community bemoans these periodic downturns and disparages the “myth” linking creativity and poverty, it’s an undeniable fact that when commercial enterprises and bureaucracies drop out of the picture, artists have to become more inventive and improvisational if they want to share their work with the world. L.A.’s underdocumented history of artist-run spaces didn’t begin in the ’90s, but that period saw an enormous proliferation of such venues, ranging from garages in Echo Park and Pasadena bungalows to commandeered suites of motel rooms and guerrilla shows in abandoned industrial spaces.

AtBP, which mounted more than 50 artist-curated shows in the course of its existence, is in many ways an exemplary model for such grass-roots enterprises, and “At the Brewery Project, 1993-2007: The Finale” — the sprawling, piecemeal self-homage currently occupying most of Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts — wisely forgoes an encyclopedic historical overview (although the accompanying catalog and Web site, www.atthebreweryproject.com, provide considerable chronological detail) in favor of a grand extravaganza in the spirit of the original premise."

Read the rest of Last Round: At The Brewery Project: The Finale here.

Pictured above: Rebecca Ripple's me please me (2008)

Too Much Viagra

Purse Launch's orgone seems to be all backed up in this still from the highly good new video for Safe in Sound, everybody's favorite song off the Mad Gregs' debut album Big Nun. Happily the Reichian therapist in the adjacent seat seems to be preparing to help alleviate PL's discomfort, ensuring a harmonic climax of whirlies in the end.

Art Go Boom! Ominous, Ominous.

Goddammit! My book shed has started collapsing. I guess it was only a matter of time. But my God, there's catalogs everywhere! Maybe its a suggestion that I significantly accelerate my de-cluttering agenda. Don't know how much blogging I'll get around to doing in the next few days, but hold tight - I have some wicked cute puppy pictures, a new piece in the Weekly, and a wealth of images and anecdotes from the recent Hi Good shoot - coming soon to this URL.

Dirty Dirty Ho Ho Ho

"The old elf has surfaced often in McCarthy's oeuvre, from the outrageous fecal-smearing bacchanalia of the mid-'90s Tokyo Santa (1996) and Santa Chocolate Shop (1997), to an entire series of recent sculptural works based on a Santa figure holding aloft a tree-like butt plug. This latter series culminated in Chocolate Santa (2007), McCarthy's warped take on entrepreneurship in the form of a fully functioning "Chocolate Santa with Butt Plug" factory, churning out $100 gift boxes at a rate of 1,000 a day in New York's Maccarone Gallery.

"I did the whole thing in two months," recalls McCarthy with disbelief. After refitting the gallery so that it passed the Board of Health, he made the mold, found a chocolatier, set up a company, and found people who "knew how to make this stuff." Then, he says, "I hired an ad agency and put ads in Vanity Fair and other magazines." McCarthy laughs. "It looked like success, but I always thought it would be a company that would fail financially — and it did. There was this thing in Artforum about how much money I was going to make and how I had sold out. They calculated that I was going to sell 30,000." He ended up selling around 1,600. "I have about 12,000 in storage, packed in shredded Artforums."

Around the same time, McCarthy turned his venture-capital attention to an even larger yuletide commercial failure. "Last year I tried to buy a Santa's Village by Lake Arrowhead," he says. The dilapidated village — part of a '50s-era franchise of Santa theme parks in California and Chicago — opened in the mountains just outside LA in 1955, six weeks before nearby Disneyland opened its doors. "I was planning on just treating it as a sculpture," McCarthy says. "I had plans for making films there, then operating parts of it." Although he did sneak in to take photographs, the project was never realized."



Read the rest of Santa's Little Helper (I just realized MP had put it online!) here.

Just got back from a week up near Chico on the Hi Good shoot. More to follow!

Give the Pouple What They Want

Recent polling efforts suggest that people prefer cute puppy pictures to bitter addled art criticism, so in the interests of capitulating to the lowest common denominator, I herewith proffer these two photographs: Above: first shot of Portfolio, flanked by Diesel and Phoebe Couture. Below, Portfolio attempts the Whippet Power salute in mid-gallop. Behind him, L-R are Chloe, harbinger of Death (note the scythe-like ear, and the "go into the light" effect), Diesel and Phoebe Couture. These photos were taken at Dr. Suzy's Whippet Emporium on Nov 4th.

Most Whatever of Whenever

"I have to start this listmaking thing by putting aside a few categories. First, the favorite things I’ve already written about this year for L.A. Weekly – The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s “A Trip to the Dump” bus tour; Martin Kersels’ “Heavyweight Champion” at Santa Monica Museum; Amanda Ross-Ho’s “Half of What I Say Is Meaningless” at Cherry and Martin; China Adams’ “Flights of Fancy” at Steve Turner; Peter Saul’s OCMA retrospective; Kippenberger’s “Problem Perspective” and “Allen Kaprow” at MOCA; “California Video” at the Getty, and so on (at this point I don’t want to look at art, let alone write about it, unless it rocks my world).

There’s also the favorite things I can’t write about – M.A. Peers at Rosamund Felsen Gallery because I’m hitched to the artist; the Third Annual LA Weekly Biennial “Some Paintings” at Track 16 and “Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace” at Grand Central Art Center because I curated them; Scotty Vera’s “Eat This” at Track 16 because I hooked it up; “Untidy: The Worlds of Doug Harvey” at Los Angeles Valley College because I was the subject – just being honest here; one as aesthetically evolved as myself must operate from a place beyond both false modesty and false pride alike, and anyone who says they aren’t more interested in their own work than that of others is either feeble-minded or unfit for their job.

What’s left is a mishmash of shows I’d like to have written about, books and other pop media artifacts, and other remarkable stuff that fell through the cracks.


Jeffrey Vallance’s awe-inspiring Track 16 installation honoring the 30th anniversary of the interment of grocery store–bought Blinky the Friendly Hen at the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery. The “life-size” Blinky Chapel contained dozens of artifacts from a replica fryer lying in state to elaborate reliquaries featuring bone fragments from the 1988 exhumation and forensic analysis of Blinky’s remains. Even a bad joke becomes transcendent if you keep telling it long enough, and Blinky was no bad joke. Snag the limited-edition catalog reprint, bumper sticker and Frisbee — a sound investment in these spiritually shaky times."

Read the rest of Mixed Media 2008 (except for that second paragraph) here, or ATJ

Pictured: David McDonald's UN 2008; Scottie Vera's Autobody Experience 2007; Jeffrey Vallance's Blinky Trifecta 2008

Shawsaulbrown Sausage

"Curating isn’t always as easy as it looks. It’s rare to find a group of concurrent solo projects that genuinely complement one another — just because two artists happen to use images of trees or refer to cartography or have Photoshop doesn’t necessarily mean their work will have anything more than a superficial verbal resemblance. Museums regularly stumble over this sort of literalism in spite of their long-term scheduling and art-historical resources, and commercial gallerists — with their relatively fast turnover and propensity for attention-grabbing sound bites — are particularly prone.


Which is why, when a triple whammy like the current lineup at Patrick Painter crops up, it’s worth looking a little deeper. On the surface, Jim Shaw, Peter Saul and Glenn Brown seem like an almost arbitrary selection from the gallery’s stable — artists from three distinct generations, two of whom work at opposite ends of the U.S., while the third hails from another continent altogether. L.A.-based Shaw works promiscuously across the media spectrum, from highly rendered figuration to abstract video, while recently ensconced Manhattanite Saul is strictly a painter’s painter. Londoner Brown is also an old-school painter as far as materials go, but his near-obsessive appropriationism (which landed him in legal hot water with one of the science-fiction illustrators from whom he cribbed) lies at the opposite pole from Saul’s seething pop expressionism.


Maybe appropriation is the key? “That’s not really a factor with Peter,” says Shaw, whose own works are frequently chock-a-block with obscure pop-culture references, “and I’m not exactly an appropriator in the way that Jeff Koons or Glenn are. I do occasionally utilize something that somebody else did. But not in a direct way where the appropriation is important to it. For example, I’m thinking of taking pictures of children similar to the ones in these Christian calendars — often I’ll set up a photograph that looks similar to the preexisting things that inspire me, which is a somewhat different action from Glenn.”

Read the rest of Agree to Dis here.

Images: Untitled Scribble (Magician); Wooden Heart; Real Estate Agent Going Crazy - all works 2008

See the shows at Patrick Painter through Jan 10.

A Sudden Flurry of Whippets

Apart from disassembling my show and keeping up with writing chores and waterproofing my outdoor stashes of raw Flash Fudd materials, things have been extra hectic due to the recent addition of two 12-week-old whippet puppies to our household. The whole litter turned out to be fluish and unable to keep food down, so we had to spend Monday night at Dr Suzy's nursing them back to health. Pictured are Portfolio's star turn at the All-whippet Mini-Westminster; Chloe with a biscuit (or piece of a tree or something); Nigel and Portfolio in a tableau of now-unlikely intimacy; Chloe - and then Portfolio and Chloe - this afternoon checking out the Mayberry schoolyard. Chloe's a chick with one disqualifying blue eye, Portfolio's a dude who likes to wear Chloe's pink sweater, and we support him in his lifestyle decision.

A New Spin on an Old Chestnut

I had to buy a memory card reader to finally get my video of Nic Waterman's l'il gig at the Echo Curio off my Canon Powershot, onto the computer, and finally up on youtube. But given the seasonal nature of this song -- his creepy detournee of 'My Favorite Things' performed in October at Echo Curio (partly in response to seeing 'St. Sebastian Doubting Thomas Singing Nun' - my own creepy detournee of 'My Favorite Things' included in my retrospective at LAVC- video TK), it had to be done.

Outsider Holiday Music Again

I had a request elsewhere to re-upload these compilations of unusual seasonal recodings (songpoems, celebrities, novelty, developmentally different, amateur, etc) so I thought I'd offer them here as well.

"You may order your pastels from Alaska,
Imported, as the Igloo, in review"
- Evelyn Christmas (songpoem, Vol 2 track 4)

Download Outsider XMAS Vol 1
Download Outsider XMAS Vol 2

Tracklists in Comments

As my invitation to the LA WEEKLY 30th anniversary festivities on Saturday night seems to have been lost in the mail, I wound up attending the much more exclusive Dr. Suzy All-Whippet Mini-Westminster in Agoura Hills (pictures to follow) with MA & Nige. Stopping by Echo Park on the way home, we ran across the above (from across the lake) and below (creeping up on them) depicted cluster of ragged Cacophonic Santas, the dregs of what I understand to have been a jolly debauch. Ah, 90's nostalgia. One angry, pink mohawked S'antirchrist took offense to me taking their picture, demanding "Who are you with?!" "It's OK," I said. "I'm with Nigel."

Dogs & Boy by Train to SF

I think this was in Merced. AKA negative space heaven.

Weird Hours and Moldy Slides

My solo retrospective, Untidy: The Worlds of Doug Harvey, closes next Wednesday, Nov 26th, just in time for Thanksgiving! However, many who have sought to amplify their imminent feelings of gratitude with an actual physical encounter with my parallel oeuvres have been frustrated by their assumption that the LAVC gallery operates on a typical gallery schedule. It does not. For starters it is NOT open Saturdays. Or Fridays. And Monday through Thursday they have the unusual schedule of being open between 11 AM and 2 PM, then closing until 6 PM, then reopening until 9 PM. So that's Monday - Thursday 11-2 & 6 - 9.


In related news, we've finally managed to book the LAVC art history lecture room for a screening of moldy slides, examples of which are included above and below. I've been showing a selection of these around for a few years, but I recently began working on Rhizomatic Transmission - a completely new show, which was debuted at the Museum of Jurassic Technology with a live soundtrack by Mannlicher Carcano. I recorded the improvised soundtrack and borrowed the MJT's remarkable Bell & Howell Tandem-Matic slide projector, and now that we have the room booked we're good to go!

The slides were recovered about 5 years ago from a dumpster-bound pile outside the house of our local crazy hoarder dude who had apparently suffered an intervention of some sort, as bin after bin of moldering bric-a-brac kept finding its way to the curb over a period of months. I was able to resist the broken lamps and deflated soccer balls, but when several cardboard boxes filled with 35mm vacation slides (apparently originally acquired somewhere else - crazy hoarder dude wasn't actually in any of the pictures) I ceased to resist.

After discovering the remarkable visual properties of the disintegrating emulsion, I sorted the plain from the fungal, then washed and dried about 1000 mold-altered images, and began organizing them by relative fabulousness and pictorial intelligibility (notice the car in the lower right corner of the top image? My favorite.) The result was very satisfying - a stochastically linked collaboration between the original vacation photographer, crazy hoarder dude, the mold, and me - plus the found and improvised soundtrack elements.


Rhizomatic Transmission will be projected on Tuesday November 25th at 8 PM in Room 103 of the Art Building at Los Angeles Valley College, located near the corner of Fulton Ave and Oxnard Rd, at the NW corner of the LAVC campus. The gallery will be open between 6 and 9.

Heavy Rotations

"The first body of work presented in detail here actually takes a step back from the uncanny allegorical puppetry in favor of a cooler and more art historically–precise exploration of physicality. In his photodocumentation of various acts of tripping, falling, smacking, tossing and spinning — probably his best-known work — Kersels lays out an incremental, encyclopedic examination of the paradox of performance art’s cultural afterlife in the form of reproductions in magazines and books.

It is in this once-removed form that an aspiring performance artist comes to know the lineage of their chosen medium. Kersels’ decisive-moment framing of his staged traumas dovetails neatly with Performance’s wryly self-reflexive engagement with its own compromised evidence trail, particularly through his UCLA mentor Paul McCarthy’s 1968 action Leap, a re-creation of Leap into the Void (French trickster Yves Klein’s notorious 1960 purported self-defenestration whose documentation turned out to be a faked photograph which, at the time of his performance, McCarthy had never even seen.)

Added to this house of mirrors, Kersels’ cibachrome pratfalls ought to beg the question of authenticity. In truth, their sense of immediacy and spontaneity is belied by the lengthy photo sessions and elaborate editing involved — Kersels often selecting a couple of shots from scores taken by his wife, Mary Collins. And I have to admit that when I saw his black-and-white Falling photos in 1995 — the ones where you can’t see his feet — I suspected there might be some hidden structural support propping him up. But aside from those deliberate formal ambiguities, Kersels’ work manages to convey a sense of both high theatricality and militant authenticity.

It all comes down to the body. Gifted as he is in this area, Kersels has created work hinging on physical presence and/or absence since his days with XXXL 80s performance troupe Shrimps. What comes across most clearly in “Heavyweight Champion” is the progression from the doomy, goofy isolation of his early sculptural surrogates — works like Monkey Pod, MacArthur Park and the artist’s punching-bag clown as oceanless Buoy (1997–98) — to the more recent social work, like the handmade Foley art instruments for his Orchestra for Idiots (2005), which, if not exactly optimistic, leaves the possibility open for some kind of connection."

Read the rest of The Big Frame: The Other Martin K here.

These images have been modified for greater torqueleptic Angemessenheit. The middle image is not Paul McCarthy's 1968 Leap, which was apparently undocumented, but his 1972 work Face Painting-Floor, White Line.

"Heavyweight Champion" is on view at SMMOA through Dec 13.

Day Breaks

"I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of paintings as mechanisms. I recently met the eccentric visionary artist Paul Laffoley, who insists that many of his two-dimensional mixed media works are, in fact, interactive devices capable of distorting local space-time – with a variety of effects including time travel, group telepathy, and contact with alien consciousness. Form follows function.

What really got me thinking along these lines are the recent paintings of Linda Day, whose elaborately composed 2003 digital glitchscape Pulse series I characterized at the time as “intricate stripe paintings saturated with the spectrum and perceptual idiosyncrasies of the Southern California landscape.” While these works still bear up to that reading as analogous representations of a localized sensorium, in retrospect they seem less illustrative, and more like – well, mechanisms.

Oddly enough, this interpretive shift was triggered by a reduction in the compositional complexity of the Pulse project, from the information superhighway boogie-woogie of the original 2004-2005 paintings to the striated freeze-frames of the recent Flesh and Between/Beyond series. The effect is similar to the cinematic special effect known as “Bullet Time” where a flurry of action is suddenly slowed down drastically, or frozen entirely, but the viewer’s perspective – as mediated by the camera of course – continues to move through the virtual pictorial space, allowing for careful detailed examination of events and processes that were previously only a heady blur.

Of course the key phrase there would be “as mediated by the camera,” which puts the finger on the point where these technologies of visualization diverge: at the exact juncture where the creative participation of the viewer becomes a possibility. For whatever special effects are being offered up by a painting – optical, pictorial, spatial, kinaesthetic, spiritual, what have you – depends enormously of the volition of the viewer to establish and maintain contact between the artifact in question and their own perceptual systems.


Much of Linda Day’s work is directed toward the activation of this co-creative feedback loop, and her aesthetic decisions can be traced in part to the gradual tweaking of the parameters of this relationship. The shift from the streaming grid of the first Pulse series (via passage through the architectonic Chime and Corona series) involved the disappearance of the hovering, interwoven vertical rectangular tab shapes which – while articulating the complex and ambiguous spatial characteristics of the horizontally striped “ground” – also suggested a horizontal (though not necessarily left-to-right) reading.

Although this quasi-informational signal pattern added a further layer of dimensional complexity to the already intricate and subtle effects created by the bands of luminous saturated color along which it was arrayed, it also triggered the narrative centers of the viewer’s mind as well. Hardwired (and continually conditioned) as we are to surrender ourselves to the most linear and teleological of entertainments, the prodding awake of our brain’s storytelling subroutine often has the effect of derailing less privileged and more contemplation-dependent modes of perception, persuading us that we have had a physical experience that we have not."

Read the rest of Kicking Away the Crutches in Bullet Time: Day’s Long Journey into Now in the catalog (and on the poster) available in conjunction with Day's solo exhibition at Jancar Gallery opening tonight, Sat Nov 8, 6-9 PM in Chinatown.

Pate 'n' Place

I've been doing more studio visits than I used to - sometimes for writing I want to do, and sometimes for the hell of it. A couple of months ago I visited Chris Pate's studio for the first time. Chris, whose work I included in Some Paintings, is one of the most underrated contemporary painters in LA.


Chris' subtly modulated 70's design-referencing abstractions have recently started incorporating more and more pictographic information ranging from his appropriated tourist souvenir scarves and vintage roadmaps to quotations from recent art history for example John Baldessari. Flyover -- Pate's current show at Chinatown-adjacent Jail Gallery -- includes Los Angeles pictured here, but the red Texas number above (my picture from the studio visit) didn't make the cut (Note: Chris has subsequently informed me that the Texas piece was in"State Line," his two-person show last year at Jail with Bill Kleiman.) Chris Pate's fusion of cartographic content and formalism grounds the transcendentalism of modernist abstraction in a net of local and historical specificities. But speaking of time and space, Saturday Nov 8th is the last day to see the show, so git on down.


"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."