Installation

I met artist, curator, and all-around art enthusiast Esteban Schimpf when he came out to the FineArtsLA: Panel of the Muses event we hosted back in June. He was there to support his friend, panelist, and co-board member of the Chinatown gallery, Actual Size LA, Lee Rachel Foley. Schimpf made himself known as the first—and most voluable—volunteer of the after-panel Q&A session. His passion for supporting art and artists was intense, genuine, and immediately recognizable (he railed against the idea that the physical limitations of Los Angeles—traffic, isolation, etc.—should in any way prevent an artist from doing their job). Following the discussion, he was quick to introduce himself, revealing a chummier, more casual side of his personality, yet still brimming with that same passion.

On Thursday, August 19^th, at 7:00 PM, Esteban opens his (to my knowledge) first personal exhibition in Los Angeles at the Carmichael Gallery in Culver City, and not surprisingly, his own work is nowhere to be seen. Instead, Schimpf, with the help of Stefan Simchowitz, has chosen to spotlight the work of fifteen other young, up-and-coming artists in an ambitious group show he has titled “Instant LA Summer.” Upon names only, I was admittedly unfamiliar with the artists on view, but after some instant LA research, the show looks to be extremely diverse in mediums and theme, but cohesive in pure enthusiasm. Essentially, it’s Esteban without Esteban. Here’s a quick, flip-through preview of what’s in store, but don’t hold me to it:

Los Super Elegantes: this musical duo, one male and one female, present three of their own videos, which are as much a part of their overall presentation as are their costumes, their on-stage theatrics, their public demeanor, sexual chemistry, and of course, their music—a Latino-influenced type of pop that owes a lot to show-tunes. Their videos, too, remind me of low-rent movie musical numbers (in one, a romantic, garbage-man Romeo belts out his love to a passing, balcony-perched Juliet).

Eric Yhanker: his piece, “Bizarro Picasso,” is a charcoal and graphite depiction of an old, wide-eyed bald man who looks kind of like the titular painter, but, in its tactility, more like something Jan Svankmajer would mold from clay. Photographic in its Chuck Close detail and sense of perception, the close-up portrait briskly departs from realism with its over-sized, features, namely the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears—the portals to our senses.

Josh Mannis: works in a variety of mediums, but his series of HD videos are the most striking. Like Yhanker, they concentrate on the frozen exaggeration of facial features, but in the style of a Japanese advertisement. Bright pastel colors, fleshy and freaky masks, limited body movement, and intense repetition characterize such works as “If You Don’t Know Anything, You Don’t Know This.”

Charles Irvin: a multi-instrumentalist as they say in the music world. He draws, paints, performs, makes videos, and simply exists. His works tends to be cartoonish, extremely colorful, and detailed, but in a soft way. It’s dream-like, psychedelic, and in-your-face. No subtleties here, save the man behind the man.

Kenneth Tam: another video-maker, but of the Dadaist ilk. His mundane, often single shot slices of life tend to take place in one setting, have a documentary feel to them, and are so direct and normal that they border the line on the absurd.

Maya Lujan: to look at pictures of her large-form, graphic patterns—architectural in nature—one would be quite surprised to hear that her installation in a 2008 UCLA exhibition was taken down due to the fact it included a simplified mandala that bore striking similarity to a swastika. In actuality, the piece was more akin to a kind of apocalyptic spacecraft, and it’s this exact questioning of shapes and patterns that shows up in most of her work.

Sarah Sieradzki: speaking of the architectural, her work presents mashups of varying shapes, materials, and textures—wooden frames, cement blocks, photographs—that look like models for massive monuments of future post-modernism (whatever that is). She seems to take joy in chaotic geometry, as well as the re-contextualizion of basic structures.

Pascual Sisto: also a multi-platform artist, he appears to specialize in playing with and subverting the viewer’s expectation. Much of his work starts off as a seemingly one-note image/idea—cursive neon lettering, a single-shot video of a motionless fruit tree—but will then either climax unexpectedly in a sudden spasm of movement (as with the fruit tree video) or double-back on its initial meaning (as with the phrase in neon: “Let us be Cruel”).

Daniel Desure: in his prints and photographs, there’s a cold, stillness that tends to break down time into single moments, whether its a car crash refracted into centrifugal prisms, or a can of paint in the midst of spilling. Desure seems to distill catastrophic moments into the way we often remember catastrophic moments: as single images.

Emily Mast: time is of the essence to this choreographic artist as well. She sets up complex, theatrical installations utilizing actors, props, lights, and costumes, which collide into a kind of Beckett-ian sense of nihilism. But within these dramatic interpretations is a clear sense of narrative, which is inherently married to time, and thereby, meaning.

Emily Steinfeld: a sort of found object artist who seems to enjoy the accidental/purposeful layering of solid things—how one thing can mold into another as if a chemical compound. Her series of structures entitled “Covert Cells” utilizes sheeting to cover objects like wine bottles and telephones so that they may be confused for a single entity.

Simon Haas: mainly primitive, muted browns and melancholy. As the title of his piece “A Brief Moment After a Bath” suggests, he finds subtle beauty in the skipped-over moments of life. The lead surface and the wide, gestural brush strokes of this oil painting have a wavy, watery feel to them. Like waking up from a dream and dealing with its immediate aftermath.

Mark Hagen: intricate, graphic designs made for specific technological uses. He designed a 360 wrap, for instance, to be hypothetically used on the antiquated bowling shoe so as to maximize arch support for the bowler. As a child, he helped his father part out and restore Post-War Studebakers, and he seems to have been elaborating on this work ever since.

Sean Kennedy: also works in design, but in a much more tactile sense. He builds layers of both abstract designs and found objects to create geometric patterns that are simple at first glance, yet wildly complex upon inspection.

Orlando Tirado: exotic, striking photographs and/or collages of imagery. The title of his piece, “ShamanColash or Land, Sea, and Air (Self Portrait)” speaks to the bizarre juxtapositions framed in the would-be tired genre of self-portraitry. To borrow a reaction once used to describe the first artist on this list (Los Super Elegantes), Tirado “[makes] the audience nervous. Nobody does that anymore.”

-By Joshua Morrison

Stefan Simchowitz presents “Instant LA Summer,” an exhibition by Esteban Schimpf, runs until September 10, 2010 at the Carmichael Gallery. The opening is  on Thursday, August 19^th, at 7:00 PM. For more information, please visit www.carmichaelgallery.com, or call 323.939.0600.

I’m about to move neighborhoods in Los Angeles. I realize this information is of interest to very few people, and even then, of very little interest. But for the past two years, I’ve lived in the USC area, about two blocks away from the historic Union Theatre—also known at the Velaslavasay Panorama—and I’ve never once stepped inside. I’ve tried. When I first moved in and took my inaugral expedition around the hood, I couldn’t help but gravitate toward the building. It’s vastly out-of-place, an artifact from another era dropped in-between a bodega and some low-rent housing (and in fact, it is from another era: it was built sometime in the 1910’s and operated for many years as a venue of multiple uses, including a playhouse, a silent-film theatre, and a meeting hall for the Tile Layers Union Local #18). When I tried to enter beneath the grand, old-fashioned marquee, however, it was closed. Ever since, it’s just been that mysterious buidling (sometimes aglow) that I drive by nearly every day, and have yet to go in—either because it’s closed or I have no reason. And now I’m about to move.

Fortunately, I have one last chance. This weekend, starting on Friday, but running on Saturdays as well, for five weeks only, the Velaslavasay Panorama opens its doors at 8:00 PM to present the unique and aptly located live performance of The Grand Moving Mirror of California. What is it? Good question. It’s a series of moving painted scenes, which encircle the theatre like a long scroll being rolled out around the audience, and depict the journeys of early American settlers attempting to reach California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Using live narration taken from an actual 19^th century script, along with musical accompaniment and radio-play sound-effects, the show celebrates and revives a 130-year-old mode of entertainment that simply shouldn’t be missed.

Not bad for my last weekend in the neighborhood.

- By Joshua Morrison

For more information about the Union Theatre, the Panorama, or panoramas in general, please visit www.panoramaonview.org, or call 213-746-2166.

At around 4:00 PM on Sunday, June 27^th, Guy Hatzvi of Farmlab, in association with Metabolic Studio, was rushing down to Marina Del Rey to find a replacement pump for the installation project entitled “Bldg. 209: Garden Folly (Indexical of Strawberry Flag)” that was to officially open to the public at the LACMA Campus in the next hour. Fortunately, he knew exactly what he was looking for: it’s a type of aeroponic generator that allows for a nutrient-rich water solution to be drip-fed through a series of I.V. tubes connecting a system of sick strawberry plants. The project was conceived by Lauren Bon, the founder of both Farmlab and Metabolic Studio, and her team of dedicated employees had been setting up the installation all week. But at the last minute, of course, the original pump broke down, and it was up to Guy to get a new one up and running by 5:00 PM.

This one task—obviously essential to the success of Bon’s operation on its opening night—was actually just a small tributary within the vastly ambitious constellation of works now going on at LACMA under the title of EATLACMA. In a sentence, this one-year-long, multi-faceted commitment from the Museum sets out to delve into the social, artistic, cultural, environmental, and humanitarian meanings behind natural food growth. In fact, this undertaking is so large, it’s hard to do it justice in a simple blog post, so I’ll just focus on the garden installations for now:

Along with “Bldg. 209: Garden Folly (Indexical of Strawberry Flag)”—which itself is indexical of a much larger work entitled “Strawberry Flag,” located three miles west of LACMA at the Veterans Administration of West Los Angeles (a bus will soon be available to take visitors in between the two sites)—there are also five other installation gardens on or around the LACMA campus.

One is called “Promiscuous Production: Breeding is Bittersweet” by the National Bitter Melon Council (yes, it exists). This tunnel-shaped, bamboo structure doubles as an experimental breeding ground for the hybrid, never-before-seen, BitterSweet melon. Through the age-old process of cross-pollination, visiting participants can actually partake in the experiment themselves by attending a series of day-long events intended to promote community, generate discussion, and—don’t forget—make melons.

A little bit further east is “Food Pyramid”—conceived by Didier Hess—which is a solar-powered, aquaponic garden that simultaneously questions the traditional food pyramid most Americans grew up on; presents an eco-friendly, soil-free alternative to gardening; and cultivates all the necessary ingredients for a delicious fish taco—including the Tilapia. It’s also aesthetically pleasing, peaceful to be around, and fun to contemplate with friends.

Just off the southeast border of the LACMA complex, on the corner of Wilshire and Curson, sits your typical traffic circle, the median point between pedestrian walk signs, the border between east-bound and west-bound traffic. But now there is also a garden of radishes, as planned and planted by Islands of LA in a project they call “The Roots of Compromise.” The traffic island itself is controlled by a variety of bureaucracies, and together, they agreed upon the root vegetable of the radish as the appropriate plant for their shared circle of land. The resulting food is representative of this small, but successful compromise.

Way over on the west end of LACMA, a crooked, polygonal potato garden lays flat and almost unnoticeable between the Ahmanson and the Art of the Americas buildings. But, according to the little placard placed in the soil, amidst at least 12 types of potato plants, “The varieties [of potato] exist as a result of coincidences, accidents, planning, violence, and careful custody over thousands of years. Through tracing their different backgrounds, a history of human desire appears.” The placard also directs viewers to a website, allowing them to cellularly interact with the incredible stories behind each strain of potato. The website is www.potatoperspective.org, the project is titled “The Way Potatoes Go 8000-BCE-Present: A Potato Perspective on an American Matter,” and was developed by sa Sonjasdotter in collaboration with the communities of the Potato Park (yes, it too exists).

Finally, on the north end of the LACMA campus, just below 6^th street, there stands a small, Roman theater of sorts, not unlike a miniature version of the restored Theater of Caesaria. Beginning November 7^th, this is the site of what shall be known as the “Public Fruit Theater,” a magical little installation concocted by the people of Fallen Fruit. In this theater, there will be only one performer (depending on how you look at it, that is), and that performer is a tree. Visitors are invited to come watch the growth process of this concrete-locked tree as if they were witnessing the slow arc of a character’s development on stage. In this way, the episodic relationship between the tree, the viewer, and also the other audience members creates a story, much like the ones we look for in theatre.

But back to Guy, and his aeroponic generator. Come 4:30 PM, he’s able to make it back to LACMA, and set up the device just in time for the first waves of curious onlookers. I observe the fragile configuration of hanging strawberry plants he helped set up, each interconnected by small life-lines of dripping nutrients, each literally holding on by a thread of survival, completely dependent upon one pump. I know it’s supposed to be representative of the plight of the Veterans in Los Angeles, but it’s also symbolic of the six gardens themselves, and beyond that, EATLACMA as a whole, and beyond that, the city of Los Angeles. I could go on and on, but you should probably just visit for yourself, and that way, become part of the garden.

For more information on EATLACMA, please visit http://eatlacma.org/about/, or call (323) 857-6000.

After unknowingly attempting to attend a film during the release of the new Twilight Saga movie, Eclipse at the Arclight in Hollywood last night I was shocked to find the parking garage closed with a sign saying “full”. Aggravated in disbelief, I turned around to head home, and noticed a metered spot had just become available outside the theatre. I swerved into the space, scooped my sweater out the back seat and went to read the meter only to find that it is now $3.00 an hour to park in Hollywood (or 5 minutes a quarter). I took off to try to make the film only to discover the prices at the Arclight had gone up again.

In a town where change is omnipresent and the increase of day-to-day expenses make us feel we are in New York, there are less and less opportunities to experience the arts on a budget (did I mention the yellow plastic sunglasses in a 3-D film that will cost you your Popcorn and Diet Coke?) However, there is a beacon of hope nestled in the heart of Century City beneath the towering buildings that won’t cost you a penny and is sure to blow your socks off without wearing any yellow sunglasses.

The Annenberg Space for Photography, which has been open for a little over a year now, is as much an experience wandering through the curvy, camera-shaped building as it is seeing the photographs inside. Much more than just a traditional display area for prints, the digital projection gallery has two 7’x14’ seamless glass screens with real-projection imaging systems that exceed the level of image quality offered by Blu-Ray players. Watching photographs appear and fade with this caliber of stunning clarity and saturation paired with surround sound music will make your eyes and ears meld into one – taking the photographic image to the next level.

For the second year running the Annenberg Space for Photography is proud to host ‘Pictures of the Year’, a collection of the most outstanding documentary photography from 2009, recognized by Pictures of the Year International (POYi). With over 45,000 entries submitted from all over the world, the show is a pure visual story that explores humanity far beyond the greatest headline stories of 2009. Held for 65 years in Missouri, Los Angeles is fortunate to have the 67th annual exhibit return after it’s west coast debut last year.

With so many photographic stories being covered, the show is broken into four Categories: The United States War and Economy, The Human Experience, Ecologies and Economies, and The Globe. What makes the Annenberg Space for Photography unique is the digital features that play in the projection gallery. No longer is photography just a printed subject in a frame, but a visual story being told in a cinematic way, giving the viewer a greater insight to what is occurring inside the frame.

Be sure not to miss Stephanie Sinclair’s “Polygamy in America” about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) community in Eldorado, Texas. Also, Kitra Cahana’s portraits of teenage runaways who gather once a year in a different American national park are sure to drop your jaw.

Every now and then we come across photographs online or in magazines and newspapers that we cannot escape – they stick with us and often become permanent representations of a time or place. The images from ‘Pictures of the Year” may only exist for one moment but can last a lifetime. And that’s totally worth a free admission.

- By Gray Malin

The exhibit runs through October 10th and more information can be found on the Annenberg website, http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/. Hours are Wednesday – Sunday 11:00-6:00pm.

This past Saturday, June 19^th, three different art shows opened at 510 Bernard Street in Chinatown, a sure-fire sign of a gallery space—and beyond that, a part of town—that’s gaining more and more recognition in the Los Angeles art world. The small corridor that opens up onto the tucked-away cul-de-sac off the 110 Freeway was packed with visitors, many of the bearded and bespectacled genus commonly referred to as hipsters. They walked in triangular traffic patterns, making their way from the video art of Human Resources Gallery, to the depictions of economic distress in the Francois Ghebaly Gallery, and finally to Adam Janes’s John Carpenter-influenced installation in the WPA Gallery.

But was Chinatown always like this? The short answer is no. In the early half of the 20^th century, Old Chinatown (which was then located in the Union Station area), fell into economic and cultural despondency due to widespread anti-Chinese sentiment, arson, lack of political presence, and inter-cultural warfare. The little that was left of the community was about to be completely annihilated with the creation of Union Station in the 1930’s (a bitterly ironic twist, given that many of the first Chinese immigrants had worked on the earliest railroads). Luckily, a determined group of Chinese Americans led by Peter SooHoo Sr. struck a deal to buy a portion of Downtown land, soon to be known as New Chinatown—the first Chinese community in America to be completely planned and owned by Chinese Americans. With the help of some sympathetic developers and architects, New Chinatown opned up shops, built around 62 units in a one-square-block radius, and erected the famous Chinatown gates straddling Gin Ling Way and Broadway. On the East Gate, there are four characters of poetry, which translate in English to “Cooperate to Achieve.”

And on Saturday, the formerly abandoned building of 510 Bernard Street, now housing three different galleries, with the new Dan Graham Gallery directly next-door, was doing exactly that. The actual art on view was by no means breath-taking (my favorite was Margie Schnibbe’s set of stream-of-consciousness doodlings, seeming to point at the mundane, existential stress of bad economic news). But that almost wasn’t the point. There were three shows going on at once, and a sense of respect for one another and one’s community was tangible.

Before the show, I stopped for a cup of coffee at the Via Café in the central square between Hill and Broadway, and watched Chinese-American fathers buy their sons packets of those miniature exploding pellets. I gazed at a couple of old men manning their shop beneath the strings of Chinese paper lamps. Yes, Chinatown may very well be the next neighborhood to fall victim to the claws of gentrification, but for now there’s just cooperation. Let’s hope it stays that way.

“Mystic Circle” at Human Resources is on view until July 27^th. “Carpenter’s carpenter (plan your escape)” is on view at WPA Gallery until July 4^th. And “Bourgeois Pig” at the Francois Ghebaly Gallery is up until July 24^th.  For more information, please visit www.humanresoucesla.com, www.ghebaly.com, or www.wpala.com.

Along with many other lucky visitors last week, I got a chance to see the inside of the brand new, as yet un-opened Resnick Pavilion, the latest addition to the already massive LACMA campus. The 45,000 square-foot wing was opened to the public for one day only—what LACMA termed a “flash visit”—allowing museum-ers to get a glimpse of the freshly painted, immaculate Renzo Piano construction.

The room (if you can call a closed-off, one-acre section of land a room) was nearly empty; no brochure stands, no explanatory plaques, no museum guards, not even other guests. It was just me and the sole installation on view, which was Walter de Maria’s “2000 Sculpture,” composed of—you guessed it—2000 pieces of intricately arranged polygonal rods, amounting to a rectangular grid the length of the entire Resnick floor.

De Maria is an artist who deals mostly in the worlds of enormous, tactile, mathematical systems, and a sculpture of his seems like the perfect testing grounds for the architectural specifications of the Resnick wing. Not only is the space large enough for such a monumental piece, but the natural lighting system—as provided by adjustable skylights above—illuminates the entire installation with an even, cool elegance. (I was told by a museum staffer that when the skylights are closed, the room becomes pitch-black).

The openness of the Resnick Pavilion, at least at this stage, is its key ingredient.  In fact, it’s almost intimidating in that it dwarfs a sculpture made out of 2000 separate pieces. But it is also a flexible space. One can easily envision large catered events taking place there, or possibly sectioning off the room into multiple exhibits. Any way you look at it, the new wing is a perfect compliment to the BCAM next-door (the first-half of Renzo Piano’s master vision), a more complex, densely structured building. And I look forward to the first three shows planned for the new space: “Eye for the Sensual: Selections From the Resnick Collection,” “Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700–1915″ and “Olmec: Masterworks of Ancient Mexico.”

For more information about LACMA, please call (323) 857-6010, or visit www.lacma.org.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Please get yourselves down to the Nuart and quick. I didn’t realize it until it was almost too late, but since the 11^th they’ve been screening, daily, the five-part masterpiece of avant-garde artist Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Cycle.

The Cremaster Cycle is comprised of Barney’s sculpture, photography, drawings, and five feature-length films that Barney created between 1994 and 2002.  The films, whose loose, wordless narratives vary widely, explore the processes of creation in ways that reach far beyond the biological implications (“cremaster” is the term for the muscle that controls testicular response to external stimuli).  Barney spares no expense—he includes everything from an extravagant, Busby Berkeley-esque musical revue in a blue-turf’d football stadium to a high-fashion Western starring Norman Mailer; an epic ascension of New York City’s Chrysler Building, to motorcycle gangs, faeries, magicians, live pigeons, and the Budapest Opera & Philharmonic—I mean, everything. What’s best, the films can be enjoyed individually or as consecutive parts of a whole.

So act fast, folks. These films are rarely screened—especially with the opportunity to see them consecutively. My recommendation would be to take the day off, swing by the 99c store for a few packs of Red Vines, and settle in to the dark theater for a day of gross overstimulation.

The Cremaster Cycle screens at the Nuart from June 11 through the 17^th. Visit the Nuart’s website for ticket information.

LACE, or Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, is located on Hollywood Boulevard, next to one of many local stripper clothing stores, down the block from a massive adult book outfit, and bordering that sticky, glitter-crusted, cement row of dead peoples’ names known more famously as the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Needless to say, it’s an odd place to hold a prestigious, annual art auction exhibiting more than 120 separate works from artists around the world (though mainly working in Los Angeles) as chosen by 21 different participating curators. And what’s even more surprising is that the art is good—no, beyond that—refreshing.

The actual LACE Benefit Art Auction, both live and silent, is set to take place on May 20^th, beginning at 7 PM and ending at 10 PM—though the corresponding online auction has already begun, and the works have already been put up for view to the public.

I know I found myself wandering through their spacious, unobstructed galleries on Tuesday night—for the opening reception of a huge, multicolored mural by artist Nick Lowe, entitled Wall Work (which spans the entirety of the west wing of the lobby)—thinking if I had some money, I’d for sure buy an auction number.

Mostly paintings and photographs with a half-dozen or so sculptures, as well as one video for good measure, the pieces are smartly organized along the walls by curator. This provides the viewer/potential bidder with a sense of context, and general breathing room between the sheer amount of art. Also, one finds themselves judging both the work of the artists and the eyes of the curators simultaneously.

I, for one, found a few of my personal favorites in this manner—the artists being Karl Haendel and Mara Lonner (as curated by Andrea Bowers), as well as Alice Jackel and Claudia Parducci (as curated by Kim McCarthy).

Haendel’s piece, Questions For My Father was, by far, the painting in front of which I spent the most time. And while this might have been because it is simply a paragraph of text to be read, it’s also because it had the most immediate effect on my emotions. It consists of a series of blunt, often disturbing queries, ostensibly addressed to the father of the artist. Some are deeply personal (“When were you the happiest?”). Some are political (“What did you think about Nixon?”) Some are sexual (“Did you ever jerk off while thinking about one of my girlfriends?”) And some are just questions (“Have you ever eaten foie gras?”) But all of them strike a deep-rooted chord connected to the idea that we might not know our own parents as well as we think we do. Or possibly, we know them all too well.

Mara Lonner’s drawing, entitled Between Green, interested me for the sole reason that it showed me something simple and obvious I hadn’t thought of before (what I often feel good art should do). The picture depicts a finely-crafted, Japanese-style tree branch, encircled by a kind of haunting, floral mandala. And though it’s quite clear the tree branch is separate from the mandala, they seem to mesh almost seamlessly. It left me with the impression that there is no separation between the two—the geometric is inherent in the natural and vice-versa. Between the green, as it were, lies a world of delicate furniture designs.

Cosmos, another colored pencil drawing—this one by Alice Jackel—depicts a crystalline, amorphous amoeba as the outline, and then within its swirling atom-like universe: fragile pop-ups of objects and locations. A farmhouse on a meadow, a snaking tree by a river, a turquoise peppermint, some water reeds, etc. It reminded me of what a feminist friend of mine had said to me about how she thinks females perceive time—not as a chronology, but as a subconscious categorization of moments. Whether this is true for all females, or solely females I’m not one to say, but it does present a quite beautiful portrait of memory.

Lastly, Claudia Parducci and her painting Pleas(e) Me. I like this piece for its unique sense of mystery. In it, Parducci presents a definite frame of a moment—where the viewer is put in the position of a highway voyager looking up to the sky, and beyond the alien, geometric lamp posts, a faint trace of an  airplane’s vapor trail spelling out the message: “pleas me.” The implied “e” in “please” is set off frame, adding a whole other poetic layer to the otherwise minimalist piece. It’s the kind of painting you can look at for days and still never quite figure out.

Other notable works include Emilie Halpern’s Hiroshima 2010, Ivan Terestchenko’s The Listener, Lily Skolnick Simonson’s Busy Body, and Andrew Berardini’s “Dead Letter” series.

Of course there are many more great pieces to explore—possibly to bid on—but I’ll let you do the exploring (and definitely the bidding) for yourself. There is an intentional reason, in light of my experiences, that LACE is located in the eye of the Hollywood storm: it’s to bring art out of its protective membrane of elitism, and present it to the people, letting us find our own way in.

The LACE Benefit Art Auction takes place on May 20^th, beginning at 7 PM and ending at 10 PM, though you may start the bidding now at the online auction. For more information, please call (323) 957-1777, or visit www.welcometolace.org.

A sense of community is one of the many reasons people frequent gallery openings.  When everyone’s milling around on a Saturday night, Grolsch or Tecate in hand, discussing the work of some emerging artist hung on the stark white walls of a Culver City gallery and deciding where to imbibe next, there’s a sneaking sense of belonging.  Once you find a gallery with the same taste as yours, it’s only a matter of time until that’s your local spot where everyone knows your name.

With all this in mind, Edgar Varela Fine Arts has got the right idea.  At their previous location, a number of openings featuring various artists were held giving regulars and newcomers the idea that it was as much about doing something interesting and new as it was about experiencing new artist’s work.  The new location strives to continue driving the point home.  The grand opening of this new space, on W. 5th Street in downtown LA, will be held on Wednesday night and will highlight the feminine work of artist Ashley Gibbons in an exhibition called “Coquettish Modernisms.” She utilizes quilting, lingerie, and other fabric-based materials to create images that reflect women and the female form in a modern way.  Gibbons puts hardware to good use as well, stretching lingerie across a canvas with screws and nails.  Her show at Edgar Varela Fine Arts runs from Wednesday (May 12) through June 26, 2010.

Edgar Varela is an independent art collector and dealer with a panache for throwing art-related events that Angelenos actually want to attend.  If you like what you see, make sure you keep coming back – you’ll want to be known as a regular.

Ashley Gibbon’s “Coquettish Modernisms” opens Wednesday, May 12 from 5 – 9pm at Edgar Varela Fine Arts. Click here for more information.

It’s been quite some time since we ran a roundup of arts news and we think it’s high time for a roundup reprise.  The art world has been abuzz lately with a forthcoming auction that hopes to bring in some of the most ambitious numbers we’ve seen in a while and news of the Getty Research Institute’s ongoing court case regarding the bronze Fano Athlete statue.

• Speaking of that bronze statue, ArtInfo reports that the Getty Trust has appealed the ruling of an Italian judge that stated the statue should be returned to Italy as stolen property.  The Getty has countered by stating that the work was not stolen and was in fact found outside of Italy “in good faith.” {ArtInfo}
• This weekend saw events held for LACMA’s Collectors Committee Weekend, during which time high-rollers are ‘courted,’ so to speak, by curators and executives from LACMA to give money to a particular sector of the museum for future purchases.  The LA Times’ Culture Monster quotes Michael Govan as saying it’s “the American Idol of the museum world.” {LA Times Culture Monster}
• San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum has extended the run of its Cartier in America exhibit through May 9, showcasing bejeweled works and pieces of art from the private collector of Mr. Cartier, the “King of Jewelers,” himself.  {Legion of Honor}
• The Hollywood Bowl season has been updated to include some seriously enticing performers for KCRW’s annual World Festival, including The Bird and the Bee, Baaba Maal, and The Chemical Brothers.  Check out the calendar here and check back on Fine Arts LA later this week for a full write-up of what to expect.  {LA Phil}
• Simon de Pury, nicknamed the Man with the Golden Gavel, has got a lot riding on a collection of urinals.  According to The Guardian, de Pury is set to host an auction that will fall in line with his latest idea for auctions to have themes. Last month’s theme was Sex and the upcoming theme is BRIC (for Brazil, Russia, India, and China).  The auction, a huge risk on de Pury’s part, will include the sale of nine urinals that make up an installation piece called Russian Revolutionary Porcelain by Alexander Kosolapov.  {The Guardian)
• No time to run through the MoMA yourself? Let Youtube do it for you.  Check out the “Two-Minute MoMA,” a video that shows you every painting from the private collection shown on the fourth and fifth floors of the museum.  {CultureGrrl}
• And, just for fun, one of the funniest typos we’ve witnessed in a while hails all the way from Australia.

Lastly, if anyone went to Coachella we’d love to hear about any new discoveries or anything that went particularly sour.  Give us some scoop!