Allegory

ALLEGORY for the Present

Merwin Belin & Dennis Reed

September 24 – November 5, 2016

Los Angeles Harbor College

Artists’ Reception:

Saturday, September 24, 4 – 7PM

 

Los Angeles Harbor College Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present ALLEGORY for the Present, recent works by Merwin Belin and Dennis Reed. The exhibition will open with an Artists’ Reception Saturday, September 24, 4 – 7PM.

Merwin Belin has been producing provocations in one form or another since the early 1970’s, embracing a strategy first described as detournement by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman in 1956, and later employed as a part of the Situationist International’s openly declared war on the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. The two fundamental laws of detournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element – which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense – and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect. From reconstructed newspaper front pages to text/image reassignments to impoverished original assemblages, his work is consistently witty, irreverent, spare, and often elegant.

Dennis Reed’s images are excerpted from a decades-long photographic project that took its momentum at the beginning of the Iraq War and extended beyond, capturing television screen images of random acts of violence, accidents and crime scenes, as well as innocuous entertainment programs. The medium is the message, or an elemental part thereof, in an enterprise the artist describes as unanticipated and unpredictable. In preparation for a book version of the TV Series images, Reed explained that he added text gleaned from newspaper obituaries and matched to the dark emotional tone of the images. Phrases were divided into three lines, and poems constructed using five of the phrases, relying on rhythm rather than rhyme.

These casual acts of cultural critique yield unexpected, meditative results along multiple lines of interpretation. For those of you who enjoy a bit of political anger but are not addicted to pure market spectacle, it doesn’t get much better than this.

ALLEGORY for the Present runs through November 5. Gallery hours are Monday – Thursday, 11AM – 4PM, and by appointment. For visuals or additional information, please contact Ron Linden, 310-600-4873 or 310-233-4411.

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Crossing Boundaries

Los Angeles Harbor College Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present Crossing Boundaries, Photographs by DeAnn Jennings and Nancy Webber. The exhibition will open with an Artists Reception on Saturday, September 19, from 4 – 7 PM.

DeAnn Jennings grew up in a small rural community in southern Utah where her father was a feature writer for the Deseret News. “I gained an interest in photography as a kid tagging along with him as he interviewed and photographed unusual people for his articles. After graduating from the University of Utah, I decided to head off to California to experience a different life style.”

Eventually Jennings ended up in LA, photographing and interviewing women on skid row in the downtown area. She says of Skid Row, “The photography and interaction with my subjects was the adventure and the photographs my trophies.” She then produced the series Gender Benders, documenting people who don’t fit into traditional sexual roles. Erotic Fruits and Vegetables soon followed with uncommon, humorous, and often erotic representation of common produce.

What began as a childhood game for Nancy Webber has developed into a body of work, which has been her main creative focus for the past twenty years. A guide at the Saint Louis Art Museum gave five-year-old Webber a card with a detail from a painting and challenged her to find the work in the gallery. Webber recalled the game years later when, as an art student visiting Florence, she observed similarities between the portraits in the museums and the faces on the streets.

The marriage of art and life is Webber’s theme in Life Imitates Art as she creates artistic reincarnations using ordinary people with striking resemblances to famous portraits. Her series includes over two hundred likenesses and covers all periods and styles of art history. With a casual attention to detail, Webber focuses on her subjects and their features, providing minimal intervention in reconstructing the scene.

The deliberately subtle humor that underlies her portraits works to underscore her purpose, which is to demystify art. “Too often, we lock art up in intimidating edifices like museums,” says Webber. “I see art on the street all the time, and by showing what I see, I’m making the older work more alive and accessible.” By literally drawing analogies between subjects like Frida Kahlo and a contemporary young woman, Webber reminds the viewer that the masterpieces we now see as objects of art started as portraits of real people.

Both artists will be available for book signing during the opening. The exhibition runs through November 14. For visuals or additional information please call 310-233-4411 or 310-600-4873. Gallery hours are Monday – Thursday, 11 AM – 4 PM, and by appointment.

Hyung Mo Lee : Lessons Learned

Hyung Mo Lee                                                                                                                        Lessons Learned

March 7 – April 24, 2015

Los Angeles Harbor College Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present Lessons Learned, recent works by Hyung Mo Lee. The exhibition will open with an Artist’s Reception Saturday, March 7, from 4 – 7 PM.

Hyung Mo Lee’s practice reflects many of the aesthetic and philosophic strategies associated with the Italian Arte Povera (literally poor art) movement whose artists attacked corporate mentality with an art of unconventional materials and style, often incorporating found objects in their works. Lee’s drawings, sculptures, and installations are notable for their radical choice of materials and emphasis on laborious, time-consuming process. His Sumi Ink drawings, both delicate and dynamic, are meditations on geologic time – strata rendered brush-stroke by brush-stroke – while sculptural works expand on lessons learned from drawing. Found objects are negotiated to the point of transformation, often bordering on dissolution, always stressing materiality and physicality, evocative of myth over scientific rationalism.

Born in Seoul, Korea, youngest of two sons to teachers of language, Lee graduated from the LA County High School for the Arts in ’99, followed by stints at the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thereafter, long drives around North America until settling again in Los Angeles. Fellowships and Awards include 2013-2016 Angels Gate Cultural Center Studio Artist Program, San Pedro, CA, and 211 Poetry Scholarship, Fall Poetry Workshop with Cecilia Woloch. Idyllwild, CA.

Lessons Learned runs through April 24. Gallery hours are Monday – Thursday, 11 AM – 4 PM, and by appointment. For visuals or additional information, please contact Ron Linden, ronmon@dslextreme.com, or call 310-600-4873, or 310-233-4411.

Eugene Daub: Sculpture / Drawings / Photos

Eugene Daub                                                                                                                       Sculpture / Drawings / Photos                                                                                           October 11 – December 4, 2014                                                                                      Reception: Saturday, October 11, 4 – 7 PM

Los Angeles Harbor College Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present Eugene Daub, Sculpture / Drawings / Photos. The exhibition will open with an Artist’s Reception on Saturday, October 11, from     4 – 7 PM.

Daub is renowned for expressive portraits of well-known public figures. President Obama unveiled his full-length sculpture of civil rights heroine Rosa Parks on March 27, 2013, in the Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol. He has recently completed sculptures of three other famous American women, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, aviator Amelia Earhart, and Debbie Harry of Blondie.

Daub has completed more than forty major public commissions nationwide. He has work in three U.S. Capitols and in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute and the British Museum.

This engaging installation includes preliminary conceptual sketches, finished presentation drawings, maquettes, and full-scale works in bronze, plaster, and clay.

The exhibition runs through December 4. For images or additional information please contact Ron Linden at 310-233-4411 or 310-600-4873. Gallery hours are Monday – Thursday, 11 AM – 4 PM, and by appointment.

Jacqueline Freedman: BLACK + BLUE

Jacqueline Freedman:  BLACK + BLUE                                                                                Drawings                                                                                                                                    March 8 – April 26, 2014

Los Angeles Harbor College Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present BLACK + BLUE, Drawings by Jacqueline Freedman. The exhibition will open with an Artist’s Reception Saturday, March 8, from 4 – 7 PM.

Freedman’s blue drawings, executed in white ink on handmade, indigo dyed paper, constitute a mapping of imagination; metaphorically related to cellular development or the cosmological movement of planets and constellations, the work is process driven, haptic – the product of conscious decisions yielding the unforeseeable, paradoxical object.

The blue drawings are complemented by three large sized black collage drawings executed in multiple layers of dyed paper. Simultaneously subtle in tonal variation and muscular in construction, they reference modernist tropes with spare elegance.

Jacqueline Freedman was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived in New York City and Boston. Currently living in Los Angeles, she works with drawing, painting, and mixed media. She exhibits in Los Angeles and has also exhibited in Boston, Philadelphia, and Ireland. She is an Adjunct Professor of Art History and Film Appreciation at Los Angeles Harbor College and teaches Visual Culture at El Camino College in Torrance, California.

Curated by Ron Linden, BLACK + BLUE runs through April 26. For visuals or additional information please call 310-233-4411 or 310-600-4873. Gallery hours are Monday – Thursday, 11 AM – 4 PM and by appointment.

WILLIAM MAHAN: Selected Works

WILLIAM MAHAN: Selected Works

October 5 – December 5, 2013

Reception: Saturday, October 5, 4 – 7 PM

Los Angeles Harbor College Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present William Mahan, Selected Works. The exhibition will open with an Artist’s Reception Saturday, October 5, from 4 – 7 PM.

Veteran Los Angeles artist William Mahan is known for large-scale works based on real-life places and events and painted with a directness that often belies their sophisticated drawing, color, and facture. This exhibition pairs selected works with preparatory studies that inform them and are essential to his practice. Conceptual rigor, physical insistence, and eschewing “pure” abstraction in favor of the “impure” image, are hallmarks of Mahan’s long, remarkable career.

William Mahan received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and his MFA from the University of Illinois and has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. His work can be found in many public and private collections including the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, California State University, Long Beach, Atlantic Richfield Corporation, and the Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles.

Curated by Ron Linden, William Mahan, Selected Works runs through December 5. Gallery hours are Monday – Thursday, 11 AM – 4 PM, and by appointment. For visuals or additional information please call 310-600-4873.