HAPPY EASTER!

Victoria Reichelt, Sir John Sulman Prize Winner 2013

Victoria Reichelt talks more on her Sulman Prize winning painting 'After (books)'. With the invention of ebooks, audiobooks and the proliferation of online news and research, the way we receive information is fast changing. Modern-day libraries are as busy as ever these days but people are using the facilities in very different ways, and oddly, the quietest areas tend to be those where the books are. This painting is from a series that considers the changing roles of library spaces as they adjust to keep up with new technologies.

"Flicker" a group show curated by Jan Tumlir at Control Room, Los Angeles, California

Justin Beal
Phil Chang
Eduardo Consuegra
Brendon Fowler
Mark Hagen
Brian Kennon
Christopher Michlig
Katrina Umber
Kaari Upson
Bobbi Woods

Control Room is an artist run space in Downtown Los Angeles.
2006 East 7th Street
Downtown LA 90021
info@control-room.org
(818) 720-2713

OPEN HOURS:
Sundays from 12 - 6pm and by appointment March 15th through April 28th.

Nery Gabriel Lemus "A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich" at Charlie James Gallery, Chinatown, Los Angeles, California

Nery Gabriel Lemus  

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich
February 16 - April 13, 2013

Artist's Reception: February 16, 2013, 7-10pm

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present our second solo show by gallery artist Nery Gabriel Lemus, winner of the 2013 COLA Individual Artist Grant, and the 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award. In this current body of work, Lemus continues to explore domestic issues, issues that can often manifest in society at large. In particular, Lemus brings focus to the influence, positive and negative, adult men have over young boys, either within families or as men in society. Lemus’ interest in the topic stems from his involvement in social work over the past 14 years, where he has worked with boys and young men with absent fathers and a lack of positive role models.

The work in the show examines the concept of heroism – particularly in what constitutes a hero. Society has established heroes in a multitude of different spaces, frequently cemented through entertainment culture. In our hyper-mediated age, many established heroes are found to be fraudulent, and many elevated personae exemplify behaviors of questionable merit. The title of this exhibition is taken from Alice Childress’ book, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973). The book chronicles the struggles of Benjie, a young African-American kid struggling with acceptance and self-worth while flirting dangerously with heroin addiction. Benjie utters the titular phrase implying that heroes and saviors have ceased to exist in the hard times he lives in. Within this body of work, Lemus uses recognizable childhood archetypes like stuffed animals, piñatas, superheroes and childhood characters to incorporate the idea of heroic absence, and to suggest where heroes might be found.

Nery Gabriel Lemus was born in Los Angeles, in 1977. Lemus received his BFA at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California (2007) and his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California (2009). Lemus also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (2008).
His work has been featured is several group exhibitions including, Made in L.A. 2012, organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART, OZ: New Offerings From Angel City at Museo Regional Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, The Seventh House at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas, the 2010 Border Art Biennial at El Paso museum in El Paso, Texas, El Grito, at The University of Arkansas in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Common Ground, at the California African-American Museum. Lemus is also a recipient of the 2012- 2013 prestigious City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) award and the 2013 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award.

Charlie James Gallery
969 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
T: 213.687.0844
F: 213.687.8815

HOURS: Wednesday - Saturday  12 - 6 PM

Made in Space at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, California

Made in Space

1. Someone drank tea. Someone else felt that a specific kind of taco eaten at a particular
geographic location was like a drug. The spices generated a certain kind of energy, or, perhaps,
muscle memory. It was 2012.

2. In 2002, "thoughts mixed and burned with gasoline" turned to Orange County, a web without a
spider, The Citadel, Eden-Olympia. The commingling of purposefulness and aimlessness was
understood to be the effect of Junkspace.

3. In 1981, Peter Schjeldahl took a trip to Los Angeles and wrote a short essay damning our city
to a future of cultural irrelevance, lest it somehow invert each and every one of its unique
features. He wrote, "The wishfulness of LA's citizens is simply explained as the effect of a life that
enforces independence to the point of autism. Try to lean on anything or anyone and you'll fall
down[…] Los Angeles is a city without public spaces. There are only private spaces--fenced
haciendas of self-maintenance and self-invention--surrounded with the soft, dreamy, zinging-withlight
nowhere in particular." Much as Michael Fried's write-off of minimalism as theater, Schjeldahl
missed the point.

4. Participants in the 2010 TV series "Wipe Out" drove to Magic Mountain for jouissance: that is,
being battered around by brightly colored, slowly rotating foam shapes.

5. In 1986, a pedestrian observed a pair of giant steel springs rolling down the sidewalk near the
corner of Wilshire and La Brea. Elsewhere, aphasiacs watched Ronald Reagan on television and
were not fooled by his affect. Because they lacked the ability to understand the intended
significance of various facial expressions and/or gestures, their experience of his speech was
divorced from his image, rendering it as inert and senseless as the printed word.

6. A shopper walks the isles of Home Depot in a stupor, hopelessly trying to assemble a mental
list of life goals by way of immediate hardware purchases. Thoughts turn to the specific alienated
labor that produced this situation. Is a kindred soul, another loser, in a cubicle somewhere,
proliferating this amalgamation of thoughtless spatial constructs, endcap displays stacked to the
sky? Is that person horny? Do they have a gaping flesh wound? A fixed quantity of gasoline was
converted to smog today. It is 1999.

7. The Mall of America is constructed in 1992. The FDA urges surgeons to abandon silicone in
breast implants and the first McDonald's franchise is opened in China. In the words of French
anthropologist Marc Augé, "Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is
never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which
the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten."

8. Food is a variety of colors. We all eat food. Certain foods appear one color or another on
account of food dye. Regardless of whether or not their color is a lie or we willingly suspend
disbelief (as in the instance of a Starburst -- is it the flavor "Lemon" or the flavor "Yellow"?), we all
eat, and we all shit. In painting, mixing color is a complicated process involving the opacity of
various pigments and substrates. Mixing too many colors results in a sludge that is invariably
described as "muddy." This is much like our digestive system. Foods we eat are broken down by
procedures which work in concert; the enzymes in our mouth, the acids of our stomach. The color
in foods is combined slowly in our body, until we shit, and see the result of our gastric color
mixing: brown. In 2009, The Wrigley Company discontinued their unpopular "Baja California"
Starburst flavor.

9. A person discovered a pile of feces directly in the middle of a pair of women's size 10 red pumps. The distance between the shoes and the feces, which looked very much like a chocolatedipped
frozen yogurt dessert, or a dog chew, indicated that the person could have been squatting
and defecating. This tableau vivant was found in a parking lot behind a chinese restaurant in
Beverly Hills in 2008. Every transaction leaves a remainder.

10. In 2001, an auto dealership on the 134 Freeway decided to expand its advertising by taking
over an adjacent parking garage. Mannequins, waving and smiling, some posed with balloons,
were installed on its upper levels. This visuality of the frontal, of the fleeting glance, produced a
sensation not unlike V-effekt in passing drivers. Like a Brechtian stage play, their collective event
was stripped of its self-evident nature. That same year, Elizabeth Grosz wrote, "Space, […]
outside the ruses of imagination, is not static, fixed, infinitely expandable, infinitely divisible,
concrete, extended, continuous, and homogenous, though perhaps we must think in these terms
to continue our everyday lives (and the architect is perhaps more invested in this understanding
of space than anyone else). Space, like time, is emergence and eruption, oriented not to the
ordered, the controlled, the static, but to the event, to movement or action."

11. In 1993, someone sat in a recliner in Long Beach with a VHS deck balanced on each knee.
One screen played Hitchcock's "Rope" while the other played Altman's "Short Cuts." Nearby,
under a bridge, someone was feeling like his only companion was the city he lived in, the City of
Angels. Around the same time, a wallet was left in El Segundo.

12. Two friends, both architects, drove to Brentwood in 1994. They got out of their car and ran
alongside OJ Simpson's Bronco, hoping to catch a glimpse of reality in progress and joining
thousands of people on the streets and overpasses in communal euphoria.

13. Two curators drove by a flip flop in the road. This was mutually lauded for its demonstrative
effect. It was 2013.

Night Gallery is located at 2276 East 16th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021 | 213 537 3027 | info@nightgallery.ca

Tues - Sat | noon - 7pm