Happy Thanksgiving!

 
Turkey (1961)
Roy Lichtenstein

SCULPTURES FROM THE PEDESTRIAN MEMORY BUREAU: New Work by Yelena Zhelezov at Actual Size, Los Angeles, CA

Actual Size is pleased to present Sculptures from the Pedestrian Memory Bureau: New Work by Yelena Zhelezov. The exhibition features a collection of Zhelezov’s recent sculptures and performative objects. The works displayed act as playful ciphers, translating topographic markers into lyric constructions that intimately investigate the biological and social body in space and time. Yelena Zhelezov’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses performance, installation, film, drawing, and sculpture.

Though her approach stems from research and critical engagement, she intuitively constructs and stages her work. Zhelezov often builds structures and modular parts that can be transformed by the individuals that interact with them. This process endows each object with its own layered history and expressive potential. The Worlds Most Charming Instrument is a participatory installation piece that generates a looping soundscape of soft harp tones. This children’s zither was produced in Belarus, the area Yelena Zhelezov was born. One can play specific songs on the instrument by following a visual score that is slid beneath the strings. The song sheets indicate which string needs to be plucked and the order in which each note should be played. The scores of this instrument are black and white photographs of the Los Angeles landscape. In order to perform the songs the viewer must read the fronds of palm trees as musical notation. A projection visually amplifies this tactile exploration and the cycle of recorded sound creates a wistful and eerie baseline for Zhelezov’s constructed environment. Shelves elevate diminutive porcelain sculptures of buildings, palm trees, cars, and abstract structures, dramatizing the handmade ceramics with a tongue in cheek gravitas. The figures were originally employed as interpretive tools for a body of work entitled," PEDXING". For this ongoing project, Zhelezov produces participatory installations that explore traditional Jewish leitmotifs of oral history and migration. Yelena Zhelezov investigates personal and societal relationships to space by staging mobile memory collecting stations in public areas. She uses the sculptures as interpretive markers to record stories from the individuals that she encounters. Removed from their performative context, the porcelain works become independent entities. The figures form a structural typology of Los Angeles. They exist as moveable monuments in absurd, poetic landscapes that could serve as utopian models or memorials for a remembered place.

Yelena Zhelezov is a Belarusian-Israeli artist based in Los Angeles. Yelena holds an MFA in Puppetry and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts. She has shown work at the the Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg, Russia; Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles, CA; Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia; Materials and Applications, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; IkoIko Los Angeles, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The National Centre for Contemporary Arts,Yekatirenburg, Russia; Elfriede Jelinek International Conference, Berlin,Germany. Yelena hosts a monthly radio show on K-Chung Radio. She has directed music videos for Julia Holter, Craft Spells, Henry Wolfe, and Jena Malone. She also engineered miniature architectural disasters for How are you Doing?,directed by Michel Gondry for Living Sisters. Zhelezov serves on the Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission of West Hollywood, and is a recipient of the 2011-2013 Six Points Fellowship. The Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists is a program of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, originally founded in partnership with Avoda Arts and JDub. The Six Points Fellowship LA Cohort is made possible through major funding from The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, and the Righteous Persons Foundation. Actual Size 741 New High Street Los Angeles CA 90012 • Tel: (213) 290-5458 • info@actualsizela.com

Julie Heffernan "Sky's Falling" and Jean-Pierre Roy "Terraformer" at Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City, California

Mark Moore Gallery is proud to present Sky’s Falling, an exhibition of paintings by New York artist, Julie Heffernan. Marking the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, Sky’s Falling showcases the latest incarnations of an ongoing oeuvre of distinctive self-portraits in which quite interior worlds of personal symbolism are made exterior allegories. Despite their autobiographical quality, Heffernan's images proffer a larger discourse concerning our anthropocentric worldview – a sociopolitical attitude that has resulted in an ecological clash with nature. 

As with her previous self-portraits, Heffernan’s recent paintings function as metaphors of a surrogate-self, engendering both the intimate world of the psyche, as well as the societal undercurrents of the present moment. Heffernan’s tableaux are rife with idiosyncratic references that draw the eye deep into a cryptic, mythical puzzle of overabundance waiting to be solved. Personal as they may appear, each composition confounds the singular interpretation, inviting the viewer to hypothesize connotations and frameworks uniquely their own. The artist welcomes us to meander about her private world, beckoning us to consider the state of contemporary consciousness - a mindset defined by its break with past certainties as we contemplate how drastically different our world looks from our 21st century vantage point. Unlike the old masters, whose visual vocabulary the artist references stylistically, Heffernan approaches the genres of still life, portraiture, and landscape much in the same way as a surrealist might. Reminiscent of the works of Dorothea Tanning, Heffernan is less as an empiricist or positivist merely recording reality, but more of a surveyor of the subconscious—the definitive architecture of our reality. Simultaneously, this concentration on personal mythos is filled with an impassioned atmosphere, in which an irrepressible force, namely nature, threatens to reclaim its own narrative. The result is an ominous parable, as if from a Grimm's fairy tale, warning us of our follies, and foretelling an apex at which biology and humanity will collide.

Heffernan (b. 1956, Illinois) received her MFA from Yale School of Art (CT), and has been exhibiting widely for the past two decades. Selected exhibitions include those at The Kwangju Biennial (Korea), Weatherspoon Art Gallery (NC), The Me Museum (Berlin), Knoxville Museum Of Art (TN), Columbia Museum Of Art (SC), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), The New Museum (NY), The Norton Museum (FL), The American Academy Of Arts And Letters (NY), Kohler Arts Center (WI), The Palmer Museum Of Art (PA), National Academy Of Art (NY), McNay Art Museum (TX), Herter Art Gallery (MA), Mint Museum (NC), Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VA), and Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK) among numerous others. Her work has also been acquired by many of the institutions listed above.

Mark Moore Gallery
5790 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232

Tel 310 453 3031
Fax 310 453 3831
info@markmooregallery.com

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 11-6, and by appointment daily

"Terraformer," is the inaugural exhibition of paintings by Brooklyn-based artist, Jean-Pierre Roy. Despite his photorealistic prowess, Roy's terrains are sourced from pure imagination – cinematic dystopias through a Dutch Golden Age lens. His Neo-Luminist panoramas engender an ominous tone, a sense of uniquely human ruination evident through melting icecaps, crumbling towers, and purging smokestacks. In this new body of work, Roy considers the beauty in catastrophe, as well as the repercussions of our fallible heedlessness.

Roy's obsessive meticulousness is analogous to the objective of modernized globalization – no canvas remains bare as no frontier remains untouched. His compositional horror vacui is increasingly less science fiction than it is foreshadow, as infinite industrial horizons appear as foreign as sketches of the New World were once perceived. Though his tableaus appear largely unpopulated, Roy uses dilapidated structures and techno-iconography to express a Physicalist paradigm of the world. Alongside the remnants of an imperialist gluttony too large to sustain, Roy introduces a solitary figure of epic proportions – an allegorical projection of the artist himself as a world-building "giant." Drawing upon an art historical lineage, Roy recontextualizes Goya's colossus as a cipher for the insatiable search for ultimate knowledge. His figures underline the sublime and terrifying aftermath of a sociopolitical cupidity. Although he critiques the myth of an all-saving hero, Roy alludes to hope through the drama of a distant rising sun or luminous structures – as though salvation waits at the dawn of a collective enlightenment.

Jean-Pierre Roy (born 1974, Santa Monica, CA) received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art (NY), and has since had solo exhibitions in New York, Seattle, and Chicago. His work has been exhibited at the Hyde Park Arts Center (IL), Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VA), the Neuberger Museum (NY), and the Torrance Art Museum (CA), among others. Roy's work has been acquired by several collections, including the Zabludowicz Collection, Pigozzi Collection, and Fischl Collection. This exhibition marks the gallery's first solo exhibition for Roy. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Pre-Raphaelite Muses: Rossetti's "Lady Lillith"

Model Laura Bailey goes head to head with Rossetti’s famous femme fatale ‘Lady Lillith’, and discusses the endurance of Pre-Raphaelite symbols in contemporary fashion photography.

Pre-Raphaelite Muses: Elizabeth Siddal

Karen Elson compares her own experience of modelling with that of Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal, Millais’s long-suffering model for ‘Ophelia’.

 

Pre-Raphaelite Muses: Christina Rossetti

Model Daisy Lowe explores the role of Christina Rossetti as a Pre-Raphaelite muse and also as a creative force in her own right.




No, Thank You John by Christina Georgina Rossetti
(1830-1894) 
I never said I loved you, John:
Why will you tease me day by day,
And wax a weariness to think upon
With always "do" and "pray"?

You Know I never loved you, John;
No fault of mine made me your toast:
Why will you haunt me with a face as wan
As shows an hour-old ghost?

I dare say Meg or Moll would take
Pity upon you, if you'd ask:
And pray don't remain single for my sake
Who can't perform the task.

I have no heart?-Perhaps I have not;
But then you're mad to take offence
That don't give you what I have not got:
Use your common sense.

Let bygones be bygones:
Don't call me false, who owed not to be true:
I'd rather answer "No" to fifty Johns
Than answer "Yes" to you.

Let's mar our plesant days no more,
Song-birds of passage, days of youth:
Catch at today, forget the days before:
I'll wink at your untruth.

Let us strike hands as hearty friends;
No more, no less; and friendship's good:
Only don't keep in veiw ulterior ends, And points not understood

In open treaty. Rise above
Quibbles and shuffling off and on:
Here's friendship for you if you like; but love,-
No, thank you, John.  

"Christina Rossetti" by John Brett

"

"Ecce Ancilla Domini" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 

Election Day: Art

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