Matthew Porter show to open at M+B Gallery
"Giant" - photograph copyright by Matthew Porter
"Empire on the Platte" - photograph copyright by Matthew Porter
"Summer Reading" - photograph copyright by Matthew Porter
M+B is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Matthew Porter titled High Lonesome, running from December 12, 2009 to January 23, 2010.
The exhibition contains 18 photographs, varying in size and sometimes clustered together in a seemingly inchoate mass. But two themes persist: the American West and the Hindenburg. The show is an attempt at historical mash-up, bringing together romantic imagery of cowboys and zeppelins. Both subjects are iconic, yet their reputations have been soured by facts, as history overtakes myth. The Hindenburg, which began its life as the fountainhead of German creative and entrepreneurial vision, ended in a fiery death under the dark shroud of Nazi propaganda. As a romantic symbol it has been spoiled, much like the history of the American West—you can’t watch The Searchers without being aware of the racism.
While not a direct narrative, the fictional meeting of a cowboy and the Hindenburg after peripatetic wanderings through the desert has the familiar ring of cheap science fiction. Dinosaurs didn’t share the planet with cavemen, but their fictional conflict has been featured in a variety of media. This absurd collision is represented in the cornerstone piece Farewell, Promised Land, a photograph of a few shelves in a personal library; the shelf containing WWII nonfiction bleeds into the shelf containing Western history, while the entire rack is peppered with fiction. Matthew Porter was born in State College, Pennsylvania in 1975. He graduated from Bard College in 1998 and received his MFA from the ICP/Bard Program for Advanced Photographic Studies in New York in 2006 and now resides in Brooklyn. His work has recently been exhibited in New York, Miami and Dallas and featured in the New York Times Magazine, Modern Painters, VMan, and Exit. This is Porter’s first exhibition in Los Angeles and with M+B.
Matthew Porter was born in State College, Pennsylvania in 1975. He graduated from Bard College in 1998 and received his MFA from the ICP/Bard Program for Advanced Photographic Studies in New York in 2006 and now resides in Brooklyn. His work has recently been exhibited in New York, Miami and Dallas and featured in the New York Times Magazine, Modern Painters, VMan, and Exit. This is Porter’s first exhibition in Los Angeles and with M+B.
M+B Gallery is located at 612 North Almont Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90069
High LonesomeExhibition Dates: December 12, 2009 – January 23, 2010
Artist’s Reception: Saturday, December 12, 7 – 9 pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm, and by appt.
For more info, please contact Shannon Richardson at M+B at (310) 550 – 0050 or shannon@mbfala.com
By Jim McKinniss
Gallery 478 to exhibit photos by Gil Garcetti
Photo copyright by Gil Garcetti
Gallery 478 is pleased to present EXCERPTS: [FROZEN MUSIC] & IRON, The Photographs of Gil Garcetti. The show runs December 3, 2009 – February 27, 2010
An Artist’s Reception will be held Saturday, December 5, from 4 – 7 PM.
Rare it is when a high profile ex-politico makes his or her mark anywhere other than as the subject of tabloid pages or as a defendant in criminal court. As of this writing, Gil Garcetti has avoided such pratfalls. Quite to the contrary, Garcetti has quietly built himself a reputation as a photographer of considerable merit. The works in the exhibition reveal a documentarian with a discernable aesthetic working in the best tradition of the genre. EXCERPTS … provides the viewer with a sampling from his first two photo books.
IRON: ERECTING THE WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL, records the assembly of the skeletal guts of Frank Gehry’s eccentric, complex architecture.
Capturing the near magical accomplishment of skilled union ironworkers, their relationship to the work and to one another, IRON renders transparent the hidden truth of all architectures – that it’s built from the inside out. The quiet drama of these populated images are treated to the same eye that so skillfully celebrates the lyrical dynamism of the concert hall’s finished skin celebrated in [FROZEN MUSIC].
Gil Garcetti’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad, including the United Nations, NYC, Millennium Art Museum, Beijing, China, UCLA Fowler Museum, Peter Fetterman Gallery, and G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles, among others.
For images or additional information, please call 310-732-2150.
Gallery 478 is located at 478 W. Seventh St.
San Pedro, CA 90731
By Jim McKinniss
Asako Narahashi at Rose Gallery in Bergamot Station
ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Asako Narahashi. This presentation unites three bodies of her work: her most recent works of a somber and partially-gutted Dubai, her hauntingly beautiful water shots along Japan’s coastline, and her earliest black and white street photography, which is being shown in the west for the first time.
The exhibition is titled “Coming Closer and Getting Further Away”.
Dates of the show are 14 Novemer 2009 – 30 January 2010
The artist will join us for a reception and book signing Saturday 23 January 2010, 6 to 8 pm
Asako Narahashi began experimenting with photography as a member of Daido Moriyama’s group Photo session in the mid-1980s, photographing street scenes of her native Japan. She established the private gallery 03FOTOS to display her work in 1990 and then published her first book, NU-E, in 1997, followed by FUNICULI FUNICULA in 2003. These early photographs reflect her roots as a member of Moriyama’s photography group, yet they hint at the unique sense of distance and the unnerving acknowledgment of human frailty that her later work expands upon. Haziness and shadows spill over these images like liquid, and the rare human subject is partially obscured, blurred, or tiny and insignificant in the distance.
In 2007, Nazraeli Press published Asako Narahashi’s half awake and half asleep in the water, a series of photographs of the Japanese coastline. In this series, she inverts the composition of the traditional, harmonious coastal shot by capturing the images from offshore, while partially submerged in the water. Suspended between enchantment and unease, this jarring perspective suggests that we are either clinging to the back of a sea creature or drowning, struggling for one final, desperate glimpse of land. All indications of civilization are minute and inconsequential in the distance, hopelessly far away and dangerously close to being engulfed by water. With a murky palette of blues, grays, and browns, Narahashi intensifies the disquieting uncertainty conveyed by this fragile balance between the remote signs of earth and the inescapable waves looming in the foreground.
Narahashi’s photographs of Dubai similarly convey a foreboding sense of ambiguity. Again, we are confronted with a chilling acknowledgment of man’s inability to create permanence when faced with the vast and powerful forces of the natural world. In her disorienting images of construction sites, it is difficult to discern whether the buildings are being demolished or built, but it is clear that their brief life span is inconsequential to the vast expanse of arid soil beneath them, which – like the ocean – existed long before us and will continue to exist long after we are gone.
Narahashi’s work is currently being exhibited as part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Photography Now: China, Korea, Japan. She was also included in the 2008 exhibition at the International Center for Photography in New York, Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan. Her work is held in such permanent collections as the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She was the 2008 recipient of the Higashikawa Photography “Domestic Photographer” Award.
Asako Narahashi Coming Closer and Getting Further Away will be on view from 14 Novemer 2009 through 30 January 2010. ROSEGALLERY is located in the Bergamot Station Arts Center at 2525 Michigan Avenue, Gallery G-5, Santa Monica, CA 90404. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm.
For more information, please contact us at 310.264.8440 or
By Jim McKinniss
Exhibition Opportunity at OCCCA
The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art is offering an open call invitation to exhibit your work. OCCCA has a fabulous space, and its openings are very well attended. Up to 1,200 people come through in a single night. The exhibit is called By The Running Foot, a reference to the cost per size of the work to enter the show. You can find details on OCCCA’s website (link below). Scroll down to By The Running Foot.
http://www.occca.org/exhibitions.html
By Gina Genis
The End of Film – Exhibit at CMP
California Museum of Photography is exhibiting “The End of Film, a Brief History of Digital Cameras, 1987-2009″ through January 30, 2010.
The exhibit includes digital cameras beginning with Casio’s 1987 VS-101 .28 mp, which digitized video signals rather than capturing a still image. It holds the esteemed label of being the first digital camera used by fine art photographers.
The first truly still image camera on display is Kodak’s DCS-100 from 1991. It boasted 1.3 mp, weighed 20 pounds, and cost a mere $13,000.00.
Fast forward to 2009. Multi media is calling, and the exhibit ends with the Canon 5D Mark II. This camera is capable of capturing stills with 21 mp and can take 1920×1080 HD video for up to 45 minutes.
I am in awe of the newest versions of digital cameras, but walking through this show only makes me wonder how obsolete they will be in another decade. I hope CMP has a second exhibit of the history of digital cameras in 2019 so we can be wistfully nostalgic once again.
http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/
California Museum of Photography
3824 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501 951 784-FOTO
by Gina Genis
Gina Genis exhibiting at the Women’s Club of Hollywood
© 2009 Gina Genis
Gina Genis will be exhibiting one of her photo collages at the Women’s Club of Hollywood. The exhibit will be for one night only, Sunday, November 22, with a reception from 5-9 p.m. The following is from a press release for the exhibit:
Genis’ work combines the most exceptional elements of nature and technology. Using a camera and software processing systems, a squirrel jaw bone found in the forest becomes an abstracted pattern of delicate beauty. This beauty, however, barely masks a strong presence of danger. The raw elegance of an animal skull reminds us of the tenuous nature of our existence, but through Genis’ photography, celebrates and memorializes life.
The Women’s Club of Hollywood is located at:
1749 N La Brea Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90046-3009
(323) 876-8383
Eleven Photo Exchange members selected for 2009 Irvine Fine Arts All Media show
Image copyright by Irvine Fine Arts Center
Photo Exchange members Charles Benes, Ellen Butler, Stan Kuran, Janos Lanyi, Manuel Martinez, Jim McKinniss, Hal Myers, Anne Marie Rousseau, Barbara Ruffini, Barbara Runge, and Larry Vogel are 11 of the featured artists in the 2009 All Media show at the Irvine Fine Arts Center.
The Irvine Fine Arts Center is located at 14321 Yale Ave. , Irvine, CA 92604
Exhibition dates are November 20, 2009 – January 16, 2010
Exhibition Opening Reception & Awards Ceremony: Friday, November 20
Reception: 5 – 8pm, Awards Presentation: 6:30pm
http://www.cityofirvine.org/cityhall/cs/finearts/default.asp
By Jim McKinniss
Tiffany Trenda multi-media exhibition at Frank Pictures Gallery
"Condemned Opera" copyright by Tiffany Trenda
Frank Pictures Gallery is proud to present SPECULAR, an exhibition of photographs, light boxes and performance by LONDON INTERNATIONAL CREATIVE COMPETITION Artist of the Year, TIFFANY TRENDA. A young, Malibu based artist, Trenda’s beautiful, surreal performances have been called spellbinding and fascinating as she mesmerized critics and collectors as the highlight of Photo LA, Photo Miami for Art Basel, the Malibu Contemporary Art Fair, LA Center of Digital Art and at her solo performance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has also exhibited at Robert Berman Gallery, Farmani Gallery, Highways, and Track 16. She received her BFA from Art Center College of Design and will be finishing her graduate work at UCLA Design and Media Arts. “With my work I am challenging our senses, our mental representations and the relationship we bear to media. I am interested in how we are psychologically affected by the digital world with the constant flux of information. Can our minds handle more and more of imagery representation and digital dialogues?” says Trenda of the recent performance piece that landed her on the cover of The Malibu Times, “with my work I use a lot of bipolar concepts: past and future, death and life, organic and inorganic. More and more we are cross breeding our media and information. The work is about man vs. machine. But can man survive its own creation?”
| Click Here to View Work by Tiffany Trenda |
Frank Pictures Gallery is located in Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, CA 90404
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 8th 6:30pm – 9:30pm
Exhibition Dates: November 7, 2009 – January 2, 2010
RSVP to 310.828.0211 / laurie@frankpicturesgallery.com
By Jim McKinniss
Two new exhibitions of nature photography at G2 Gallery
"Aspen Grove" photo copyright by Robert Turner
"Spanish Shawl" photo copyright by Nick Fash
G2 Gallery in Venice, CA is currently hosting two exhibitions which highlight the works of nature photographers Robert Turner and Nick Fash.
The Turner exhibition is called “Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light” . Robert’s body of work to date is a stunning collection of photographs that, in his words, “will inform the soul and convey my deep belief in the fundamental value of wild places.”
From the Pacific Northwest to the Great Smoky Mountains and the canyon lands of the Colorado Plateau to the hardwood forests of Maine, this exhibition captures both the grandeur and intimacy of North America’s precious wild lands. His large, strongly composed prints communicate the moods of rare moments, both intimate and grand, captured across the continent in his pursuit of the light on the land. Robert’s ever-watchful lens has isolated remarkable instants in time–at the edge of a storm, after a rain, in the afterglow of sunset–when light upon the land intensifies color to almost magical proportions.
The Turner exhibit closes on Sunday, November 8.
Nick Fash is featured in ”Nature LA”, an ongoing series of nature and wildlife photography solo exhibitions by Los Angeles area photographers that will rotate monthly. The exhibitions will provide an opportunity for up-and-coming nature and wildlife photographers from Los Angeles to showcase their work. All proceeds from each show will benefit an LA based environmental charity.
Nature LA brings into focus the work of an individual photographer based in the Los Angeles area whose passion is shooting in nature. Each participant’s unique perspective as urban environmentalist and as artist raises a specific concern brought to the fore by the verity of conservation photography. With this new venture, the G2 Gallery hopes to tap into a growing segment of the population interested in change at a grassroots level.
Nature LA: Nick Fash will be on view October 20–November 20, 2009. An artist’s reception will take place November 6 at 6pm, coinciding with Abbot Kinney First Friday.
The G2 Gallery (www.theg2gallery.com)
1503 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291-3742
Tel. 310.452.2842, E-mail info@theg2gallery.com
By Jim McKinniss
Three Photo Exchange members to participate in 2nd City Council celebration of Dia de los Muertos
"Frieda Speaks" copyright by Richard Ostrowski
"Death's Sales Pitch" copyright by Stan Kuran
"Waiting for an answer" copyright by Emanuel Dale
Photo Exchange members Emanuel Dale, Stan M. Kuran, and Richard Ostrowski will have work featured in this year’s event at 2nd City Council gallery in Long Beach, California.
2nd City Council is honored to participate in a traditional neighborhood celebration of Dia de los Muertos. Each year, our neighbors’ apartment complex and beautiful courtyard becomes a magical place where altars, candlelight, marigolds, dancing and live music fills the air. The gallery hosts a Dia de los Muertos exhibition and our garden is transformed with altars, calacas, art workshops and delicious food. Our two spaces are linked by gates that open wide to encourage an exchange of culture, art, tradition and friendship.
There is an artist reception on Saturday, November 7, 2009 from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Please join us in this joyous celebration Sat., October 31, 2009 – Dec. 3, 2009
2nd City Council gallery is located at 435 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90802
(562) 901-0997
email: 2ndcitycouncil@earthlink.net
web: http://www.2ndcitycouncil.org/
Jim McKinniss
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