Culver, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Parallel City
Ms BarbersAmy Brener, Heather Cook, Shannon Ebner, Joey Frank, Sonja Gerdes, Mark Steven Greenfield, Jay Heikes, Anton Lieberman, Adam Miller, Nikhil Murthy, Brian Randolph Organized by Erik Frydenborg and Nick Kramer Constructed to be an art-city in parallel with this city, Parallel City exists like the cities in books- as a continuous entirety and as a collection of vignettes. Discussion around Plato’s allegory of the cave, Italo Calvino’s invisible Venice, and Thomas Pynchon’s bizzaro California transformed in to a conversation about sight, fingers, politics, and ultimately, subjectivity. Parallel City explores the idea of a city as a model for an art show and finds a collection of bodies. The artists here are the body politic of this very imaginary polis. Dubbed parallel because it is defined by our city (whatever that is) while being fundamentally different- a curatorial overlay that does not aspire to be as a city so much as a running commentary or sidebar on the idea of one. In this construct the artist-citizens play both unique and overlapping rolls as they are drafted into an attempt to imagine a municipal language-thing, a body or architecture. Scaled down and up, renderings of things yet to be and translations of things from before, the works in this show are chosen because they manifest in a gray area of presence. For instance, if you are in a "New York State of Mind" are you in New York? Or, do the borders of Hollywood include every movie theater with or without a 90068 zipcode? Perhaps Parallel City exists as a sub-zip code, please forward mail to -90068.