Culver, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Me, Myself, I
China Art ObjectsMorya Davey LaToya Ruby Frazier Richard Hawkins Heinz Peter Knes Sean Landers Emily Mae Smith Frances Stark Organized by John Morace China Art Object's summer group show Me, Myself, I brings together seven artists who explore ideas of the self as an artistic medium. This group uses the self not only as a subject, as found in self-portraiture or autobiography, but rather as a basic building block to create artistic works. In philosophy and psychology there are clear cut, negotiated ideas of what the self is and how it exists in the world. These negotiated ideas have a history and were developed through the academic process which is one of peer review and consensus. For an artist making physical objects, these definitions frequently can be an uneasy fit. In his monumental canvas We're All, Sean Landers paints a birch tree stand scarred by graffiti. Revealing the artist's inner thoughts as public subject matter, Landers presents the illusion of his stream of consciousness. Yet, these fleeting moments don't rest easily with the lengthy process of creating an intricate representational oil painting. Another example can be seen in the work of Moyra Davey. In this show her photographic works capture the physical accumulations of her intellectual pursuits and personal life that create an impression of peering into the actual workings of her mind. By mailing them in fragments to others, she seems to be deconstructing her past and asking the recipients to project meaning and value on it. Yet when the artist reassembles these parts new meanings open. Making her West Coast premier, 2015 McArthur Fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier uses photography to record the specifics of her life and community in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Through the intensity of the images she chooses to capture, she is able to build a visual conversation about America's past and present while exposing the workings of some of our most fundamental national myths. Richard Hawkins contributes The Mark Hanter Series, a four part work from 1999. This early work explores the idea of internet catfishing as a deceptive construction of persona before the term catfishing existed. In a recent interview with Maurizio Cattelan, Emily Mae Smith described her work as existing in "the disconnect between the way I know/believe the world to be and the way the world is presented to me." In photographer Heinz Peter Knes work, there seem to be flickering moments of internal thought that range from personal amusement, to profound connection, to blind drunkenness. Frances Stark, subject of a recent Hammer Museum survey, creates work that revolves around the use and meaning of language, and the often difficult personal anxieties of translating thought and ideas into a work of art. As part of this exhibition, there will be a screening of Moyra Davey's acclaimed 60 minute narrative video work Les Goddesses at 356 S. Mission Road on July 28th, 2016 at 8PM which was included in the Guggenheim's recent exhibition Photo-Poetics. John Morace is a local collector, former longtime chair of the Drawing Acquisition Committee at Moca, LA and founding member of the Mountain School of Art.