Friday Opening - Transplants @ This

Catch the opening Friday of a show of work by LA Transplants at This Gallery in Highland Park.

Participating artists:

Adam Amengua
Aaron Farley
Amanda Friedman*
Sian Kennedy
Liz Kuball*
Chris McPherson
Scott Pommier
Ryan Schude*
Emily Shur*
Claire Weiss
Jeremy Weiss

*Previously featured on WCST

Friday, April 30, 7-10 pm
5906 N. Figueroa St.
Los Angeles, CA 90042.

Weekend

So I'm sick as a dog but crawled out of bed to point out a few photo events happening this weekend. I only wish I were in shape to attend.

Check out the MOPLA calendar for Fresh Fairs on Saturday.

Saturday is also the opening of the Catherine Opie show at Regen Projects from 6-8. If you were wondering how to write a statement for what amounts to a series of sunset and sunrise photos as far as I can tell, here's how:

In the summer of 2009, Opie traveled aboard a container ship en route from Korea to Long Beach. She documented the voyage in a series of time-based photographs that captured each sunrise and sunset for the ten-day duration of the trip. The works are composed with equal registers of water and sky, broken by a thin center horizon line. This is a format Opie also used in her iconic Icehouses (2001) and Surfers (2003) series. These segmented panoramic landscapes capture the point where sky and water meet. Articulated in the title of the exhibition, the twelve-mile distance between the artist and horizon evokes notions of time, place, solitude, elusiveness, and possibility. The deliberate framing of each work places the viewer in a precise physical reference point and moment in time. Evoking a formal classicism, these beautifully elegant and masterful compositions immerse and seduce the eye. There are subtleties that reveal in the nuances of the photographs – whisper of color, shimmer of waves, and glimpse of light. These painterly, poetic, and lyrical visions of blue, grey, black, orange, and yellow resonate with oblivion, the sublime, and the unknown.

If you're over at Regen, pop over to Kopeikin for the opening of 4x4: Four Figurative Photographers.

Also at Kopeikin but on Sunday is an all female-focused edition of Slideluck Potshow, called Women's Work. Remember to bring some tasty food. These are a lot of fun.

Confirmed artists include: Lauren Greenfield, Elinor Carucci, Jodi Bieber, Phillip Toledano, Jen Davis, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alicia Ross, Jennifer Shaw, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Alex Prager, Sari Wynne, Michael & Davida Horn, Lynette Astaire, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Angelika Rinnhofer and more.

Here is a good intro on what to expect.

Feature - Ye Rin Mok

Ye Rin Mok's photos have a quiet, sublime sensibility. While portraits are her bread and butter, I thought I'd also show a few landscapes that seem emblematic of Los Angeles.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

In case anyone missed the LA Weekly cover story, Banksy's first film highlighting (trashing?) Mr. Brainwash, titled Exit Through the Gift Shop opens in LA at the Arclight this Thursday.

Details.

Trailer.

Spoiler.

Open Call - GuatePhoto

There's a new photography festival in town. Well, not in our town but in Guatemala City, just a little bit down the coast. GuatePhoto is hoting an open call for entries and the top 15 portfolios will be featured in a show there, with the festival paying for all printing and mounting costs. You know - how a festival should do things. The show will be held at the Museum of Modern Art Carlos Merida from July 6-31, 2010.

The entry fee is just $15 and you can submit anywhere between 5 and 15 photos. The top portfolio wins a grand prize of a camera, printer and a solo show and the top three will be featured in Visura Magazine.

All details here.

Feature - Aline Smithson

I was amazed to realized I had not yet featured today's photographer.

Aline Smithson is an enthusiastic, generous, and important member of our local photographic community. She also runs the excellent Lenscratch blog, which I'm sure you all read regularly. It is with great pleasure that I feature work from her Hollywood at Home and Recreating History series.

Aline's work will be shown at an upcoming show at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston.

Recreating History:









Hollywood at Home:

Le Weekend

Tonight's the PDN 30 group show opening at the Icon from 6-9, which I'll be headed to in 25 min. or so. Expect a photo from each in standard wood frames at 11x14 or so. We know how these things go.

Then, Saturday is the aforementioned Scot Sothern opening at DRKRM.

Also on for Saturday is the Pieter Hugo opening at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Culver City from 5-7. Pieter's all around awesome and he'll be showing his new series on Nollywood - that's right, the Nigerian movie industry.


Copyright Pieter Hugo


After that, there's a show opening at the Loft at Liz's above Liz's Hardware on La Brea, featuring Aline Smithson of Lenscratch and the following photographers also from 7-10pm:

Aline Smithson
Amanda Keller Konya
Franklin Londin
Gwen Samuels
Jad Najjar
Mike Saijo
Willa Mamet
Paul Papanek



There are other things going on of course as part of MOPLA so check out their site if you need more photo fix. (pun intended)

Opening - Scot Sothern's Lowlife @ DRKRM

Copyright Scot Sothern

Scot Sothern's Streetlife opens at DRKRM this Saturday from 7-9pm. He is also an extremely capable writer and you owe it to yourself to head over to ASX and read an excerpt from his forthcoming book and check out more of his work. I guarantee it will draw you in. This is work that can't be made by the faint of heart or stomach (or the sober, maybe). In Scot's words from his blog:

These images, shot mostly in Southern California between 1986 and 1990, record the existence of the many disenfranchised Americans, hawking their souls for the price of a Big Mac and a fix. With these portraits, paragraphs, and full disclosure, I hope to reveal the struggle and never changing plight of the street prostitute, victims of a culture that deems them criminal and expendable.

DRKRM Gallery
2121 N. San Fernando Rd. Ste. 3
Through May 23

Art Pet Peeve

Please, people, stop using the word "subvert" in your artist statements. This is not the French Revolution. Your photos, paintings etc. are not overthrowing or destroying anything.

Feature - Yoko Kanayama

Congratulations to Yoyko Kanayama, a recent CalArts MFA graduate, for an honorable mention in Center's Project Launch competition. Her series, Urban Forestry comprises photos of Ficus Trees around LA. At first glance, they reminded me of Paul Graham's work from American Night but then I asked Yoko to explain her process to me:

What you are looking at are photographs viewed through silk screened Plexiglas. I take the photos with a 4 x 5 color negative and make a traditional c-print. Then I use Rapidograph ink to trace trees from the image on a sheet of Frosted Mylar. From this Rapidograph drawing, I expose the silkscreen and use translucent white ink to make silkscreen prints of trees on the Plexiglas. This process gives the work a little bit of a 3D effect.

Photo Reads

Dalton Rooney started a new blog called Photo Reads, where he lists interesting articles he's found along with an interesting quote or two from each.

This one, from an article he links to over on ASX particularly struck my fancy:

And the viewers, despite any pitfalls or roadblocks put in their way, could still to some extent be there too. This has always struck me as somewhat amazing: That magic little black box enables one to leave, in a small way and for a short while, one’s own time and space and to occupy, maybe only superficially, another time and space: a then and there that really existed as well as a here and now.

- Charles Harbutt

That is exactly what is so magical about photography for me - its ability to transport me to a different reality, if only for a second. This explains why I don't like the vast majority of soft-focus, blurry, grainy or noisy photographs. My eyes don't see that way and thus, I can't believe the photo and experience that jump.

Go take a look at what Dalton's serving up. There's a Twitter account for it too if that's your thing.

Emily Shur in Fraction

Copyright Emily Shur

Local Emily Shur has a great series up in the new issue of Fraction, as well as an interview. Check it out.