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21/1/2011

Geoffrey Todd Smith - Margie Livingston

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Santa Monica

GEOFFREY TODD SMITH: “Casual X”

Luis De Jesus is very pleased to present GEOFFREY TODD SMITH in his first solo exhibition at the gallery, titled “Casual X”", on view in Gallery 2 from January 22 through February 26, 2011. An artist’s reception will be held on Saturday, January 22nd, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.

Geoffrey Todd Smith explores the impossibility of achieving a purely abstract image. For this upcoming exhibition, Todd–Smith has created a group of mixed media paintings on panel which employ the letter X within their composition. As X, with its multiple cultural interpretations, is manipulated through a variety of color relationships and varying prominence, each painting is given a personality and mood of its own. Each work begins with a default position of gridded shapes and is often adorned with a horror vacui of zigzags. Employing this limited vocabulary, he delineates a seemingly impenetrable field of optical buzz. This collaboration between Todd Smith’s rhythmic mark making and seductive color arrangement reveals alternating moments of depth and flatness, leaving the viewer with a dizzying trail of clues to the artist’s mindset and influences.

Though primarily abstract, Geoffrey Todd Smith’s work draws heavily from personal visual experiences. The paintings evoke moments from pop culture, recent art history, and activities from his life such as video games, jigsaw puzzles, doodling, fashion, wall paper, sticker collections, board games, soccer balls, nature documentaries&mdashjust about anything that he has found visually stimulating. These varied moments are absorbed into memories and are reinvented as abstract visual hybrids. Furthermore, the titles given to each work provide insight into his thought process but rarely reveal the entire story. They are intended to capture a certain rhythm, cadence or mood.

Born in 1973, Chicago–based Geoffrey Todd Smith has been called one of the "rising stars we should be collecting now" by Chicago Magazine. His work is included in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, including Microsoft Corporation, Hallmark Inc., and the Jager Collection in Amsterdam. He received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from Northern Illinois University. Recent solo exhibitions include the 2009 NADA Art Fair, Miami; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; Main Gallery, Las Vegas; and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Group exhibitions include Baer Ridgeway Gallery, San Francisco; Columbia College; Chicago; Fecal Face Dot Gallery, San Francisco; and The Northern Illinois Art Museum, DeKalb, IL, among others.

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MARGIE LIVINGSTON: “Paint Objects”

Luis De Jesus is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by MARGIE LIVINGSTON, titled “Paint Objects”, opening January 22 through February 26, 2011. An artist’s reception will be held on Saturday, January 22nd, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. This will be the artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.

Margie Livingston has long been admired for her abstract paintings that articulate the interaction between the architectural grid and the natural, organic world. Based on three–dimensional models that she builds in the studio, her paintings directly translate the phenomena of space, light, color and gravity upon these hybrid structures into lines and bands of color that hang seemingly suspended in space. Now, letting accident and discovery meet invention and experimentation, Livingston reverses her usual process, using paint to construct objects. Her new paint objects—built entirely from dots, strips, and skins of dried acrylic pigment—investigate the properties of paint pushed into three dimensions and offer a compelling view into how the medium of paint can be used sculpturally. With this major transformation of her practice Livingston has moved away from working with the illusion of space and toward working with literal space, constructing objects that straddle two media—painting and sculpture.

Experimentation drives Margie Livingston’s work, sometimes by accident or serendipity. For example, when a paint skin detached itself from the wall where it was being used to test an adhesive, she picked it up and folded it like a piece of laundry. That mishap became Folded Painting, Small (2009)—the first in a series. The simple domestic act of folding these swaths of marbled color allows the object to flux between finished product and waiting–to–be–used resource.1 And when another work in progress turned out to have too many cracks, she set it aside until it occurred to her that she could approach it as if it were a piece of wood and shape it into a cube. The result was the first work in her "paintblock" series. Livingston literally pours gallons of paint out in sheets and lets them dry for days, like so much acrylic fruit leather.

Each layer is made of several gallons of acrylic paint, poured, splashed, dripped, and formed in an expressionistic manner.2 Attention to fleeting impressions and associations also has its place, as when Livingston noticed her eye being drawn more to the drops of paint on her studio floor than to the canvas she was painting. This observation eventually led to Room (2008), a single continuous row of more than 3,000 paint drops lined up and glued at eye level all around the walls of the gallery. Although Room is a two–dimensional painting, it had the effect of turning the gallery itself into a painting that the viewer could enter and walk through. Livingston will present the second iteration of Room is this exhibition.

As Livingston makes new work and incubates new ideas about painting and sculpture, she often does so in dialog with other artists. Her paintblocks are a riff on the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Charles Ray, and her folded and coiled paintings offer a nod to the sculpture and studioworks of Linda Benglis and Eva Hesse, and even Barnett Newman. But these new pieces also subvert, challenge, and recontextualize the works of those artists. Although the paintblocks may look like wooden sculptures, they are actually objects made from acrylic. And even the scraps left over from cutting the paintblocks have their uses—Livingston reconstitutes them as flat shapes reminiscent of waferboard. Thus, her images, rooted in process and conceptual reference, are depictions of raw materials that hold the potential for becoming still other artworks.3

Equally fascinating is how Livingston subsumes and feminizes traditionally macho art traditions, particularly those of abstract expressionism and minimalism. The image of Livingston heaving paint onto the floor inevitably brings to mind Jackson Pollock. A difference here is that after producing nearly a dozen of these canvas–free paintings, Livingston literally obliterates each one by rolling it up and then slicing the log into lengths. The gesture of individual expression is sliced by machinery; layers of accident, collaboration, and culinary skills draw attention away from the hand of the artist and towards the process itself while, at the same time, the object is clearly a finished product with presence.4

Margie Livingston received her M.F.A. in painting from the University of Washington in 1999 and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2001, during which time she spent a year living and working in Berlin. Other awards include the 2010 Neddy Fellowship from the Benkhe Foundation and the 2010 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust (funded by the Chihuly Foundation), a 2008 Artist–in–Residence at the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, and the 2006 Betty Bowen Memorial Award. She has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Greg Kucera Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, SOIL Gallery, Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, and Amerika Haus–Berlin, among others. Margie Livingston’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and numerous prominent private and public collections.

1-2 Jeannie R. Lee, ArtScene Preview: Margie Livingston, January 4, 2011.
3 Noah Simblist, An Archaeology of Practice: The Object of Paint(ing) in the Contemporary Sublime, “Margie Livingston: Paint Objects,” exhibition catalog, published by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, 2011.
4 Jeannie R. Lee, ArtScene Preview: Margie Livingston, January 4, 2011.

For further information, please call 310-453-7773 or email gallery@luisdejesus.com.

Image: Geoffrey Todd Smith

Artist Reception: Saturday, January 22, 6–9 PM

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2525 Michigan Avenue, F2, Santa Monica, CA 90404
HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm, and by appointment
free admission

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