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14/9/2007

Group Show

Laxart, Los Angeles

Michael Queenland, Francesca DiMattio, Alexander May

LAXART is pleased to present the Los Angeles debut of Michael Queenland's The MORL or NYC-Apartment. For this ambitious project, Queenland has restaged and examined the logic of museological display and the phenomena of kitsch by transforming the space of the gallery into that of a Wunderkammer. Resembling a wide-ranging accumulation of natural curiosities, cultural ephemera, and decorative sculpture, The MORL or NYC-Apartment functions as both a simulated domestic space and site of resonance and wonder, proposing a sustained interaction with both the refined and the banal. The staging of found and composed objects within this context furthers Queenland's interrogations of sculptural fixity and the limitations of medium-specific modes of signification, while continuing to engage questions around the cyclical relationship between photography and sculpture.

The project references the Museum of Romantic Life, a mansion in Paris that, since 1987, has housed the personal effects of the French novelist George Sand. For The MORL or NYC-Apartment, the floor plan of Queenland's New York railroad apartment has been installed and presented as a theatricalized set in which domestic, commercial, and cultural spaces reside in tandem. Conceived as a collection in itself, the domestic setting within The MORL or NYC-Apartment becomes a seamlessly integrated space of performance and theatre. By the conflation of this historical institution with the objects and layout that make up Queenland's New York apartment, the artist's deployment of a disparate array of cultural artifacts interrogates the relationship between modes of preservation and the symbolic nature of objects.

Michael Queenland received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002, and has since exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions. In 2005, the exhibition Michael Queenland: Photographs, Sculptures, and Shaker Classics traveled to both the Institute of Contemporary Art t the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2006, he was named a United States Artists Fellow. From 2004 to 2005, he served as a resident artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent exhibitions include Happenstance at Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York, Civil Restitutions at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Trace at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria in New York, and Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

LAXART GALLERY TWO

Francesca DiMattio: Unhinged
Curated by Jeffrey Uslip
September 15, 6pm
CAMPARI and LAXART present Campari Talks: Francesca DiMattio and Art Critic Jori
Finkel in Conversation
Please RSVP to 310.943.9236
Must be 21 and over to attend

For Francesca DiMattio's solo Los Angeles debut, LAXART is pleased to present Unhinged, a large scale, eight-panel, site-specific painting installation based on Los Angeles' distinctive modular architecture. Consisting of a 28-foot horizontally configured painting, as well as an additional 12-foot painting in the gallery's adjacent corner, the monumental scale and dense layers that make up Unhinged move the work beyond the limits of painting to provide a stunning and resonate environment.

Paired with DiMattio's renderings of a fragmented visual space, the modularity of the canvases that make up the installation heighten the artist's investigation of surface tension and the anti-decorative. The paintings that make up Unhinged suture modernist architectural spaces with disparate cultural debris. DiMattio reconfigures her subject matter into webs of detritus; human limbs, dead birds, butterfly wings, urban scaffolding, American lace and quilt patterns, derelict architectural frameworks, public and private housing and domestic furniture dynamically collide to comprise her tightly woven compositions.

New York based painter Francesca DiMattio received her BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from Columbia University in 2005. Recent exhibitions include Salon 94 in New York (2006), November at Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York (2006), The Manhattan Project at Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2006), First Look at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York (2005) and Paradise Lost at Marvelli Gallery, New York (2005).

LAXART WINDOW

Alexander May: Light Echo
Curated by Aram Moshayedi
LAXART's ongoing series of window projects is pleased to present a sculptural installation entitled Light Echo by Los Angeles based artist Alexander May. Culling from interests in geological systems of representation, the occult, and topographic networks, May's project centers upon a found stained glass window, recently discovered by the artist on the beaches north of Malibu. In the context of LAXART's window project, the once decorative and ornamental object is here employed to treat an ominous light as a shifting object within the gallery's office interior. The window-within-a-window aesthetic performed by this project highlights the function of light within architectural space, and enables the lustrous, discarded object to suggest a dynamic and material presence of natural phenomena.

Alexander May currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006, and has exhibited throughout Chicago since 2004. Light Echo is the artist's Los Angeles gallery debut.

LAXART OUTDOOR INSTALLATION BY MARA LONNER

Concurrently on view at LAXART is a site-specific installation in the gallery's foyer by Los Angeles based artist Mara Lonner. Conceived as an extension of LAXART's Public Art Initiatives, Lonner's installation uses plaster and binding compound to build upon Mark Bradford's original intervention entitled Volver that has occupied the gallery's entranceway since November 2006. As part of an ongoing series, Lonner's project was selected by Bradford as the first in many to take place within this highly visible and public site.

About LAXART

Responding to Los Angeles' cultural climate, LAXART questions given contexts for the exhibition of contemporary art, architecture and design. With a renewed vision for the potential of independent art spaces, LAXART provides a center for interdisciplinary discussion and interaction and for the production and exhibition of new exploratory work. LAXART offers a space for provocation, dialogue and confrontation by practices on the ground in LA and abroad. LAXART is a hub for artists based on flexibility, transition, spontaneity and change. The space responds to an urgency and obligation to provide an accessible exhibition space for contemporary artists, architects and designers.

LAXART's programs are made possible with the generous support of the The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Campari, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Eileen Harris Norton, Nelson Buxton Collection, Harris Lieberman Gallery, Daniel Hug, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Dennis and Debra Scholl, Lisa Schiff, Karen Ma, Ben Spector, Donanne Kasicki and LAXART founding patrons and sponsors.

Opening: September 15, 7 - 9pm

Laxart
S. La Cienega 2640, Los Angeles
Admission Free

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