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7/11/2014

Bruce Conner

Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

Kohn Gallery is pleased to present Bruce Conner: Crossroads, on view November 8 through December 20, featuring the iconic 1976 short film of declassified footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test. The fully restored 36-minute film, with original music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley, was last seen in a single screening last fall at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the exhibition at Kohn Gallery returns the film to the West coast. In addition to the film, a selection of Conner's drawings focused similar themes of destruction and resurrection, created between 1962 and 2004.

On July 25, 1946, "Operation Crossroads" detonated "Baker," the first underwater atomic bomb test, 909 feet under Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The bomb forever altered the course of human events and yielded a horrific vision of the apocalypse as documented by more than 700 cameras on ships, on land, and in the air. Nearly half the world's supply of film was at Bikini Atoll for these tests, making these explosions the most thoroughly photographed moment in history.

Conner selected 27 individual shots from declassified US government footage of this event from the National Archives to transform the images of nuclear holocaust into hypnotic abstraction. "Whether in film, sculpture, photography or drawing, Bruce Conner has been a role model for younger artists for at least two generations," says Michael Kohn, Conner's dealer for the last 25 years and expert on his work. "The mesmerizing quality of the repetitive film edits in films like CROSSROADS is a direct influence on artists from Dennis Hopper to Christian Marclay. And Conner's polymathic approach to art making is discovered by each generation of new young artists."

Accompanying Crossroads is a group of works on paper that date from 1955 to 2004 by Conner. These drawings not only relate symbolically to the film, as in Mushroom (1962), but also in the range of emotional depth of the varying works. The mushroom image recurs in a number of drawings from the early '60s, most likely because of the artist's admiration for the secret, complex growth of this fungal form.

The notion of great knowledge and wisdom contained within, be it a fungus or a nylon-veiled assemblage, is a consistent theme in Conner's works. In an untitled work from 1963 a labyrinthine and dense series of black lines simultaneously resembles a thumbprint and a black hole of space; in an inkblot drawing from 1995 the small mirrored shapes recall the self-reflective quality of fleeting images of inner thought. Other drawings in the exhibition from the "Falling Leaves" series, created soon after 9/11 in 2001, show the fragility of nature in the face of human borne disaster. The pathos of these works on paper is poignantly close to that elicited by CROSSROADS.

Opening reception: Saturday, November 8, 6–8pm

Kohn Gallery
1227 N. Highland Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90038
Hours:
Tuesday - Friday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Saturday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.

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