Joe Sola
dal 26/11/2010 al 17/12/2010
Segnalato da
26/11/2010
Joe Sola
Motinternational, London
Talking About My Drawings with Escorts. Continuing his mining of the apocalyptic nature of masculinity as it is constructed through Hollywood, Sola's drawings of perverse puritan hats, tic-tac-toe with cocks and balls, seem to suggest that we are all 'totally fucked'.
For his performance Talking About My Drawings with Escorts, Los Angeles based artist Joe Sola will perform a walk-through of his roughly rendered coloured pencil drawings on paper with two hired escorts in tow. The escorts, not having seen the work prior to this first encounter will pose questions to the artist about his works with titles including Totally Fucked Button, Inmates Waiting for Visitation, and Take Me to Your Gay Bar . The artist's and escorts' conversation will create a specialized discourse around art making, process and the pleasure of the dissemination of meaning. Continuing his mining of the apocalyptic nature of masculinity as it is constructed through Hollywood, Sola’s drawings of perverse puritan hats, tic-tac-toe with cocks and balls, and a land mover shoveling art history into a ditch, seem to suggest that we are all ‘totally fucked’.
For his last solo show in London Sola filled a gallery with shirtless male fashion models whom he hired to make conceptual art. Given only the instruction to use all of the materials available and to work for a prescribed period of time, the content of the work-within-the-work was devised entirely by the models themselves, who thus became artists, while still maintaining their status of eroticized object in front of the viewers gaze.
When it comes to the work of Sola, the audience is subject to a bolt from the blue. Whether Sola is leaping out of his studio window mid conversation or being tackled by audience members and hung by his underwear on a hook in the gallery wall, his work induces in the viewer a jubilant yet uncomfortable laughter.
Joe Sola’s recent solo exhibitions include I found some Bic pens by the railroad tracks at The Happy Lion, Los Angeles (2010), Male Fashion Models Make Conceptual Art at Hilary Crisp Gallery, London (2008) and New York Mega Millions and other work, at Bespoke Gallery (2008), New York. Sola’s work has been included in Hard Targets: Masculinity and American Sport at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH(2010), Vancouver Biennale, Vancouver, BC, Canada(2009-2011), Dark Mirror: Artists Videos at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007), Reckless Behavior at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2006), Taking a Bullet at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles (2005) and The California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach(2002).
2010 will be slightly different at MOT International, in that under the umbrella of a one-year experiment, the gallery will dispense with conventional programming. It is intended that through this abandonment of traditional exhibition programming the gallery will be able to react to ideas from artists and curators almost immediately, with projects merging and usurping each other in a free-form reaction to current ideas edited by the director. This means that projects do not have to fit into traditional exhibition timescales, they can collide, interact and even cancel each other. The most interesting works supersede their successors. Works can come and go over the year.
Opening Saturday, November 27, 2010, 6-8
Performance at 7
Mot International
8 Andrews Road (Unit 54/5th floor Regents Studios), London
Open Tuesday - Saturday 11 - 6 and by appointment