Come with me take my hand we will see
Right here now is a place that is free
What you feel to be real is your right
Happiness is hidden in plain sight

Ride the Fantasy is Irvin's second show at WPA and features recent paintings and prints.

The message is mystical, the medium is physical.
Stuff of the earth, depict signs of the birth
of the Aquarian Age.

David Hughes presents his new book, UITOA, as a flat
wall sculpture. Writing of scenes and images projected on and
centered in a fictional apartment represent the domestic space again
as a locus for horror, anxiety and conviviality. Hughes will also be
showing several new woodblock prints and two wooden sculptures which continue the themes of projection and horror.

WPA is proud to present a new exhibition from Tyler Vlahovich.

"My work is an expression of certainty and ambiguity. I mean to link these interests in a practical and accessible way.

My approach is to set in motion a certain kind of tension through the seduction of abundance, inquiry and discovery. I start with the rudiments of composition - volumes, values, lines and their variants - and methodically build toward excess. My aim is to have these straightforward elements spar with the spatial ambiguities they propagate; and, because the repetition and variation of these elements is plain, it quickly becomes a game of how I can relate or cluster them. Somehow a rapport emerges that slows the read of the overall image while leveling a richly charged field to study. The resulting image is intended to be compelling by means of its uncomfortable vagueness. I use contour line as a means to plainly articulate form and space while hinting at figuration. Often the clarity of the line is bent toward misinterpretation. Figuration steps in to maintain a point of reference. Contour lines also suggest a great deal with extreme economy and can easily slip or flash between two and three-dimensional representation. I like how this flux can delay a quick appraisal. And, as the title of the show suggests, I've not only embraced the promising/worrisome paradox of clarity but the attraction has become a calling."
- Tyler Vlahovich

Tyler Vlahovich lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is represented by Feature Inc. in New York, John Tevis Gallery in Paris, TWIG Gallery in Brussels and is an original member of WPA in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include The Cones, John Tevis Gallery (2010) and Feature Inc. (2006). Tyler has been included in shows at the Torrance Art Museum, Luckman Gallery at Cal State University, and Pasadena City College. He has been included in group shows at Leo Koenig Gallery and Anton Kern Gallery in New York; Acme, Cherry & Martin, Mary Goldman Gallery, Cirrus Gallery and Grant Selwyn in Los Angeles; Stalke Galleri in Copenhagen; Atelier Cardenas Bellanger in Paris; Sead Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium and Lemon Sky Projects in Miami.

WPA is proud to present a new exhibition from Henry Taylor,
Couch Paintings.

The couch is the most comfortable seat in Henry Taylor's home. His new exhibition, The Couch Paintings, is a collection of recent acrylic on canvas portraits unified by the common theme of Taylor's couch. It is no coincidence that he has merged his working and living space. As Taylor states, "My home is my studio and my studio, of course is my home. Most of the time I'm alone there working and sometimes I receive visitors and these visitors become subjects." This body of work continues Taylor's commitment to community as subject matter. Taylor's lifeblood is his community. Home, neighborhood, storytelling, memorialization are paramount to him. The checkout person at the local market, friends, family, artists, homeless people, and even an art curator are subjects in this new body of work. Taylor treats them all equally and refuses hierarchical structures that others accept or impose.

Not only does the couch serve as a metaphor for his commitment to community but it also allows for an explorative site into contemporary painting issues. Craftsmanship and capturing likeness, in a more conventional sense, are skewed in these new paintings. In many of the works both the couch and the figures become stand-ins for volume, or simultaneously another image. For instance, in one painting a black man wearing a green party shirt becomes a stand in for a mountain. The couch, at times, doubles as a landscape. It is in the fabric and form of the couch where Taylor's skill as a painter reveals itself. The serial process of creating the successive representations of a singular form reveals his love of painterly experimentation. Taylor explains that, "Sometimes my style is a surprise to me. I am never able to anticipate what any one painting will look like in the end, it may have abstract elements, or it simply may have something totally missing like an arm or an leg which can be the result of any sort of abuse." Unexpected color combinations and confident mark carve out evocative spaces. The paintings transform portraits of friends and family into emotive studies perhaps more revealing of the artist than his subjects.

Taylor refuses traditional standards of beauty and the western Eurocentric use of the gaze in art. "Everybody just looks lovely when you start painting them. I don't know what ugly is. We are all carnal, but for the most part, when you get beyond the carnal, everybody is fuckin' beautiful."

WPA is proud to present )black(, a solo exhibition by John Pearson featuring a new video and selection of photographs.

Both the video and photographs are primarily taken throughout Griffith Park; the observatory, its gallery of dioramas and the figurative sculptures on its grounds, and the nearby quarry tunnels known as Bronson Caves. The photographs are associative observations of phenomena; in combination they are an insight into Pearson's experience of place. They are not a cataloging of the park's sites and landscape. They are distillations of rock, light, dirt, darkness, which reveal both an intuitive fascination with elemental incidents, and an examination of an individual's actual and perceptual place in the world.

When presented in unison the starkness of the black and white photographs along with the layered, color saturated video elaborate an exploration of the dynamics of light to vision. In discussing this work Pearson offers fundamental questions about vision and its dependence on light - What is vision? How do you represent vision? How do you come to terms with the assumptions of vision? Can the camera represent this? How can the camera be more closely aligned with the body?

The silent video 780,000,000 Miles Away adds time, color, and motion to Pearson's observations and experiences. Its title comes from an announcement that Pearson heard while waiting in line to see Saturn through the Griffith Park Observatory's huge telescope. It was the distance that particular night from Earth to the planet Saturn. Among the imagery of this work is footage of the Bronson Caves along with the gouged out eyes of the bronze bust of James Dean on the observatory grounds. Both operate as crude apertures constraining but still receiving light into a sheltered dark interior. This association conveys a sense of the artist's inquiry. Aligning these disparate apertures he evokes bodily vision and creates a direct experience of the perception and sensation of light.

These photographs and video extend beyond explanatory representations, and into propositions that interrogate our assumptions about vision and take pleasure in a base and direct revelry of phenomena. Avoiding a systematic and arbitrary legibility, this work engages a broader capacity of the medium and the viewer in an exploration of the affinities between vision, subject, and mechanical apparatus.

Who's Who in "New Boston", 1932-33 2:52 Legend (Edit), 1994 5:06 RESEARCH, 1995 :55 Johnx3, 1995 1:20
When You Love Someone, 2009 Terri Phillips 1:11 In the Middle of the Night... (announcement, collaboration with Terri Phillips 2009 :27 Sun Zoom Spark (announcement w/ music), 2010 :56
Transcript, 2004 4:31 untitled (white light), 2005 2:39 Untitled with Commercial, 2005 6:39 Ground/Glass, 2008 4:25
Sun Rise Sun Set, 1995 :39 On The Horizon, 1999 1:41 untitled (approach), 1999 1:44 untitled (Eaton), 2008 1:19 Pulse, 2010 1:40
untitled (candle), 2009 :59 Revolution, 2010 2:13
I Will Always Love You, (w/ Michael Mahalchick) 2004 3:51 Power Bromeliad, 2009 3:14 Daylight Landscape, 2001 (TRT 9:19) excerpt 3:31 780,000,000 Miles Away, 2009 6:53

Transcript, 2004 TRT 4:30

Vision is full and unyielding; fueled by sunlight it spreads out effortlessly. And this sunlight fills space inviting views and further distances to the eye. I want to consider a different vision that can occur while writing and drawing; at these times my perspective changes as my attention narrows to the thin black line along the white paper plane. I can remove the pen and the paper and still allow my eye to trace/construct the same trajectory. The thin line made by my eyes changes without the brace of the page. At other times I render a part of the landscape as my eye defines it – the camera shifts from a passive recorder to a more applied marking. The sunlight keeps filling space inviting views and distance but I use the camera to sketch out distinct objects in the landscape instead of resolving each in a broader perspective. How many miles away is the moon from my eyes? And the sun still reveals its presence: a cloudy white, circular point.

untitled (white light), 2005 TRT 2:39 silent

a further investigation of sun/light phenomena - a consideration of a landscape and the point of view it provides or induces - a survey and integration of phenomena into this visual account to provide a shifting sense of space
This was shot with George Raggett at the El Mirage Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert outside of Los Angeles.

Untitled with Commercial, 2005 TRT 6:39

This project explores the relationship of the sun to photography and vision. It is concerned with the phenomena of light as it appears to us in the landscape and photographically. The camera relies on a light source to define information but often when that light source appears in a photograph it registers as an omission of information.
This video was structured for a collaborative exhibition with George Raggett. It was presented as a looped single channel piece on a monitor in a gallery. The commercial marks a break in the sequence of visual explorations while providing a subjective reading of the excitable visuals of advertising narratives.

Ground/Glass, 2008 TRT 4:25

Ground/Glass is an attempt to use a cave as an optical instrument for exploring light and the landscape. Within this cave a person's eyes dilate and adjust to the darkness revealing the character of the cave while simultaneously the view to the outside sunlit landscape appears increasingly obscured, veiled in broad daylight. This video is an exploration of this inversion while considering the austere yet ornate structure of the cave. The imagery is layered with views through broken beer bottle shards and an intermittent 360° pan involving a bicycle wheel that also functions as an audio component.

Sun Rise Sun Set, 1995 TRT :39 silent

After undergraduate school I worked at a stock photography agency. This was before internet business and my job was to maintain a library of 35mm slides. Eventually I took on the responsibility of assigning images to categories: sunset with people, smoking, family eating, exercise, happy, businessman, ... The most popular images were published in glossy color catalogs each year. These catalogs were fascinating, boring, and repulsive.

On The Horizon, 1999 TRT 1:41

Untitled (approach) and On the Horizon attempt to attach the eye to the body. Both videos are from a time when I used a narrow hilltop in Griffith Park as a studio. Primarily the work I did there was photographic and involved the visually broad and physically constrained point of the hilltop as a viewing mechanism
At sunset the street in front of my apartment provides a view of this hilltop I frequented. It is just a point on a huge lumpy black horizon line that is partially comprised of Griffith Park. Usually my time in the park would precede and then carry through sunset. It was an immersion and would probably be better served if this video was titled "In the Horizon," except that "on" can suggest within oneself: You are on drugs.

untitled (approach), 1999 TRT 1:44

After working at the hilltop for a while I was occasionally asked, "What is this place you go to?" and if my answer wasn't adequate, "Where is
it?" I realized my interest was never in documenting the physical appearance of the place. After all this time I really didn't have any photographs that could offer that information. So I decided to go up during broad daylight and make that type of photograph. This video provides a way to answer those questions while folding that type of photograph into the actual space that I spent time in.

untitled (Eaton), 2008 TRT 1:19

The eyeball is a dark gelatinous place that allows light in, into a body that resembles a blind spot. When you try to see the light outside you are bombarded with reflections of objects in your line of vision. This video is an attempt to lessen the role of light as descriptive messenger, to fracture legibility while immersing in a landscape.

I Will Always Love You, 2004 TRT 3:51

On a train trip leaving New York City Michael Mahalchick lip-synched to the memory of a song. Later after returning from our trip he sang the song a cappella. This is an attempt to construct a music video from these two performances.

Daylight Landscape, 2001 TRT 8:48

This video is an attempt to commit the camera to the landscape physically, to link the visual to the tactile while considering two elements of the Los Angeles landscape: sunlight and palm trees. There is a gap between looking at something and being in it, in this case the landscape. This project falls in the midst of the distance that vision/photography assert and presence that the body defines.

Group Show.
August 13th - August 28
Opening TBA

WPA is please to announce a 1 year anniversary Group Show
of WPA members.

Gallery Summer hours:
Open 12-6pm, Friday - Saturday or by appointment.

In conjunction with the second annual PERFORM! NOW! Festival in Chinatown, WPA presents SWAP THING.

This event will feature 15 WPA artists each exhibiting one artwork. These works are available to the public for trade. Exchanged artworks will be immediately installed as part of the exhibition and subsequently available to the public for further exchange. This exchange cycle will begin with the opening reception and continue through the course of the show. There will be no title/artist/price list, only a continuously changing exhibition of works and participating artists.
Anyone is invited to replace an artwork with another artwork of their choice that is of equal or greater value. "Value" is determined by the trader.
All traders will be added to the list of contributing artists.

The WPA artists that will inaugurate the show

Bart Exposito
Adam Janes
Andrew Hahn
David Hughes
Charles Irvin
Pamela Jorden
Michael Minelli
Rachel Neubauer
John Pearson
Terri Phillips
Fil Rüting
Amy Sarkisian
Henry Taylor
Ryan Tomcho
Tyler Vlahovich

Final List of Participants:
Joshua Aster
Ball-Nogues Studio
Kristin Calabrese
Steve Canaday
Juan Pablo Carrillo
Michael Christy
Alice Clements
Alexis Disselkoen
Jackie Dunbar
Karen Dunbar
Bart Exposito
Katy Go
Charles Graybosch
Justin John Greene
Andrew Hahn
Amy Hoffecker
Bettina Hubby
Dave Hughes
Charles Irvin
Adam Janes
Pamela Jorden
Keith D. Kurman
Derrick Maddox
Brian Mann & Dylan Marcus
Michael Minelli
Rachael Neubauer
Miriam Nöske
John Pearson
Terri Phillips
Lauralee Pope
Vincent Ramos
Fil Rüting
Amy Sarkisian
Nizan Shaked
Henry Taylor
Ryan Tomcho
Ian Trout
TRYHARDER
Tyler Vlahovich
Daniel Wheeler
Kent Young & Kevin Young

WPA is please to announce a new show by Adam Janes.
Carpenter's carpenter (plan your escape) is a short film, soundtrack, and installation loosely based on the work of cult movie writer, director, and composer John Carpenter. Though "plan your escape" was taken from the advertising campaign of Carpenter's "Escape From L.A.", most of the project steals its rough structure from Carpenter's first major release "Assault on Precinct 13" which was released the year of the artist's birth, 1976. "Assault on Precinct 13" is an updated version of Howard Hawk's "Rio Grande" in which a lone sheriff holds off an entire gang of ruthless villains with a small band of talented gunslingers and crooners. "Rio Grande" is said to be a allegory for blacklisting in Hollywood, as well as a critique of McCarthyism. For the project at the WPA, a window will be added to the gallery. The artist's short film and soundtrack will be made from the installation process. Carpenter was chosen as the model for the project not only because of his low budget, do-it-yourself simplicity but his relentless obsession with "remakes" and odd pop-cultural cross breeding.

Artist Statement:

I have always been interested in how personal or universal histories manifest themselves in objects and how associative meaning is embedded in form, material, and surface. For the past several years I have been making straightforward sculptural objects that have been caught in the act of morphing between body and product, nature and prop. Through a synthesis of source material, a loose conceptual framework is created and informs the shapes and the palette of the project. However, it is important that these fused sources remain somewhat elusive, allowing the objects and "what they are" to be fluid rather than fixed. A kind of open ended-ness that permits the things I make to remain mysterious, yet not unfamiliar, not predetermined but always in the process of revealing themselves.

Concerns in the more recent work have shifted from earlier ideas of how nature and the body are represented by the manufacturing industry, to notions of how science and technology reshape our world and our sense of what is natural. This inquiry has taken the form of an unabashed pursuit of the sublime in the form of perceptual experiments. And, although I hope the work continues to dazzle and puzzle the viewer as it has in the past, now the surfaces have the potential to tip into a more perceptual space, a deeper space than what is delineated. Static objects with real time reflections collapse two dimensional representations of the here and there to create the sensation of a partial recall. Using the elemental components of our existence, the planets, the moon, the ocean, I am attempting to choreograph a kind of reverie in the space. Glimpses of a life lived are intersected and partially obliterated by the shadows and auras created from the objects placed in front of light sources. The result is a playful yet seductive environment that gives a nod toward fashion as much as it does to the Cosmos.

The title of the show is an abbreviation of a recorded message by Nick Sagan, son of the late Carl Sagan, for the Voyager Golden Record. The gold plated copper records were aboard both Voyager I and Voyager II, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth and are intended for extraterrestrial life or future civilizations, which may find them. At a time when mankind first started exploring the Universe, it was a kind of Noah's Arch and the first moment in history to reach across those distances. Comos, the television series, was a lifetime's worth of thinking by the fearless Sagan. His contributions to mankind were infinite and his research transformed planetary science. In 1990, The Voyager took one last photo It's home planet. Earth appeared as a tiny blue dot in a vast sea of darkness. The social, cultural, and spiritual implications of this upheaval are incalculable. It enabled us to share the dawn of a new consciousness, real time unfolding in the grandeur of the Universe. As I sit alone in my studio, attempting to make something out of nothing, I am comforted by my relationship to the Universe and how I, and others, might better understand our place in it through the work I make.

Rachael Neubauer, 2010.

Sunday 7pm, March 25th.
WPA will present a screening of video work as a closing to the current show.

WPA is proud to present Sun Zoom Spark, featuring work by Julie Becker, Katy Crowe, Pamela Jorden, Alice Könitz, Virginia Holt, and Terri Phillips.

Inspired by movement, magnetism, and the poetic energy of the Captain Beefheart song Sun Zoom Spark; this exhibition is a diverse group of paintings, sculptures, and drawings that generate momentum amongst and beyond themselves.

Does it start at the bottom or does it start at the top?

Organized by Pamela Jorden, the exhibition is inspired by the characteristics of kaleidoscopic vision, the way it dissolves an orientating register, how it alters images with shifting perspective and reflection. Ultimately these qualities demonstrate that visual experience includes objects and the spaces between, with colors and impressions, changing, reconfiguring, affected by circumstance and time.

The work included is all possessed of a tactility and a material immediacy. A beautifully idiosyncratic portrait, a rocket ship, a geometric sculpture, a grouping of mirror drawings, and two abstract paintings, in concert these artworks are a complicated picture, a series of relationships moving and interlocking in dynamic arrangement.

Closing Party and Performance March 20th.
Reception begins at 6pm. Performance commences at 9pm.

‘Introducing Achillia’, written and directed by Andrew Hahn

Achillia ………………………………………… Sarah Tadayon
Countess ………………………………………. Terri Phillips
Militant Girls …………………………………. (TBA)

WPA is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and prints by Andrew Hahn. “Paintings for Achillia” features three oil paintings that continue Hahn’s investigation of the female portrait, but here his ghostly cinematic and disembodied faces achieve a grand scale, and the figurative fragmentation of bound feet shows up in two of the paintings. For Hahn, these works are like film stills from a surrealist movie about a female Achilles, a perversion of the Greek myth, that has yet to be made. The paintings’ surface remains relatively flat, though complex with Hahn’s layering techniques of both scraping wet and sanding dry paint, creating filters and blurred lines, and the occasional element of spray paint, all making the canvases, and the fleshy subject matter, appear attacked.
Like in his earlier series of 50 photo realistic watercolors of crime scenes or his feature-length bio-pic on the Unabomber, these new paintings are about the procedural, assembling clues in a documentary fantasy, privileging fiction over fact. The depths of literature as well as the movement of projected film can be allegorized as a motive for Hahn’s mechanics of painting, wherein he has set up his own classical story of fear and seduction, paranoia and vulnerability.
Also on display is his varicolored collection of ‘Unfinished Girl’ monotypes. In the context of this installation, the artist has referred to these quickly painted and transferred portraits as “a casting call for various Achillias.” The chance blurring and smearing created in the printing process does much of the work in creating the psychological story of his subjects. These prints are installed in the office alongside the same lithographic press from which they were pulled.

Andrew Hahn lives and works in Los Angeles.

WPA is pleased to announce an exhibition by Ryan Tomcho.
"Interrupture" is a collection of canvasses which present nonrepresentation as a space made up of disparate elements, intermingling through a space both flat and illusionistic. Activation is created through the mutual interruption and tension of movements similar, opposing, and nonrelated. The surface isn't just there to expose and exploit the literal material of which it is made, nor is it there to be forgotten. Instead, materials, surfaces, marks and gestures are all represented as illusions of themselves. The surface is in fact a thin layer of pigment applied by a machine. In a sense, the false tactility of the brushmarks heightens their presentness. One moment in time becomes many, orchestrated through a whole which is not unified or singular, but uncertain, irregular, meandering, and unstable.

WPA is pleased to announce a performance
on December 24th from 8:30pm.
featuring:
David Hughes, Derrick Maddox and John Williams.

WPA is pleased to announce an exhibition by David Hughes.
David Hughes’ sculpture is discursive and infused with personal narrative.  His work can be seen as a peculiar kind of storytelling.  In Hughes’ world, the practicality of objects is isolated from both use and subject.  The care is taken in the synthesis of a unique material language, not in the directness of pointing.  His work is at once about the anxiety of effort and the ease of a complex gesture. 
Hughes’ art encompasses everything from performance, sound, video and film, to various forms of painting and drawing, all siphoned through the expanded definition of sculpture; even his writings have a materialist quality.

David Hughes lives and works in Los Angeles.

With the closing of Terri Phillips show we will also be hosting the inaugural WPA Soup Kitchen event.
From 4pm on Saturday Dec 12th.

WPA is proud to present an exhibition of new work by Terri Phillips. “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World’ is an outlandish collection of things, pieces of darkly remembered moments that invite contemplation. Phillips’ describes some of her sculptures as ‘the outside coming in’, a sensation like walking toward the edge of a movie set, toward or away from a suspension of disbelief.

Terri Phillips has exhibited internationally. Originally from Alabama, she now lives and works in Los Angeles.

WPA Screening
Screening this Sunday 15th Nov, 7pm, will be a double-bill screening of Charles Irvin’s ‘Membrane Lane’
and Andrew Hahn’s ‘Manifesto’.Two mind-bending true stories, one night of experimental narrative video at WPA.

‘Membrane Lane’, Charles Irvin, 2009, 31 min.
Presented in the style of conspiracy theory documentaries, Irvin’s ‘Membrane Lane’ places The False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the backlash against progressive movements of the 1960's and 70's. Blind acceptance by many of the mythology of False Memory Syndrome grossly underscores America's culture of denial, fueled by a dangerous fiction that it is exceptional among nations. This belief of American exceptional ism too often keeps citizens from acknowledging and confronting the destructive aspects of culture and society, whether it's our excessive consumption, denial of our racist and violent history or social problems like child abuse.
Produced, written, directed by and starring Charles Irvin.

‘Manifesto’, Andrew Hahn, 2007, 52 min.
Aping the style of tv news docudrama's, “like a self-conscious PBS Frontline episode”, Hahn’s ‘Manifesto’ is a no-budget bio-pic on the American terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, starring David Hughes as Ted. Following the course of his eighteen year bombing campaign against industrial society, we get an askew glimpse into his mind and methods.
Produced, written and directed by Andrew Hahn.

Screening begins at 7pm, Sunday, November 15. WPA, 510 Bernard Street, Chinatown, LA 90012.

WPA is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Fil Rüting,
"Tri Repetae - One 24th of a Second".

*Trichromacy, the condition upon which humans perceive color, is a fundamental exploration point in "Tri Repetae". Sampled from iconic film, the videos and prints in this exhibition contain ghost like figures in shades of red, green, blue, moving within a stationary camera space such as a hallway, trash heap, or skate park. These images hint at a sublime subtext within the original sampled narrative releasing the imagery from the restraints of its linear form, by continuously cutting the frame in overlapping time. One 24th of a second is the time in which a single frame of film is seen; these prints as single frames however implicate the multiple frames found in cinematic film. This literal liberation of image and sound from the formal and conceptual constraints of historical linear filmic space succeeds predominantly though this direct relationship to time. Time is represented as historical form, context, and idea. Rüting’s playful reconstructive approach to sampled cinematic imagery implies a sort of visual haiku; instead of three lines of text, we have three colors, three compositions… a tri repetae.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Fil Rüting now lives and works in Los Angeles.

*The human eye contains three types of color receptors (cones), with different absorption spectra. The RGB (red, green, blue) additive color model used in video and other electronic devices, was derived from this trichromatic perception of color.

WPA presents “,” an exhibition of recent work by Michael Minelli. This is the second in a series of exhibitions scheduled at WPA, a new artist-run space located in Chinatown. Minelli’s work has long been invested in the quid pro quo between popular media discourse and the individual subject. In this recent series of sculpture and drawing, Minelli renders microphones, boom stands and free standing banners as avatars of public address. However, as opposed to being either “behind” or “in front of” the mic, the voice in these works emerges as stuck somewhere between states of mediation and misrecognition. Minelli’s use of materials and language suggests how distortion itself might be claimed as a site of agency. Be it through quotation, lyric or utterance, the voice in “” erupts as a shower of alternative somebodies; occupying positions of both call and response.

Michael Minelli has exhibited his work in the U.S. and in Europe. His commission from The Wexner Center for the Arts entitled not by everybody will be exhibited at the Design Museum of Holon in Holon Israel as part of the international exhibition Only Now in January 2010.

Contact information | 213-503-5762
info@michaelminelli.com

Gallery open 12-6pm, Thursday - Saturday or by appointment.

WPA presents, Movies for Free, on our open-air patio
(concessions available, bring chairs or blankets)
510 Bernard Street, Chinatown, LA, 90012
BEGINNING THIS SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 6TH!

Aliens, Amy Sarkisian, 17 min., 2004
Valley Girl, Michele O'Marah, 112 min., 2002
Two way-out remakes of movies made in the mid-80s by two of Los Angeles' most way-out artists.  Not to be missed.
Sept 6, 8pm

WPA presents Four Baboons Adoring the Rising Sun an exhibition of paintings by Charles Irvin. This is the first solo exhibit at WPA, a new artist-run space located in Chinatown. The title refers to the granite sculpture placed at the base of the Temple of Luxor in ancient Egypt.  This massive sculpture shows baboons raising their hands, singing, and dancing in homage to the rising sun, which they guide and assist in its passage through the gates of day.  Just as the Egyptian King Ramesses II appreciated this sculpture, enough to have his name inscribed upon the breast of each baboon, so does Irvin find fascination in this and other mythological concepts and belief systems that he explores and gives form to in this group of paintings.
 
Charles Irvin makes paintings, drawings, videos, performances and more. Most recently his work was presented at the Hammer Museum as part of Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A.

WPA is an art space organized by artists. This is our inaugural group show featuring the members of WPA.

Bart Exposito, Andrew Hahn, David Hughes, Charles Irvin, Pamela Jorden, Michael Minelli, Rachael Neubauer, John Pearson, Terri Phillips, Fil Ruting, Henry Taylor, Ryan Tomcho, Tyler Vlahovich.

WPA is a multi-purpose acronym; it can stand for anything you like, but it does intentionally recall the Works Progress Administration, Roosevelt’s New Deal relief agency that highlighted the arts and employed artists as artists during The Great Depression. The title of our first show is taken from a 1939 WPA poster, An Exhibition of Selected Skills of the Unemployed.