Art and Cake’s weekly art calendar has changed. Facebook was getting too tedious trying to cull through so many events each day with their new feature of adding many days to an event. We have decided to post only that weeks events and add more in depth information to help you decide where to go each week. In addition, each week will be a different contributor to keep the content fresh, relevant and edgy.
Enjoy and as always thank you for your continued support!!
(If you would like to submit an event or press release, send to artandcakela@gmail.com with a high res jpeg for publication)
This weeks Lineup contributed by Kristine Schomaker
Friday December 7th
Terry Arena – Variability of Knowing at 643 Project Space
643 Project Space
643 Project Space N. Ventura Avenue, Ventura, California 93001
Opening Friday Dec 7th 6-9pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/504063683418459/
In 2004, Terry Arena began making detailed renderings of bees inspired by colony collapse disorder (CCD). While researching the environmental crisis of the loss of bees, the process of searching inspired new installation work. The vastness of information available with the advent of technology is awe-inspiring yet can be misleading at times or redundant without clear resolutions. Working in repetitive themes, “Variability of Knowing” is the representation of that search.
Arena’s drawings are made on repurposed food tins and are often arranged in metaphorical “swarms”. In addition to the drawings she uses bell jars as a vehicle for exhibiting many of her drawing models. The bell jars refer to Victorian taxidermy curiosities, but also to their use in gardens to keep seedlings warm. Bell jars are protectors of living and dead objects. Arena has also incorporated magnifying glasses as part of this installation. Aside from the literal use of magnifiers as tools to see, their linked repetition suggests the process of information gathering and how understanding is forged, sometimes to no end. Using a range of processes to explore CCD and the acquisition of knowledge, Arena’s work considers the complex web of relationships between information, human, and bee.
Growing up in the agriculture rich areas of Southern California Arena was very aware of the effect nature can have on culture. One of her most recent projects, “Symbiotic Crisis”, deals with the plight of the bees and the ancillary effects on the environment and society. The first three iterations of this project were shown in the back of a box truck to reference the transporting of the bees nationwide to pollinate crops. Working within the tradition of still life, Arena draws on prepared metal surfaces with graphite and installs the drawings in clusters reminiscent of bee swarms. Her work has been shown at Thinkspace Gallery, Culver City the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster and the Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard. She currently lives and works in Ventura, CA.
Saturday December 8th
Painted Brain Community Center and Art Exhibition Grand Opening
Painted Brain
5980 Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, California 90035
Opening December 8th 3-5pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/361776474591296/
Painted Brain and Otis College of Art and Design present a gallery opening for the public on raising awareness on mental health in the Los Angeles area. This is a free event so come to join us for food, and view poster designs from the Otis students. There will be a video screening as well as a photo booth. Exhibition curated by course instructors Leyna Lightman and Gina Valona.
COME HUNGRY!! Superba Food and Bread is providing some of their infamous pastries and cookies superbafoodandbread.com
Painted Brain creates lasting community-based solutions to mental health challenges and the impact of social injustice through arts, advocacy, and enterprise.
Sign up for the event at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/painted-brain-community-center-opening-tickets-52342928107
Karen Kitchel / Pastoral Crude Opening Reception
Carnegie Art Museum
424 S C St, Oxnard, California 93030
December 8th 4-6pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/211790486400686/
These paintings continue Karen Kitchel’s longstanding commitment to make landscape paintings that transcend conventional portrayals of scenery, location, or nostalgic attempts to interpret “nature”. Widely recognized for her multiple-panel installations of american grasslands and urban botany, this is the first west coast solo exhibition of her landscape plaintings using asphalt emulsion.
Kitchel has worked throughout the coastal and interior west for more than thirty years, receiving her M.F.A. in painting from Claremont Graduate University in 1982. Her work is in the permanent collections of multiple museums and private collections nationally and abroad, including the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Tucson Art Museum, the Joslyn Museum, the U.S. State Department, and the National Museum of Poland. She is represented by Robischon Gallery of Denver, CO, and Gerald Peters Gallery of Santa Fe, NM and New York, NY. She currently lives and works in Ventura, CA.
Marie Thibeault and Daniel Dove discuss ‘By Water, By Fire’
LAUNCH LA
170 S La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, California 90036
Opening December 8th 4-5pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/196747777933630/
Please join us for a walk through and discussion of Marie Thibeault’s current exhibition, ‘By Water, By Fire’ with Daniel Dove, Professor, Painting and Drawing of CSULB . Reception to follow.
Within this group of paintings, Thibeault explores the consuming qualities of fire and water, both increasingly destructive forces affecting our precarious ecosystems. Although fragmentary, such appropriated imagery expresses ongoing environmental events such as floods and wildfires. As a reference to the industrial landscape surrounding the ports of Los Angeles, the inclusion of these locations impacted by trauma or extreme transformation express themes of flux, change and environmental instability. Color is both symbolic and associative and clearly the most expressive element in the work. The paintings are the result of a sustained contest between structural references and their exposure to intense color fields, that creates both a linearity and an atmospheric presence in the work.
Ultimately, Thibeault arrives at a sense of balance and stasis, in order to allow the viewer a space in which to hold and to contemplate the intense changes taking place in the environment, and in particular, within this place in this moment in history.
Wang Xu: Garden of Seasons
Vincent Price Art Museum
1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, California 91754
Opening December 8th 5-7pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/430110797522923/
Wang Xu: Garden of Seasons features a new monumental sculpture, “Athena” (2018), and a two-channel video that both records the sculpture’s physical creation and reflects upon the historic and economic conditions that help determine its significance. Taken together, these works establish a distinction between the creation of an artwork and the interpretive activity through which its meaning is established, contested, and revised.
Central to the exhibition is Heritage Falls Park, located in Monterey Park near the Vincent Price Art Museum, that was built in the 1920s and includes a niche that originally housed a marble sculpture of a female figure referred to as “Athena.” The sculpture, which disappeared shortly after it was installed, was not replaced until 2005, when the Monterey Park Historical Society installed a replacement “Athena,” which like its predecessor, bears no formal signifiers commonly associated with the Greek goddess Athena.
Equitable Vitrines, a Los Angeles nonprofit committed to expanding the collective understanding of art in public places, worked with artist Wang Xu on a proposal to the City of Monterey Park in 2016 for an intervention at Heritage Falls Park to temporarily present Wang’s sculpture Eve (2015). Wang’s Eve, produced in Quyang, China where the 2005 “Athena” sculpture also hailed from, was made by recovering a damaged statue of the Biblical figure and re-carving it in the image of a woman who worked at the marble quarry and factory where it was created. The proposal generated debate about the site in relationship to the nature of public artwork, leading to the rescinding of the plan, and prompting the production of these new works.
Partita at Durden and Ray
Durden and Ray
1206 Maple Ave. #832, Los Angeles, California 90015
December 8th 6-9pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/1003483806526555/
The Durden and Ray collective is a whole entity, but it is the disparate individual parts that give it strength. The collective provides a vehicle for collaborative curatorial efforts and experimental exhibits. As individuals, the artists within the collective are committed to supporting one another in that community. Partita pays homage to the legacy of the parts by asking the community to gather for a one-night fundraiser. This event will help Durden and Ray continue its “commitment to both individual praxis and shared aims of curatorial experimentation, visual research, and artistic exchange with international partners.”
Artists have made work using postcards which represent the unification across distances through image and discourse. They are the physical remnants of experience and ubiquitous in our culture of marketing. This is a unique and affordable way to collect some very nice artwork while supporting Durden and Rays ability to continue its curatorial programming.
Reception Date: Saturday, December 8, 6-9pm
All artworks will all be displayed together for one night only, Saturday, December 8, 2018. Each piece will be priced at $50, with 100% of proceeds going to Durden and Ray. Supporters can purchase individual works that they will be able to take home immediately.
RAFFLE: We will also be hosting a raffle for a variety of other larger items, artworks and experiences. Tickets are priced at $5 each. Raffle will be held at 8:30 pm the night of the event. (Winner will need to be there in order to take a physical piece home that night, or have arrangements for someone else to take it for you.)
Opening Reception: Meditations on Liminality
Norwalk Cultural Arts Center
13200 Clarkdale Ave., Norwalk, California 90650
Opening December 8th 6-8pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/1156280931202709/
Excited to present a new body of paintings developed over the last 2 years influenced by ideas about liminality, inspired by studies in cultural anthropology many years ago in Uppsala, and an unrelenting preoccupation with existentialist philosophy.
Show runs December 4-22
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Friday 3:00 – 7:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 3:00 pm
JJ L’Heureux: Faces from the Southern Ocean Opening Reception
MOAH: CEDAR
44857 Cedar Ave, Lancaster, California 93534
Opening December 8th 6-8pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/2304126772993466/
Antarctica is completely surrounded by the Southern Ocean. There are no sounds except for reverberating wind and water punctuated by the cracking and booming of ice as it breaks off into the sea. It is a pristine place, overwhelming and awesome.
Faces From the Southern Ocean embodies the spirit of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, a realm dominated by sky and cold. Reindeer, seals and penguins—inhabitants of this icy region—along with breathtaking landscapes are captured in photographs from L’Heureux’s more than a dozen expeditions to this region.
Faces from the Southern Ocean will be open from December 8, 2018 – February 10, 2019
Remembrance
Rose Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, D-4 Santa Monica, CA 90404
Saturday December 8th 5-7pm
https://www.rosegallery.net/exhibition-remembrance
ROSEGALLERY presents REMEMBRANCE, an exhibition centering on photography’s influence upon memory and the notion of family. With work by artists who explores their connections to community and family through the utilization of found imagery, whether sourced through personal photo albums or public archives, the exhibition features works by Melinda Gibson and Thomas Sauvin, Carla Jay Harris, Lebohang Kganye, Kovi Konowiecki, B Neimeth, and Martin Parr, and is curated by Thomas Kollie and Zoe Lemelson. The exhibition will be on view from 8 DECEMBER 2018 until 26 JANUARY 2019, with a private reception from five until seven pm on the 8th of December.
Where time moves generations apart, images remain as artifacts of personal histories, existing in family albums and archives until they live again in minds as memories. When remembrance is mediated through photographs, these intimate moments, caught on camera, are often re-imagined and instilled into personal narratives of the present. REMEMBRANCE examines the various ways photographers working with archives explore their personal connections to the past as they expose the meaning of memories embedded in their images.
Johannesburg-based artist Lebohang Kganye deconstructs and recreates her personal family images in her series Reconstruction of a Family, examining the falsity of family history as mediated through photographs and albums. On the notion of constructed ancestral history, Kganye beautifully writes:
“Family history remains a space of contradictions, it is a mixture of truth and fiction. Sometimes we rely on the family photo album as a way to understand what family is meant to be. What we often land up with is a grouping of images that have been constructed, and perhaps do not account at all for the histories and memories that are connected with that album.”
The artist’s black-and-white cut-outs examine the grey zone where the factuality of a photograph and the construction of memory intersect.
In the early 1970s, Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows photographed families in their homes on June Street in Ornsdall, a street whose exteriors were filmed for a famous soap opera of that time. By photographing the interiors and its inhabitants, Parr juxtaposes the media perception of this place with the realities of the working class families that lived within the walls. In Delivering Flowers to Grandpa Jack, Kovi Konowiecki intersperses his own contemporary photographs with images from his family albums. In partnership with his family photographs, Konowiecki’s photographs of his hometown, Long Beach, transcend the division of time between generations; while the people age, the spaces remain the same, showing the timelessness of place between one generation and the next. LA-based artist B Neimeth photographed the interior of her grandmother’s home in Beverly Hills, FL, focusing upon the photographs and documents that enrich her personal space with the history of her immigrant Jewish experience.
While many artists reach into their own archives to explore their personal and communal history, others source from the archives of others. In Carla Jay Harris’ installation piece Bitter Earth, Harris worked with historian Barbara E. Stevenson to gather images from archives that evoke the broad range of experience for African-American women during the Jim Crow Era. Exploring narratives of black womanhood through archival imagery interwoven into wall paper, Harris highlights vignettes of both hardship and joy into her installation work. While Harris uses found imagery to re-visualize a history less seen, Melinda Gibson and Thomas Sauvin similarly use vernacular photographs to question the hierarchies of remembrance. In their series Lunar Caustic, the artists appropriate found family photographs that were in the process of being extracted for their chemical compounds, and thus forgotten, to stop the erasure of the stories in the images. The resulting photographs use destruction as both a visual evocation and a commentary on the prioritization of imagery and memory.
As memories are often inherited and interpreted through imagery, REMEMBRANCE explores the many ways artists question the influence of photographs in their personal lives and collective histories.
Sonja Schenk: All Things (Being Equal)
Elephant
3325 Division St, Los Angeles, California
Opening December 8th 7-10pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/2180770655536935/
All Things (Being Equal) is a large-scale installation that incorporates sculptural elements, lighting and ambient sound to create an immersive experience. It is part of a larger series entitled, “The Collectors.”
Inspired by rock collectors, desert dwellers and junk hoarders, this installation looks at the very human desire to acquire, accumulate, and arrange the objects we own. Just as ancient humans came across gold and other objects of beauty and decided to keep them, we all work daily to search, scavenge, acquire, quantify and organize, all to our own mysterious purposes. But as you peel away the metaphors attached to the objects themselves – the importance assigned to precious metals, the meanings attributed to various gemstones, the healing and mystical properties believed to be inherent to crystals and other rare minerals- it becomes clear what we desire to control and quantify is perhaps the earth itself. In light of the changes that are affecting our planet, this desire becomes even more poignant, the action of collecting or hoarding is ever more futile and desperate.
All Things Being Equal consists of a large indoor mound or pyramid of milk crates that are filled with fabricated, unnatural “rocks” and equipped with a special timed lighting and ambient audio system that operates on a cycle.
During this cycle, the gallery lights will dim and special rotating LED lights inside the sculpture will project outwards through the structure onto the walls of the room, revealing elaborate, slowly moving, multi-layered shadowplay. The sound design will serve to subtly highlight the changes in the visual elements of the room.
Sunday December 9th
The Universe Is In Us | Curated by Mark Todd
Space Gallery at Ayzenberg
39 E. Walnut St., Pasadena, California 91103
Opening December 9th at noon
https://www.facebook.com/events/560274321098300/
or The Universe is in Us, Todd has assembled a diverse array of artists who honor the vastness of the universe around us through the raw material of our physical biology, our spirit, our emotion, and just everyday life on planet earth in contemporary society.
“What are we made of?” Todd asks in his curator statement. “Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. The universe is inside of us all. Incredible as it is, we are literally made of stars. But what of our thoughts, dreams, hopes, worries? This too is inside. The eight artists in this exhibition expose these complexities that make us who we are and reveal them to us through a hodgepodge of collage, pencil, inks, oils and acrylics. Portraits of strangers stare back at us. Familiar but dreamlike landscapes swirl. Other worlds and oversized figures are on display. Playful and poetic, the work in this show is honest and sincere. At times, powerfully obsessive, at other times quiet and austere. The connection that ties them is what is inside each and every one of us.”
This is Todd’s fourth exhibition with sp[a]ce at Ayzenberg, and continues the gallery’s unique focus on contemporary work.
Blue Roof Studios Open House
Blue Roof Studios
7329 S Broadway, Los Angeles, California 90003
December 9th 12-5pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/267875847208624/
Join us for an afternoon of exploration and discovery!
Visit all ten artists’ studios.
Join the eco-friendly Barnsdall Arts project.
Paint a mural with Skye Amber Sweet, organized by Arts Bridging the Gap.
FREE ADMISSION. FREE FOOD. FREE DRINKS.
Tacos Hasta La Muerte will be catering from 1:00 – 3:00 pm
Residential neighborhood. Ride-share encouraged.
Participating Artists:
Adele Kandarian
Alexandre Lamarche
Amanda Maciel Antunes
Beverley Morrison
Cole James
Diana Magui Sanchez
Galia Linn
Jacqueline Palafox
Leonardo Bravo
Teri Klass
Nadege Monchera Baer Open Studio
3803 San Rafael Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90065-3224
Sunday December 9th 1-5pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/281538955828342/
Save the date: December 9, 1:00-5:00pm.
My studio is on the top of Mt Washington, plenty parking on the Avenue.
Hope to see you!
HAC Open Studios & Holiday Boutique
Hawthorne Arts Complex
13040 Cerise Ave, Hawthorne, California 90250
December 9th 2-6pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/1341845429283226/
HAC’s next Open Studios event is on Sunday, December 9th from 2-6pm. View artist studios and their work. We’ll also have a Holiday Boutique with small artwork and other handmade goods.
Transition Zone Exhibition Opening
Chaffey Community Museum of Art
217 S Lemon Ave, Ontario, California 91761
December 9th 2-4pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/932458270475519/
“Transition Zone” refers to the wild-land urban interface, the terrain where nature meets built environment. In the transition zone, we see how nature and culture navigate within one space. In this exhibition, artworks focus on the intersection of nature and culture, depicting the human impact on the natural world and vice versa, sometimes in harmony and often in conflict. These artists passionately explore and express their ideas and feelings about their connection and relationship to nature. The artists employ a variety of media to explore the nature/culture relationship from diverse perspectives.
Artists: Fred Brashear Jr., Mariah Armstrong Conner, Sapira Cheuk, Tanner McGuire, A. E. Van Fleet, Heath Rössler, Dinyl Schmidt and Andrew K. Thompson. Curated by Sant Khalsa
A-B Projects Housewarming Party & Inaugural Exhibition
A-B Projects
Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Ave., suite 540, Los Angeles CA
December 9th 6-9pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/297622834210171/
There is a Housewarming Party on December 9th at A-B Projects! We will host the launch of Maake Magazine Issue 8, in which A-B Projects is featured (http://www.maakemagazine.com/issue-8), and celebrate the opening of the inaugural exhibition in the new space!
PLOT LINES is a group exhibition about how we seek, locate, and manifest a sense of home within and around ourselves. The show includes large-scale lurking and powerful domestic objects by ceramic sculptor Jackie Rines, paintings of windows and hyper compressed spaces by Christine Han, and short stories that use time and fiction to deal with personal experiences by writer Andy Anderegg.
Second Annual TSA MVP Holiday Art Raffle and Party
Monte Vista Projects
1206 Maple Avenue, 5th floor, #523, Los Angeles, California 90015
Sunday December 9th 6-10pm
https://www.facebook.com/events/443967432798008/
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles and Monte Vista Projects are excited to announce their upcoming Second Annual Holiday Art Raffle and Party. After an opening reception on Saturday, November 17th from 7-10 pm, the donated artworks will be exhibited for three weeks before the raffle, which will begin at 6 PM PDT on Sunday, December 9th.
This is the second year that the sister spaces in the #BendixBuilding’s #523 have joined forces to put on this event. Last year’s raffle featured well over one hundred pieces that each went home to a lucky ticket winner. This year the raffle will have a broad range of works available with a number of new raffle features. Raffle tickets will start at $30, with the option to purchase discounted bundles. There will be a variety of member made prints available at the ticket booth. There will even be a ‘sudden death’ ticket option to get in on the first round of drawing. Additionally, members of MVP and TSA LA have invited area curators to select works that will be presented in a separate silent auction part of the program that will run through the exhibition. This auction will begin the evening of our Opening Reception, on November 17th.
TSA LA and MVP are both funded and operated by their artist-members. Each member pays monthly dues to cover the costs of operating the spaces, and all of the work to execute and promote their programming is done voluntarily by the members. Our mutual goal is to provide opportunities for other artists while adding to and fostering the Los Angeles art community. Fundraisers like this will allow us to enhance our programming and provide better opportunities for the artists that we do exhibit.