Out of Bounds Exhibition

August 6, 2001

 

 

08/06/01

 


CONTACT:
Julie Joyce
Luckman Gallery
(323) 343-6608

 


Calendar
of Events

GROUP EXHIBITION FEATURES WORKS
THAT EXPANDTHE PRACTICE OF DRAWING
Entitled Out of Bounds: Working Off Paper
at the LUCKMAN GALLERY Cal State L.A.
August 24 - October 13, 2001

The Luckman Gallery, located on the campus of Cal State L.A., presents Out of Bounds: Working Off Paper, a group exhibition featuring work that expands the practice of traditional drawing. Exhibition dates are August 24 - October 13, 2001. Artists featured in the exhibition are Corinne Carlson, Sonja Feldmeier, Ceal Floyer, Mark Grotjahn, Lucy Pullen, Andrei Roiter, David Shrigley, Mungo Thomson, Olav Westphalen, and Erwin Wurm. The exhibition is curated by Julie Deamer/Four Walls Productions. Admission is free of charge.

Out of Bounds: Working Off Paper includes works on paper as well as works of sculpture, video, and digital media that relate and refer back to drawing. Represented are artists from around the globe whose relationships to drawing differ but whose use of drawing can be looked at as primarily a means to an end, whatever form that may take. A few of the artists place drawing at the center of their practice while others shift formats accordingly, often allowing one medium to inform another. The result of their ideological endeavors is work that ranges from ethereal to three dimensional and work that is often tinged with humor.

Much of the work in Out of Bounds: Working Off Paper alludes to issues regarding process and continuity, such as that of Erwin Wurm, born in Germany and living in Vienna. His well-known One-Minute Sculptures begin as drawings that illustrate performances that suggest optional physical interaction with objects to activate a sculpture in time and space. The artist's ideas, in simpler terms, are conveyed as drawings, experienced as temporal sculptures and sometimes documented in video. Examples of each are in this show.

Los Angeles-based Mungo Thomson is able to turn the ideas that run through his work in on themselves and off again without collapsing their mechanism. Poking fun at process as well as those moments of inspiration artists often wait for, his sculpture, Between Projects (2001) comprises one dozen hand-carved, hand-fabricated pencils that appear as though they were, out of ambivalence and boredom, thrown up into targeted formation into the gallery's foyer ceiling. Born in Karachi, living in London, Ceal Floyer's video, Ink on paper, shows one hand holding a pen on paper and the other hand holding the paper in place. All futher artistic interaction is suspended, letting time and the material's inherent properties create the results. The video is a succinct rendering of how artists today carry forth ideas rooted in classic conceptual and minimalist art. Toronto-based artist Corinne Carlson presents a wall of 47 framed drawings (from a series of 276--the total sum achieved from a 24 pack of Laurentian colored pencils) depicting a repeated spiral form in different two-color combinations. Laurentian colored pencils have been a learning staple for generations of children. Presented here in an appealing array of colors, the pencils' shortcomings are exposed and the artist's project becomes a document of the material's imperfections. Mark Grotjahn, living and working in Los Angeles, incorporates his own interpretative interests into things that already exist in the world. Featured in the exhibition are actual signs taken from neighborhood markets and liquor stores that he replaces with replicas of his own. Grotjahn not only claims the originals as art, but also encourages the pleasure of finding beauty in the everyday world.

Several other artists in the exhibition play out the illustrative aspect of drawing in their works. Packed full of intelligent humor, Glasgow artist David Shrigley's drawings have a deadpan quality that is complicated by his philosophical, imaginative wit. Verging on schoolboy caricatures found on a bathroom wall, rough line drawings and succinct phrases illustrate human tendencies and weaknesses with a grisly humor and a penchant for horror and hard realism. Basel artist Sonja Feldmeier's phantom 00 is a series of large format posters created with an advanced FBI drawing device that renders, step by step, a person's mental picture of someone else into portrait form. Replacing the eye witness with various individuals from all walks of life, and an FBI staffer with herself, the artist moves an advanced technology normally devoid of artistic functions into the realm of art practice. New York-based, German-born artist Olav Westphalen includes his video, Perfect Spiral, which depicts an Etch A Sketch® used as a drawing board on which a simple archetypal symbol, the spiral, is given form. Denying the entertainment experience of playing with the toy depicted as well as the activity of drawing, this video illustrates a tedious drawing activity and becomes something akin to the perfect "anti-entertainment." A series of his drawings based on short descriptions of failed TV pilots complement the video. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Lucy Pullen includes Endless Drawing, a physical and interpretative work. A solid and immense sheet of black acrylic leans against a wall and buckles in the middle under its own mass. Fluid, delicate white lines drawn onto this structure become a mess of knots suspended on a glassy black pool, crating a hallucinatory space between abstraction and form. Born in Moscow and based in New York, Andrei Roiter's drawings stem from photographs taken during his frequent worldwide travels. Involving visual and textual puns, his delicate juxtapositions of word and image find ambiguous yet poetic openings in language. Presented is a collection of recent drawings installed as if they would be in the hallway of an average home.

Out of Bounds: Working Off Paper is curated by Julie Deamer, an independent curator and writer who moved to Los Angeles last year after a five-year tenure as Curator/Director of Four Walls in San Francisco. Deamer is curator of three exhibitions that also open this year: Sharing Sunsets at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson; To your left is the South. To your right is the North, depending for Refusalon, San Francisco; and Drawn from LA (home is where the heart is), an exhibition at the Midway Initiative, St. Paul.

 


RELATED EVENTS:
Opening Reception: Friday, August 24, 6-9 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Tuesday, October 2, 12-1 p.m.
Featuring Julie Deamer, Exhibition Curator and Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson.

 


This exhibition is part of the TRI-CAL STATE DRAWING EXHIBITION--
a three-part exhibition plus symposium focusing on contemporary drawing that also features:

Drawing Towards an End
Grand Central Art Center Gallery, Cal State Fullerton
August 20 – September 29
Opening reception: Saturday, September 1, 7-10 p.m.
Tel. (714) 278 3262

By Hand: pattern, precision, and repetition in contemporary drawing
University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach
August 28 - October 14
Opening reception: Thursday, September 13, 6-8 p.m.
Tel. (562) 985-5761

Contemporary Discovery II: The Role of Drawing in the 21st Century
University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach
September 29, 2001
11 a.m. - 4:30 p.m./5 p.m. Zeitlin Lecture by Jim Dine
For information and reservations call (562) 985-5761

GALLERY HOURS:
Luckman Gallery hours are Mon. – Thur. & Sat., 12 - 5:00 p.m.,
plus one hour prior to and during the intermission of each Luckman Theatre presentation. Call Luckman Theatre Box Office for information: (323) 343-6600.

GROUP VISITS/TOURS:
Group visits and guided tours for adults and college students are available on an appointment basis by calling (323) 343-6608.

Teachers of K-12 schools who wish to arrange special visits and/or related activities may do so by calling Carole Valleskey, Director of Education and Outreach, at (323) 343-6615.

ADMISSION:
Admission to the Luckman Gallery is free of charge.

 

INFORMATION:
Parking for Luckman Gallery events is available in Structure II (across from the Luckman Complex) for 50¢ per hour (meter box).

For Directions to the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, please call (323) 343-6610, or visit www.calstatela.edu for more detailed instructions.

 

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