Sunday, September 9, 2012

Fits and Starts

7447 Sunset Boulevard (at Gardner Street), West Hollywood, CA 90046
September 22 – October 6
Opening reception: Saturday, September 22, 7pm – 9pm
Video screening and performance: Saturday, September 29, 8pm
Additional Open Hours: September 28, 29 and October 6 
12-4 or by appointment

Fits and Starts features work by Ursula Brookbank, Elizabeth Leister, Tricia Lawless Murray and Cindy Rehm. The artists in this exhibit embrace the tactile and the visceral through varied media including installation, drawing, photography and video. Their projects are permeated by a bold physicality that reveals the body, both figurative and metaphoric, in a range of expressions from tenderness to aggression. The works investigate memory, identity, and desire through heightened materiality and haptic resonance.



Ursula Brookbank will present a site-specific installation using an unfinished wall to serve as a series of niches to hold relics and ephemera of the SHE WORLD ARCHIVE. The archive is an ongoing accumulation culled from the artifacts of women's lives that migrates between the space of privacy and history. The SHE WORLD ARCHIVE creates an environment for the elaboration of overlooked histories embedded in the detritus of their daily lives.



Through the use of a projector, screen, and mirrored triangular prism, Tricia Lawless Murray will create a tripartite division of space that can be entered into and occupied by the viewer. Projected images of interiors, landscapes, architecture, and the artist herself were captured through the use of a mirrored corner construction. The resulting environment intersperses the viewer’s body between the projection, screen and the mirrored reflection of the projected images producing an alternating display of shadow and reflection.


La Recherche, a new video by Elizabeth Leister, weaves an open and meditative account of her search for Professor Mees, a teacher she studied with decades ago in a small European town. Images and memories are conjured through a series of performed drawings, marked on the page and wiped away in a gesture of erasure as the unreliability of memory and the passage of time impend the search for her past professor.




Cindy Rehm will show The Hysterics, a collection of drawings and found images that reference the history of female madness. The beautiful and the grotesque mingle as Rehm’s hysterical paper dolls contort, cry, and leak bodily fluids to test their somatic limits. Rehm will also show her video Drain, which presents fragmented impressions of a solitary woman engaged in acts of private ritual.

A video screening will be presented in conjunction with the exhibit on Saturday September 29. The screening will feature works by Cortney Andrews, Lani Asuncion, Phoebe Collings James, Anne ColvinCarolyn CastañoJeseca Dawson, Michelle Handelman, Kelly Sears, and Gabi Vru. The evening will also feature a performance by choreographer Christine Suarez who will present an excerpt of her new work Mother.F*cker.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Screening and Performance


Fits and Starts
7447 Sunset Boulevard (at Gardner Street), West Hollywood, CA 90046
Video screening and performance: Saturday, September 29, 8pm


On Saturday September 29 at 8pm, Agency will host an evening of video and performance. The screening will include works by Cortney Andrews, Lani Asuncion, Ursula Brookbank, Phoebe Collings-James, Carolyn Castaño, Anne Colvin, Jeseca Dawson, Michelle Handelman, Kelly Sears, and Gabi Vru. The event will also feature a performance by choreographer Christine Suarez who will present an excerpt of her new work Mother.F*cker.


Cortney Andrews, I Want to Love You (Part I), 2010

Cortney Andrews' I want to Love You (Part I) explores the nature of boundaries—between intimacy and violence, pleasure and pain, love and death. The female subject performs within these liminal spaces, forcing the viewer to question their own constructs of selfhood and otherness, lover and beloved, subject and object.



Lani Asuncion, Birth of Other Girl, 2011

In Birth of Other Girl, Lani Asuncion references Hawaiian oral traditions as she enacts a ritual of the mythical birth and rebirth of a woman descended from mythology and cultural constructions.



Ursula Brookbank, SHE WORLD.Enumeration, 2012

Ursula Brookbank’s SHE WORLD.Enumeration captures documentation of a three projector super8 film screening at Echo Park Film Center in 2012. Filmed at SHE WORLD, a Los Angeles based archive of relics and ephemera from the lives of women, the work searches for relationships and private histories emerging from objects in the archive. Multiple projectors are used to further the investigation between moments and memory.



Carolyn Castaño, Vanitas, 2009 

In Vanitas, Carolyn Castaño explores ritual, beauty, and aging through the private actions of two women.




Phoebe Collings-James, Heart Beet, 2009


Phoebe Collings-James, Sortir un Oeil, 2011

Phoebe Collings-James expresses frustration anxiety and the futility of violence in Heart BeetWith Sortir un Oeil she  focuses on language and sexuality as she plays with the symbolic slippage between the egg and the eye.





Anne Colvin, The Audition, 2008

Anne Colvin’s The Audition pieces together re-filmed fragments from Godard’s Contempt--one of those quintessential Nouvelle Vague films about film --into a monochromatic dreamscape of movement and re-recorded Stockhausen crescendo. The players are stuck in their bit part audition tirelessly waiting for rejection or inclusion.




Jeseca Dawson, Birthing Dinner, 2012

Jeseca Dawson’s Birthing Dinner is a highly visceral meditation on the cyclical nature of violence.



Michelle Handelman, Folly & Error, 2004/07

Folly & Error is part of  Michelle Handelman’s project This Delicate Monster, a multimedia pop fable inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. Folly & Error are the twins Baudelaire refers to in his poems; like youth and age, pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow, these twins are the great equation of life caught in an endless landscape of effort. Handelman transposes the Flowers of Evil into a contemporary pop landscape, creating a haunting and hallucinatory fragmented narrative that can best be described as a cross between between a pagan ritual and a fashion shoot gone terribly wrong.





Kelly Sears, Imprinted, 2011

Kelly Sears employs a light table, clear tape, and newspaper ink to render tracings of failed rapture, destructive tornados and other discord in 2011.




Christine Suarez, Mother.F*cker., 2012, Photo by:CedarBough Saeji

Mother.F*cker., a tour- de-force, dance-theater solo from Los Angeles-based choreographer Christine Suarez, fearlessly sheds light on the absurd and poetic life of a mother.





Gabi Vru, Dean and Chlorine, 2012

Inspired by John Waters and Kenneth Anger, Gabi Vru’s Dean and Chlorine portrays the limitations of two genders from a transgendered individual’s point of view. The title characters deny, ignore, and hate each other in a constant battle to be the dominant identity. In this struggle, there are no winners and the conflict continues without resolution.
 


The screening is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Fits and Starts which features work by Ursula Brookbank, Tricia Lawless Murray, Elizabeth Leister, and Cindy Rehm. The artists in this exhibit embrace the tactile and the visceral through varied media including installation, drawing, photography and video. Their projects are permeated by a bold physicality that reveals the body, both figurative and metaphoric, in a range of expressions from tenderness to aggression. The works investigate memory, identity, and desire through heightened materiality and haptic resonance.