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 Colvin, Carolyn Castaño, Jeseca 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.