 |
Press
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
MIYA ANDO STANOFF
Revelation and Reflection
June 28 – August 9, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 28, 6pm – 8pm
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com |
3.8.31.41, 2008
steel, patina, pigment, lacquer
31” x 47”
|
|
June 24th, 2008 (Culver City, CA) - Utilizing industrial metal finishing techniques on steel panels Miya Ando Stanoff transforms an apparently cold medium into something luminous and ethereal.
Of Japanese and Russian ancestry, raised amongst swords-smiths turned Buddhist Priests, educated at Yale, Stanoff’s spiritual, familial and academic traditions are the basis for her deep respect for the dynamic properties of the steel. From it, her artistry evokes sublime colorization, elegant light and shadows, and a meditative reflection beamed back upon the viewer.
Stanoff’s work is a unique expression of the post-abstract, post-minimalist tradition, suffused with serenity and mystery.
For artist statement, biography and images please contact Ashley McLean Emenegger or Joshua Kaplan at 310.837.6230.
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Blood and Glitter
Co-Curated by Heather Harmon and Ashley McLean Emenegger
May 10 – June 21, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 10, 6pm – 8pm
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com |
Carrie Jenkins
Untitled (Study for Two for the Road), 2008
Acrylic and gouache on paper, 11” x 15”
|
May 10th , 2008 (Culver City, CA) - Bandini Art is pleased to present Blood and Glitter, curated by Heather Harmon and Ashley McLean Emenegger, and features the artwork of James Gobel, Alejandro Gehry, Carrie Jenkins, Eddie Ruscha, and Michael Shulman.
Blood and Glitter is a group exhibition dealing with artists who express a particular kind of joy in playing with stereotypes of gender, sexuality, punk rock and the psychedelic. The title of the show is drawn from Mick Rock’s book portraying the on-and-off stage lives of musicians such as David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Iggy Pop. These musicians were among the first to collide the tough individuality of their sounds as musicians with the revolutionary style of their dress as performers, bringing elements of fantasy and reality, lipstick and leather to center stage.
Blood and Glitter speaks to a fluidity of signs, a layering of masculine and feminine distinctions that exist only in the mind of the viewer. Assembled for this exhibition are a group of artists that play the edge between the delicate and the dangerous, the male and the female- reminding us that gender is a social construction that continues to dissolve through music and popular culture. Glam in particular is a mix of theater, sexual ambiguity and decadence, drawing from hippie, and rock genres, science fiction as well as futurism and transvestism.
Artists in the exhibition include Carrie Jenkins, whose seemingly delicate works incorporate elements of femininity and fashion, showing the relationship between identity and getting dressed. In her work, much like a performer or musician, wardrobe is a powerful costume that can change the wearer’s personae as a type of armor. James Gobel’s brilliant paintings constructed of felt, yarn and fabric play upon the idea of painting and the use of materials that have often been relegated to female crafts. Gobel subverts our expectations combining both masculine and feminine associations through materials and subject matter. Michael Shulman’s documentary photographs of drag queens are shot, printed on canvas and highlighted by hand painted elements, using make up. Shulman produces a doubling of being made up, before the image is shot, and being made up again as the artist devises. Eddie Ruscha’s paintings reference music, fantasy and counterculture, the very countercultures that have aided the dissolution of various social constructions. Ruscha looks back at the future in a world of sci fi and psychedelia. Alejandro Gehry’s graphic and overtly sexual paintings describe the sensuality of punk rock with the hard edge of painting; lips are intertwined with body parts in ambiguous poses of hedonistic acts. The artists share the contradictions of being bohemian and futuristic embracing rupture and revolution.
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Shauna Peck & Melinda Smith Altshuler
Absence & Elsewhere in LA Weekly
March 22 - May 3, 2008 at Bandini Art, Culver City
Please view the review by clicking the link to the right
|
(read the article by clicking here) |
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Goodstein Incidents
Luke Whitlatch
February 2 – March 15, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 2, 2008, 6pm – 8pm
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com |
Luke Whitlatch
Skeleton Bird Vs. the World, 2007
Acrylic and dye on canvas, 48” x 11” x 7”
|
January 26th , 2008 (Culver City, CA) - Luke Whitlatch’s paintings, at Bandini Art from February 2, explode from a central event. Time, motion, space, temperature and feeling are frozen as the painting captures the totality of a singular moment.
Titles such as Skeleton Bird Vs. the World, 20lb Irons Covered in Platte River Dust and If the Smoke May Weep Your Eyes suggest the introspective nature of the works, which may arise from a particular experience, or may be fuelled by further exploration of the premise of a previous painting.
Abstract in composition and intent, the works combine the geometric formality of hard-edge line work with soft washes and the splatter of gestural painting. Precisely judged use of white space defines and balances the intense color, while the interplay of the two modes of painting creates a dynamic that is both dramatic and absorbing.
Built on 3D frames, sometimes with the canvas folded or overlapped, the paintings are objects that make reference to their materials, construction and genre, to question the form of painting itself.
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Don't Fence Me In
A Group Show from the Extraordinary Women of Bandini Art
December 15, 2007 – January 26, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 15, 6pm – 8pm
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com |
Sharon Ben-Tal
Castillo
Jennifer Celio
Jessica Curtaz
Ashley McLean Emenegger
Mitra Fabian
Susan Holcomb
Robin McCauley
Laura Ricci
Lana Shuttleworth
Jennifer Vanderpool
Leslie Yagar
|
December 9th , 2007 (Culver City, CA) - Don’t Fence Me In presents work by the twelve female artists who have shown at Bandini Art during its first year. Artists Sharon Ben-Tal, Castillo, Jennifer Celio, Jessica Curtaz, Ashley McLean Emenegger, Mitra Fabian, Susan Holcomb, Robin McCauley, Laura Ricci, Lana Shuttleworth, Jennifer Vanderpool and Leslie Yagar each approached the group show differently, some taking the opportunity to push the boundaries with one-off experiments, others working through their signature styles to make pieces that define their individual oeuvre. A spirit of expansiveness and empowerment informs all the works.
True to the adventurousness of Bandini’s distaff side, works are on the walls, the floor and hung from the ceiling in materials as diverse as felt and plastic, paper and breath, acrylic, ink, graphite, hair, PVC, and dryer lint. Laura Ricci contributes a live pine tree in all its beauty and power, bringing into focus the underlying mythology of the midwinter season
The exhibition is a celebration of the extraordinary talent of these women and thrilling glimpse of things to come in 2008.
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ashley McLean Emenegger and Paul Pitsker
November 3 - December 8, 2007 at Bandini Art, Culver City
Please view the reviews by clicking the links to the right
|
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
View Susan Holcomb’s Nightlight artist reception on YouTube:
CLICK HERE TO WATCH
Susan Holcomb
Nightlight
May 26 – June 30, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 26, 2007, 6pm – 8pm
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com
|
Susan Holcomb
One Hundred Billion, 2006
acrylic on canvas, 42" x 42"
|
May 21st, 2007 (Culver City, CA) -Set in the dramatic moments between sunset and nightfall, Susan Holcomb’s paintings are complex meditations on the infinite. Her luminous canvases, on show at Bandini Art from May 26, depict not only the limitless skies of the American west but also the means by which we seek to interpret them.
The expanses of land, sea and heavens that fill Holcomb’s paintings are overlaid with charts and diagrams, referencing the systems that classify our world. Mapped first in the imagination and then through math and science, the hundred billion stars that become visible at night challenge our understanding of the universe.
From the campfire stories of our ancestors, through astrology and astronomy, to astrophysics and personal readings, the symbols assigned to the stars carry different meanings. In some of Holcomb’s paintings, the grid of contemporary Los Angeles stretches to the horizon mirrored by schematics in the sky. In others the ocean, or mountains, provide the subject. The iconography floating above can be profound, or touched with humor, but is always thought provoking
Poised between the worlds of light and darkness, science and intuition, perception and logic, the paintings pay tribute to the transcendent beauty of the natural world and our attempts, as stargazers, to “define the indefinable.”
Susan Holcomb has work in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Bandini Art is located in the Culver City Arts District. For artists’ statements, biographies and images please contact Alison Rowe at (323) 573 7574.
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Castillo
Curve
April 14 - May 19, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 14th, 2006, 6pm – 8pm
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com
|
Castillo
Tendril(detail), 2007
paper, 49" x 60"
|
April 5th, 2007 (Culver City, CA) - “Pulp as an organic material is made geometric when processed and manufactured into paper. One might say, throwing off its original identity with a curve.” Castillo
A majestic curtain of paper tendrils undulates diagonally across Bandini Art, Culver City, in Castillo’s new installation Curve, opening April 14, 2007. Spills of paper twist and curl from the ten-foot tall installation like tumbling hair, or the shavings from a woodworker’s plane.
This is the first time that Castillo has explored the qualities of shredded paper. In previous installations, Castillo used synthetic hair and unraveled rope to mimic the locks that were the starting point for her work – her own hair and that of her loved ones. Multi-layered works spoke of hair as a source of identity and stereotype, of fairytale and ritual, embodying ideas of power and value.
By turning to pristine white paper, Castillo replaces soft raw fibers with the manufactured hardness of processed organics, and adds another element to her ongoing investigation into the sculptural, cultural and visceral impact of materials that she describes as ”commonplace and yet charged with association and meaning”.
Transformed from natural fiber to ubiquitous sheets, paper is literally and figuratively the currency of the modern world, whether in the form of banknotes, contracts, books or invitations, it carries the freight of law and the many aspirations of human society. Curve is paper, in all its monumental power.
Bandini Art is located in the Culver City Arts District. For artists’ statements, biographies and images please contact Alison Rowe at (323) 573 7574.
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
Robin McCauley
March 3 - April 7, 2007 at Bandini Art, Culver City
Review reprinted from POL OXYGEN, Friday, February 9th, 2007
|
 |
Artist Robin McCauley’s tools of the trade include teeth, nails, hair, even porcupine quills. She adds them to clothing, particularly high-heels, to represent how we show and defend ourselves, just like in nature. “We flash our teeth and paint our nails, displaying the weaponry nature gave us in a way that is both defensive and sexual” she says. Her new work will be on show at Bandini Art, California from March 3 to April 7. Here she will take her work one step further by also applying the materials to architecture. For example, the gallery walls will appear to grow tresses as she contrasts the controlled structure of architecture and the sensual nature of hair.
Bandini Art, 2635 S. Fairfax Ave., Culver City, (310) 837-6230, through Sept. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.bandiniart.com |
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Aaron Kramer
Wood & Wire
October 28 - December 2, 2006
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 28th, 2006, 6pm – 8pm
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com
|
Aaron Kramer
Wood & Wire
|
October 21st, 2006 (Culver City, CA) - Aaron Kramer’s sculptures take the forms of vessels, gourds and spheres. The timeless simplicity of their shapes belies the complexity of their origins and fabrication. Kramer’s sculptures are made from found materials. The metal is the shed bristles from street sweepers, the wood comes from salad bowls or coffee stirrers. Everything is painstakingly collected and the seemingly banal materials are re-fashioned to create classic sculptural forms.
His skill in refocusing materials is one of the pleasures to be found in Kramer’s work. His groupings of pieces can suggest a flotilla of small ships, the spheres of antique orreries, or a colony of weaverbirds. Yet the materials remain true to their origins, unfinished, merely woven or welded. Kramer’s ability to see intrinsic value in the commonplace elevates his materials, giving his work added interest and integrity.
Bandini Art is located in the Culver City Arts District. For artists’ statements, biographies and images please contact Alison Rowe at (323) 573 7574. |
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Vanderpool
Bemused
September 16th - October 14th, 2006
Opening Reception
Saturday, September 16th, 2006
6:00 - 8:00 pm
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue
Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com
|
|
Jennifer Vanderpool
Bemused, 2006
Photograph: Tony Mastres |
|
September 9th , 2006 (Culver City, CA) - Shiny, beady, plastic, creamy, toothsome, trippy, Jennifer Vanderpool’s new installation, which opens at Bandini Art on September 16, is a world of sensory overload, where the viewer wanders between Day-Glo Astroturf stalactites and pastel bubblewrap flowers. Almost-edible resin desserts erupt from the pebbles and sand of the natural world, carried forward by mountains of whipped plaster cream.
This is women’s work, the crafting of sweet, artificial confections that both entice and corrupt. In Bemused Vanderpool has conjured housewife heaven, her molded delicacies as indestructible as a Twinkie. Yet all the while, the accompanying video plays scenes of escape and exploration.
Vanderpool is lauded in Europe for her gleeful embrace of the domestic goddess, to whose realm she brings the rigor of art history and discipline of formal sculptural concerns. Bemused contrasts shape and texture, color and spatial relations with a surety that springs from a thorough understanding of art theory.
We can but guess which muse inspires Bemused but, whomsoever she is, her intelligence and sly wit hit their mark – perfectly.
Bandini Art is located in the Culver City Arts District. For artists’ statements, biographies and images please contact Alison Rowe at (323) 573 7574.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Laura Ricci and Jennifer Celio, both showing at Bandini Art, approach the same general subject — the L.A. landscape — from distinctly different angles.
Ricci, who was born in the Midwest and professes in her statement to have "an admittedly uneasy relationship with habitation in Los Angeles," is the skeptic. Motivated by "the general political climate, looming prospects of cataclysmic earthquakes" and her intuition that nature is getting angry, she envisions in her paintings a sort of revenge: trees crushing freeways, binding up automobiles and stretching their limbs across vast empty spaces. Loose and whimsical, the works — acrylic, ink and pencil on paper — have a storybook charm.
Celio, born in Burbank, is considerably more sympathetic, viewing the city's roads and freeways not as spaces of absence but as windows into her own history. Her beautifully articulated graphite drawings, executed on large gesso-covered boards, present snapshot glimpses of roadside landscapes floating in fields of white. The scenes are banal at a glance but rendered with such affection and care that they come to feel almost hallowed.
Bandini Art, 2635 S. Fairfax Ave., Culver City, (310) 837-6230, through Sept. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.bandiniart.com |
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
|
SONIA MORANGE
June 24 - July 29, 2006 at Bandini Art, Culver City
Review reprinted from ArtScene by Diane Calder
July/August 2006 issue, Vol. 25, No. 11
|
 |
Statisticians who keep track of such things accuse the average viewer of spending just a matter of seconds in front of most works of art; only as long as it takes to recall the artist’s name, glance at the wall text for confirmation, accept congratulations for guessing right, and move on. Mr. Average Viewer will have more than one reason to slow down when he comes face to face with Sonia Morange’s work.
Not yet thirty, Morange was born in Paris in 1977, and now resides in London. She was short-listed as a finalist for the Celeste Art Prize in May, and is currently completing her MFA degree at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. She has also lived in New York, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2000 from Parsons School of Design.
The six large paintings in Morange’s current “Airhead” series are purposely set within a shallow, pale pictorial space: all have painted white backgrounds that facilitate fusion onto conventional gallery walls. Morange chooses to leave the works unframed, emphasizing the linear and spacial elements which contribute to a sightline that travels through all the works, a technique similar to that employed so effectively by Catherine Opie several years back in her series of icehouse photos.
Opie was aiming through the lens of a camera, sighting and exposing real objects in space, focusing and lighting actual scenes to produce imagery that fulfilled her intentions, choosing her point of view carefully to keep the unintended out of the frame. Morange works with oil paint, a more pliable medium.
It widens her range of creative choices, but demands dexterity and skill in handling to be convincing. Painting affords the opportunity to decide not only what kinds of objects she wants to include in each composition, but their formal relationships. She isn’t limited by the constraints of time or place that tie down a photographer. Additionally, Morange takes advantage of the manipulative qualities of her medium to blur or abstract various sections of her compositions and to focus on, and bring detail into other areas, evoking a nearly photogenic believability.
Through the choices she makes, Morange sets up a narrative that compels the viewer to take the time to participate in forming meaning. Symbols and metaphors are implied through the objects represented. Interpretations cued by the artist await enrichment by the depth of knowledge, experience and/or imagination brought to the work by the viewer. |
|
“Untitled (bouncing gloves),"
2004, oil on canvas, 64 x 66".
“Untitled (robots and poppies),"
2004, oil on canvas, 64 x 68".
“Untitled (weightless),"
2004, oil on canvas, 64 x 70". |
For example, careful attention to the balloon heads in “Untitled 1 (dudes),” makes discernable the subtle suggestion of open mouths. The faces projected by Tony Oursler--which give voice to his puppets--immediately come to mind. The viewer’s ability to decide exactly what messages Morange’s airheads project is challenged by other elements in the painting. The choreography employed in aligning the group of figures depicted suggests the Byzantine era “Justinian and Attendants” (c. 547), the apse mosaic at the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. Morange employs a similar lineup of bodies with tubular thin arms and legs, accentuated by toed-out feet. Then she dons her androgenous figures in Philip Guston pink and red shorts and tee shirts. The string hanging from the balloon heads is thick enough to read as rope. Does the obvious care Morage takes in painting each strand imply a caress of plaited hair by Rapunzul’s lover, or perhaps the rough, abrasive weight of a noose? And what are we to make of the boxing gloves that hang like animal carcasses, fully dimensional against the flags of pink shorts behind them?
The selection and placement of imagery, heightened by the artist’s skillful enlivening of an artificial reality through her command of the media, is equally compelling in other paintings in the series. “Untitled 3 (robots and poppies)” suggests a family of robots, apparently relatives of the Jetson’s outdated but beloved housekeeper, Rosie. The toy-like machines are let out to pasture in a poppy field worthy of Monet’s garden, the Wizard of Oz, Flanders Field, or Afghanistan. Each flower is painted with such exquisite precision and detail that it might have been seen through the eyes of someone whose vision was enhanced by an intimate encounter with botanicals. The story takes an ironic twist when one begins to investigate the roots of Morange’s fantastic garden.
Each painting’s fully loaded scenario is enhanced by imagery waiting to be decoded within other works in the series. Poppies fade, robots become entangled in rope and wire or are carried off into space. In one haunting composition, “bouncing gloves,” a few balloons lift into the atmosphere while others deflate beneath a line of boxing gloves dangling from old-fashioned springs that resemble those toymakers once used to propel Jack out of his box.
In order to further explore linear forms, spatial shifts and inconsistent perspectives, Morange plans to construct and assemble groups of charcoal drawings on paper that will relate to the electric cords that surface in several of her paintings. The drawings were not completed at the time of this writing, but no doubt they will give you and Mr. Average Viewer additional justification to slow down and take time to fully absorb Morange’s work. |
|
|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
ROSHA YAGHMAI
The Song Remains The Same
May 16 - June 17, 2006
BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com |
Rosha Yaghmai
Good Old Fashioned Nostalgia Bomb |
March 28th, 2006 (Culver City, CA) - Bandini Art’s inaugural exhibition, Rosha Yahgmai ‘The Song Remains The Same’, is a panegyric to the California dream and seekers who pursue it.
In this her first solo exhibition, Yahgmai stitches fragments of discarded wetsuits into billowing multifaceted forms that manifest a restless energy. Their vibrant colors suggest both lyrical abstraction and flamboyant hippie décor, summoning the heady days of West Coast counter culture.
The sculptures hang above extinguished candles, or a doused beach bonfire, taking the shape of smoke clouds, or maybe embodying the thoughts and aspirations of partygoers who have now deserted the scene.
Attracted by, and complicit in, SoCal utopianism, Yaghmai is part of a new generation of Californians whose fantasy is mixed with uncertainty. In her hands, the iconic remnants of Southern California culture celebrate innocent freedom and cherished ideals, but also speak of their loss.
Gallerist Joshua Kaplan is an established collector of Los Angeles contemporary art, who founded Bandini Art specifically to promote the work of young artists living and working in California. Bandini Art is housed in a redbrick Culver City warehouse, adapted for gallery use by the renowned architects Johnston Marklee.
For images and further information on Rosha Yaghmai, Joshua Kaplan or Johnston Marklee, please contact Alison Rowe at (323) 573 7574.
|
|
 |
