Visit LACE on Friday, July 30th at 12:30 to see a public walk-through with writer/artist Jenny Donovan via Skype as she discusses her work with Gabriela Torres Olivares on Yo No Estoy Aqui as part of the Not Content portion of Les Figues' curation of Painted Over/Under.

To see more from Jenny and Gabriela, please visit their blog at yonoestoyaqu1.blogspot.com.

ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
Where do we locate what is not physically present? Where are we when we speak into a telephone?  Where we are when we are inside of the border and cannot get out?  That is to say, where is that which is not physically here due to circumstance rather than conviction.  The question, philosophically, is perceptual.  A is (physically) here and therefore not (physically) there.  B is (physically) there and therefore not (physically) here.  This perception stirs up the disjunctive between the Shakespearean to be or not to be and the there of a dinosaur that alienates us through fear because it is always there and never here (although it always is) in Augusto Monterroso’s story. The answer is a minifiction, a phrase whose past and future are uncertain within the constant present of a line, a marrow whose subjective skeleton is yet to be discovered: a virtual realm.

Yo no estoy aquí = yo soy aquí (I am not here = my presence persists here) because one concept cannot exist without the other. This project explores the process of virtuality as the answer to “where are you when you are not here?” That absence is the presence of absence: the emptiness that gives form to a figurative presence.  Everything that is not, so that something can become everything that is not here.  The present is everything that is but also that which is ...

LACE is proud to present Art Against Empire—Graphic Responses to U.S. Intervention Since World War II, curated by Carol A. Wells from the archives of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG). Featuring works by Josh MacPhee, Corita Kent, Jay Belloli, Cedomic Kostovic, Stephen Kroninger, and more.

Art Against Empire uses the power of posters to document 60 years of opposition to U.S. interventions into the domestic affairs of sovereign nations. Political, economic and military interventions, many of them covert, have repeatedly resulted in unacceptable deaths and misery for millions. These posters show hopes and dreams, and the pain of dreams destroyed.

Art Against Empire showcases over 100 political posters in the LACE galleries, spanning two dozen sovereign nations including Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba, Iran, and South Africa. It attempts to inform, challenge and inspire by confronting the viewer with images of past struggles that remain powerfully relevant today. It both raises questions about past interventions and fosters debate about present ones. The exhibition will also provide insight into why the amount of devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Haiti can be linked to its long history of French colonialism and U.S. imperialism.

The United States is the focus of this exhibition. As citizens, we are ultimately responsible for the actions that are taken by our government in our name. Censorship and repression, so prevalent in wartime, invariably attempt to eliminate dissent, thereby violating the principles on which this democracy was founded. These posters document the efforts of people who refuse to remain silent and who use the power of art to inspire action.

Read about the exhibition in the LATimes' article titled "Political Statements Make Bold Statements."

UPCOMING RELATED EVENTS
All events are free and open to the ...

LACE is pleased to present Sweet Child Solos, a new performance/ installation by artist-in-resident Mark Tribe. The performance on Tuesday 19 January 2010 will feature several guitarists playing instrumental covers of "Sweet Child o' Mine" by Guns N' Roses and result in a new work to debut at LACE on Thursday 21 January 2010. 

"I am me and you are you and we are we and we are all together. Corporation t-shirts, stupid bloody Tuesday, see how they run? Coming back from Kabul laying in a casket, see how they fly? Something’s wrong. The more I want to be me, the more I feel empty. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the tireder I get. Meanwhile, we manage. We blog, we rent apartments, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who's hooking up with whom, whatever it takes to hold on. All the existential crutches that allow us to keep dragging on, the dependencies we've contracted as the price of identity. Where do we go, sweet child, where do we go? Where do we go now?"  - Mark Tribe

RELATED EVENTS
Thursday 21 January 2010 - Guest artist talk with Mark Tribe at CalArts, Valencia.

To learn more about Mark Tribe's projects, visit www.marktribe.net.

LACE is pleased to present Mark Tribe: Port Huron Project, a video installation depicting reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movement of the Vietnam era. Each reenactement took place at the site of the original speech and was delivered by an actor or performance artist to an audience of invited guests and passers-by.

Watch a video of the installation here.

Drawing upon traditions of political protest, civil rights, and public address, Port Huron Project reenactments traveled across the country and encouraged audience participation and dialogue. Employing actors and artists to restage these radical and historically monumental speeches, the project examines artists’ relationships with the roots of American democracy, and the way in which these issues are still relevant today.

“The goal was to use the speeches not just as historical ready-mades or conceptual-art explorations of context, but also as a genuine form of protest, to point out with the help of art how much has changed, yet how much remains the same.” – Mark Tribe

Last year, LACE teamed up with Creative Time and Mark Tribe to present Cesar Chavez's 1971 speech We Are Also Responsible at Exposition Park. The documentation of this performance and other Port Huron Project reenactments, including The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis 1969/2008 and Let Another World Be Born: Stokely Carmichael 1967/2008, were later screened on campuses, in art spaces, and distributed online as an open-source media. Locations included Park Avenue Armory in New York City, the National Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, and MTV's oversized HD screen in Times Square.

With large-scale video projections, the upcoming installation at LACE will bring these reenactments to life within the exhibition space. This encompassing spectacle will allow viewers to step inside each scene and become a part of ...

LACE is pleased to present I Feel Different, a multi-media group exhibition organized by guest curator Jennifer Doyle. Participating artists: Nao Bustamante, James Luna, Lezley Saar, David Wojnarowicz, Monica Duncan, Lara Odell, Raquel Gutierrez, Susan Silton, and Niña Yhared (1814).

This provocative project explores both the experience of feeling different from others and the transformational power of art to make one feel differently. Most of the time, we attend museums and galleries with our social armor “up” – approaching art with sophistication, irony, and even a degree of cynicism. This exhibit gathers together artists working in the unusual registers of the sentimental and the sincere – testing the limits of what kinds of emotional expression are possible within art. In doing so, they ask us if tears register as “real” in art (and what happens when they do), what happens when we are asked to take on an artist’s outrage, depression, or pleasure as our own, or how much can an artist can really change how we feel (and if this what we want from them). The show acknowledges that contemporary art is powerfully defined by the relationship between art and the spectator, and asserts that emotion plays a major part in this story. 

I Feel Different opens with an evening of moody performance – a reading by Raquel Gutierrez (the text of which is available on the exhibition’s website), and live performances by LACE resident artist Niña Yhared (1814) and James Luna.

To read Jennifer Doyle's essay "Feel Your Way Through It," download the exhibition catalog.

Read about the exhibition on art 21 blog.

RELATED SALON EVENTS

Tuesday 13 October 2009 - 11PM
Niña Yhared performs a special cabaret at Wildness (2700 West 7th St., LA 90057).

Sunday 15 November 2009 - 2PM
Join curator Jennifer Doyle as ...

LACE is proud to present United Fruit, the first solo show by the artists collective Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young). This exhibition premieres a new body of work generated during Fallen Fruit's recent residency in Colombia, South America which features a series of photographs and video installations exploring the social, political and pop history of the banana. 

The opening reception, on Tuesday June 16 from 8pm – 10pm, features Are You Happy to See Me?, a participatory performance involving hundreds of bananas available for eating.  Attendees will be encouraged to photograph themselves playing with this often comical or suggestive fruit.

As the most popular fruit in the world, the banana is ubiquitous in daily life -- both as a food staple in grocery stores large and small as well as the supremely seductive fruit used in modern advertising and branding.  At the same time the banana’s history, politics and origins have remained virtually invisible due to the remoteness of where they are grown and of the people who grow them.  

Fallen Fruit's installation at LACE engages its subject in a range of bold and oblique strategies, signaling perhaps that no single history of the banana is possible.  The title for the exhibition, United Fruit comes from the United Fruit Company which exists today in a much reduced form as Chiquita Bananas.  More powerful than the Latin American countries it colonized, the corporation was marked by its ruthlessness and corruption, and its exploitation of workers, a turbulent history of protests and events that lead to the infamous Banana Massacre of 1928 near the town of Ciénega, Colombia, which Fallen Fruit visited to create this work.  Burns, Viegener and Young chose to retain the title United Fruit for its hopeful and utopian echo, a contrast to ...

Jason Yates' wall-drawing Hummer and Ami Tallman's wall-painting Thank You are currently on view in LACE's front gallery. They were both commissioned to debut for LACE's Annual Benefit Art Auction 2009.

Ami Tallman is a Los Angeles- based artist who received her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2006 and her BFA Interdisciplinary Fine Art (emphasis in new genres) from The San Francisco Art Institute in 1999. She recently exhibited her work at LACE in a group show curated by Christopher Russell entitled Against the Grain (12 June 2008 - 10 August 2008). She exhibited her work in a solo show at Circus Gallery, Los Angeles and has exhibited in group exhibitions at See Line Gallery, Santa Monica, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery, Portland, Trudi Gallery, Los Angeles, and Rental Gallery, New York to name a few. View her work at www.amitallman.com.

Jason Yates received his MFA from Art Center, Pasadena, California in 2000 and his BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1995. He has exhibited his work in solo shows including The Rise and Fall of Shame, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles (2009), Smog Setting, Los Angeles, California (2009), Smogabilly, Welcome Hunters, Los Angeles (2008), We Used To Be Friends, The Main Gallery, Las Vegas (2008). He has also exhibited in group shows including Feelings and Power, Five Thirty Three Los Angeles (2009), Under Alvarado: There is a Beach, Galleria Mexicali Rose Mexicali (2008), Pop Ups and Dreamabilly Emissions in San Francisco California (2008), and Closing Show, Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles (2008). View his work at Circus Gallery here.

STREET ADDRESS
MY BLOODY VALENTINE

From the silly to the sublime, this 24/7 storefront installation offers Hollywood Boulevard passersby new video work ranging from the roughly hewn to the pristinely polished. My Bloody Valentine explores the poetics of love, lust, sex, music, blood, guts and terror. Darin Klein, curator.

Artists include Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Kelly Sears, Trulee Grace Hall, Nathan Budde, Cindy Rehm, Dino Dinco, Weston Currie, Cathy Begien, Zachary Drucker, Rhys Ernst, Adrian Cruz, Kanako Wynkoop, Anjali Prasertong, and Mores McWreath.

LACE & Pitzer Art Galleries present Narrowcast: Reframing Global Video 1986/2008 curated by Pitzer Art Galleries Director Ciara Ennis and Associate Professor of Media Studies Ming-Yuen S. Ma. The exhibition is part of Resolution 3, a collaboration between Pitzer College's Media Studies program, Pitzer Art Galleries and LACE on the occasion of LACE's thirtieth anniversary.

Narrowcast re-presents selected works from LACE's seminal 1986 video exhibition Resolution: A Critique of Video Art and pairs them in compelling and unexpected ways with contemporary works, thus framing the medium's brief history both formally and thematically. Resolution was one of the first exhibitions in the United States to embrace video as a serious art form and to discuss it in critical terms. Revisiting Resolution in relation to a number of exceptional contemporary video works demonstrates the influence that video art has had on artistic practice over the past two decades and testifies to the pivotal role and ubiquitous presence that the medium has in the contemporary global art world.