Each week, Artweek.LA provides a comprehensive calendar of art events from the more than 475 art venues throughout Los Angeles. This Artweek.LA features highlights and our recommendations for the upcoming week. A complete listing can be found at www.artweek.la.
Opening This Week
Shane Guffogg: At the Still Point
For more than a year now, Guffogg has been drilling straight down with a single-minded focus and the results have been profound. The paintings in this show, oils on canvas, are "abstract" in the conventional sense of the word but their subject is real: energy made visible. Guffogg descibes his work as "not about flattening pictorial space but rather about creating it. Having the luxury of historical time to look back on abstract painting enables me to make abstraction my subject, just as a still life or person can be a subject within a pictorial space." Opens February 12 at Leslie Sacks Fine Art.
Laurie Frick: Sleep Patterns
Frick's wall-based works and a site specific installation represent the resonant rhythms of the neural paths of the human mind. Using scientific tools to measure these, Frick desires to visually present our biological nature though a unique language of pattern. Her recent works are conceived from five years of daily activity charts captured in ten minute intervals over twenty-four hours from a colleague's self quantified sleep patterns, along with her own nightly EEG sleep data collected over a period of one hundred nights. Opens February 12 at Edward Cella Art + Architecture.
Jennifer Steinkamp
Jennifer Steinkamp employs computer animation and new media to create projection installations in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion and phenomenological perception. Entitled Madame Curie, the seven-channel, synchronized projection is inspired by Steinkamp's recent research into atomic energy, atomic explosions, and the effects of these forces on nature. Opens February 12 at ACME Gallery.
Saturday at PDC
Pacific Design Center is keeping its doors open this Saturday, February 12 from 10am - 4pm for Design Loves Art, featuring new projects and ongoing exhibitions by a host of resident galleries such as den contemporary's Staccato, a visually striking exhibition in contrasting black and white featuring four artists who use thousands of distinctive marks to create arresting works. The artists utilize an unorthodox approach to "drawing." Rather than using extended lines or broad strokes and curves, their technique is more physically demanding with minute mark-making to create the imagery. With their own take on the use of "line," the movement is more disciplined, the energy abbreviated and repetitive instead of the extended push/pull of the pencil and pen. The artists embrace the challenge of the process and shift the viewer's perspective of scale with their visually complex work.
Last Call
Eske Kath: There Are Houses Everywhere
Eske continues to explore subject territory that balances colorful exuberance with images of destructive threat. Through large format paintings and sculpture, Eske depicts nature and human civilization in conflict. This conflict has been at the heart of Eske's practice for several years. Human civilization in Eske's work is symbolized by the image of the house. The house serves as proxy for the human figure and also as exemplar for humanity's will to control nature. Closing February 12 at Charlie James Gallery.
Ben Durham
The subjects of Durham's portraits are friends, classmates and acquaintances from his childhood in Lexington, Kentucky. In a ritualistic daily process, the artist combs the Lexington police reports for familiar names and faces, collecting their mug shots and arrest records. Ranging from petty theft to violent crime, these records represent the climax of a troubled past. Closing February 12 at Marc Selwyn Fine Art.
