Saturday, October 18, 2008 6 - 8 pm
October 18, 2008 - January 11, 2009
Saturday, September 13, 2008 6 - 8 pm
September 6 - October 11, 2008
SHERRY FRUMKIN GALLERY is pleased to present Sid Garrison's second solo exhibition of color pencil drawing
opening Saturday, September 13, 2008 with a reception from 6 – 9 pm.
The exhibition continues through
October 11.
In Art Ltd. magazine, Kim Beil described Garrison's work as "...playing a game of chess against oneself, Garrison makes a mark and then responds to it by combating or supplementing his last move. The result is alive at multiple levels, from the waxy surface to the complex organic abstractions fairly crackling with the energy of carefully balanced tension".
Saturday, April 26, 2008 6 - 8 pm
April 26 - June 14, 2008
Art and money is the equation is for some a reason to shiver, for some it occasions critical reflections, sometimes also the idea of new ways to actively incorporate economical sub- or infrastructures into the work itself and into the artistic process. From Duchamp to Conceptual Art a whole series of strategies has been developed, and contemporaty relational aesthetics - the work as "service", "intervention", "social trigger", etc - becomes an increasingly integrated part in systems that are both symbolic, aesthetic, and economic.
Sven Olov-Wallenstein
L.A.
Weekly review (pdf)
Saturday, November 3, 2007 6 - 9 pm
January 19 - March 8, 2008
SHERRY FRUMKIN GALLERY is pleased to present solo exhibitions of work by Kimberly Squaglia and Jil Weinstock
opening Saturday, January 19, 2008 with a reception from 6 – 8 pm.
The exhibition continues through
March 8.
Kimberly Squaglia's lyrical works of delicately painted biomorphic patterns and microscopic forms are layered between coats of sanded or glossy resin. Lacey ribbons and starry bursts of color are magically suspended inside these wall-hung works that sizzle with trapped energy inside clear, creamy smooth surfaces. The tension between inside and out gives them their pizzazz – the equivalent of sipping what your tongue believes as simple fruit drink only to find it’s a spiked punch.
Jil Weinstock takes recognizable objects, like vintage clothing (many of the them inherited from her grandmother whose fashion sense and sewing talent she admired) that she encases in rubber. Hanging on the wall much like vanity mirrors, they address ideas of identity and memory. These sensuous materials trapped inside rubber like insects captured in amber address the artist’s continuing interest in exploring the double-edged sword of feminine identity. The material's fleshy surface acknowledges the body while the strict geometric shape of the pieces demonstrates Weinstock's exploration of formal composition.
Saturday, November 3, 2007 6 - 9 pm
November 3 - January 12, 2008
The concept of marking time is universal. It is what we all do with our lives - some more gracefully than others - but none leaving an unmarked path.
SHERRY FRUMKIN GALLERY is pleased to announce a
solo exhibition of work by Los Angeles artist, Doni
Silver Simons,
opening Saturday, November 3, 2007 with a reception from 6 - 9 pm.
The reception is part of the 3rd Anniversary Open House celebrations
organized by Santa Monica Art Studios. The exhibition continues through
January 12.
The works in Center Justified were created in the last two years.
For more than two months over the summer and fall, the artist worked
in the gallery expanding on the scale of her practice of marking
the passage of time - a ritual resonant with earlier efforts at abandoning
speech and documenting time visually, incorporating her observance
of the traditional Jewish calendar.
The exhibition contains both works on canvas and on paper. The scale
varies from a 16' 3" painting created on site in the gallery
and completed between the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays to
intimate works on canvas and paper drawn or painted at her studio,
on airline flights or on vacation. Simons needs to document her time
on Earth, its passing shape and mood. There is discipline in the
rule for creating each work. Within each lies its own distinct rhythm
and poetry.
After Doni Silver Simons completed her MFA at Wayne State, she had
10 solo exhibitions and performances and participated in as many
group exhibitions in a short period of time. In the years following
that outburst of intense activity, her attention was devoted to teaching,
lecturing and raising a family. She never stopped making work, but
she consciously withdrew from exhibiting until last year.
Doni Silver Simons' work is in the public collections of Detroit
Institute of Art, University of Michigan Art Museum, Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center, National Endowment of the Arts, Michigan Council
of the Arts, Detroit, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, Flint Institute
of Arts, Michigan, Allegheny County Community College, Pittsburgh.
Click here for more information: pdf
file (72kb)
Visit Doni Silver Simons website.
Saturday, June 30, 2007 7 – 9 PM
June 30 – August 11, 2007
L.A. Times review (pdf)
L.A. Weekly review (pdf)
ArtWeek review (pdf)
SHERRY FRUMKIN GALLERY is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by Bay Area artist, Robin Kandel, opening Saturday, June 30, 2007 with a reception from 7 – 9 pm. The untitled exhibition of videos, photographs, painting, maps and found objects is a child’s eye view of how one comes to understand identity. Who am I? Where did I come from? Where do I fit into history? For most people these questions are answered in childhood through the stories families tell about themselves. What happens when they are only partly told? In the September 11th aftermath Kandel was stunned when her father revealed the existence of audio interviews he had given in 1983 to a researcher of WWII survivors. “Listening to the tapes for the first time left me dazed,” she wrote. It also led to several bodies of work that took her away from painting into video performance and installation. She tried to assimilate knowledge of her Ukrainian father as a boy in a Nazi labor camp: the back-breaking work and escape and nearly two years in the woods, hiding and on the run.
Robin Kandel’s mother, born in Detroit and her dad, born in Ukraine, are cousins, but as kids growing up on opposite sides of the Atlantic, they were unaware of each other's existence. If not for WWII they might never have met. Her dad's childhood was a dramatic one of survival in the forests of Ukraine. Her mother's by contrast, epitomized the American WWII experience, except for her family's relation to the Purple Gang, a Capone-style Detroit gang of the Prohibition/Depression Era.
What to make of all this? The current exhibition includes the video “dress-up” in which Kandel takes on a number of characters who define her family’s history - among them a woman with a purse, a 30’s era gangster and a nazi who symbolizes the war the led to her parents’ meeting. Having missed the opportunity to grow into her identity slowly over childhood, Kandel tries on all the costumes to get inside the people whose lives lead to her own. The unlikely assortment of images and objects she has collected in this installation are fragments of her parents’ story. “I suppose it's my story as well. In the process of 'putting the pieces together' the ideas I'd formed in childhood about 'where I came from' didn't disappear, they expanded to encompass new information. This new information answered some questions and raised others. Now I'm wondering what is myth, what is fact, and are the two inseparable?”
Robin Kandel received her BFA in painting at the University of Michigan in 1983 and was awarded the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2001. She has exhibited at Mirage Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Gallery ef Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan; Sesnon Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA and the Slusser Gallery, Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is represented by Andrea Schwartz Gallery in San Francisco. This is her first exhibition with Sherry Frumkin.
January 13 - February 24, 2007
Trying to Pick up a Gallery Guyde is a series of pastel on paper works that express the artist's frustration in finding the right match for gallery representation* in her professional life, and for a romantic partner in her personal one. Her playful self-portraits have an undertone of wistful sadness and her use of text involving riffs on words like mate, pair, double, couple and partner, among others, reveals a highly imaginative mind.
In previous solo exhibitions with the gallery in 1992 and 1993, Stein's quasi-autobiographical works were a delightful visual and linguistic visual stream of conscious tour de force. She was a student of John Baldessari who said of that "her images are unadulterated and joyful displays of exuberance that burst for the with indelible icons that burn into one's mind -imprinted forever."
*Corey Stein stopped showing with Sherry Frumkin Gallery for more than a decade. Who knows if this will be a good match, or if she'll pick up a new one?
November
4th - December 19, 2006
This will be the 4th solo for the artist with the gallery. Ekstrom's sculptures and installation spaces can be read and experienced as a meeting point for interior and exterior understandings of word, space and place, memory and event. Her works are motivated by the tension that arises between the sacred and the secular realms and how these notions continue to animate activities within the private, public and collective experience. Her eclectic objects and spaces begin with meditations on such things as, sacred text, the handwriting of Emily Dickinson, common objects within the domestic and natural realms, and how space becomes place through intentional purpose. She gathers and co-mingles these in ways that evoke the ritual dimensions of daily life and art practice. Recitation of the ordinary is a fundamental thread that runs throughout her work. What exists, as first a point of origin in one corner of the world extends into space, to be read anew in material form.
Linda Ekstrom website
September
16th - October 21, 2006
In this new painting series, begun in 2003, Donis pairs the unlikely partners of soldiers from opposing battlefields in poses of classical ballet, expanding on the visual language he began in the controversial "WAR" exhibit that was first commissioned for the re-opening of the Watts Towers Art Center then censored, by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. (The cancelled exhibition of 14 paintings of LAPD officers and gang members doing hip-hop moves together went on view shortly afterwards at Frumkin/Duval Gallery in Santa Monica as "WAR: The Last Dance Reinstated".)
Richard Meyer, associate professor of Art History at USC, and author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford, 2002) comments regarding "Abdullah and Sergeant Adams" (2003), a painting featuring a US Marine partnered with an Iraqi soldier, "No other art form idealizes sexual desire like ballet. By refusing the simple route of making an obscene sexual image, Donis has made a far more powerful one, about desire and purity and the aspiration for peace and communion with our enemies." (Art Papers Nov. 04).
Donis’ history of provocative work begins with his infamous pairing of same sex kissing couples from the 1997 exhibition "My Cathedral" at the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco. In a matter of weeks two paintings from the exhibition where destroyed by vandals causing a wave of media and public demonstrations along with the largest attendance record in the gallery's history. Donis says, "Machismo has been at the heart of my investigations for several years now. Trying to understand communities of men and how they interact is of key interest to me. I first thought of this new series "Pas de Deux" on the eve of September 11, 2001 as I installed the paintings from "WAR" (2001) at the Watts Towers Arts Center. "This idea that dance could be used as a metaphor to understand and somehow erase hatred is of great interest to me. I began researching images from early ballets in old books on the Ballets Russes, American Ballet Theater and the Royal Ballet. These frozen postures from choreography long since forgotten seemed the perfect ground for this new project."
July 8 - August 5th, 2006
In these restrained and beautiful works Kerr reflects on the isolation of the American commuter culture, distilling the experience of a contemporary visual culture saturated with passing images of buildings and freeways. Just as freeway architecture gives the passing motorist a continuous, uninterrupted view of a seamless façade, these works have no 'front' either and the curves of the pieces force the viewer to move about in order to see the work in its entirety.
After making the first few pieces, Kerr began to travel the freeways with his camera, searching out prime examples of this architectural idiom. It was while cruising the freeways that he began to think about this other type of architecture - of interchanges, overpasses and ramps. It occurred to him that these two idioms have a symbiotic relationship. He saw how the Edge Cities of America were created first by the massive buildup of highways and roads through the rural and pastoral outlying areas and that once in place they were followed by large office buildings and office parks built in close proximity to draw a tax base. Then the area is flooded with housing, strip malls and services, and the cycle moves on to the next location, which led to the Racetracks series, a reflection of the continuous loop of modern life: go to work, run errands, and return home, and repeat it ad nauseam.
ArtWeek reviewer Kristin Palm observed that Kerr's work is "largely devoid of he irony with which suburbia is treated in so much of the art world today..." and noted the homage to the "clean lines and crisp edges that make modernist architecture so counterintuitively alluring".
April
29th - June 10th, 2006
While many artists choose to take the money and run, Los Angeles artist Jack Butler chose to explore something new with his City of Los Angeles COLA grant. Armed with a pinhole camera and additional support from Polaroid, he set out to capture the hotrod car culture that has fascinated him since boyhood. Butler's homage to this "kulture" is a reflection of his respect for the do-it-yourself attitude of the early hotrod enthusiasts. For him, there is no "high" or "low" in this art -- just the love of creating something unique and individual and the spirit of adventure that all good artists share. This "attitude" is what first attracted him and why he wanted to document it. His choice of the "old school" super wide-angle pinhole camera gives him the ability to emphasize and monumentalize the exaggerated gestures of the hot-rodder who pose for him with their meticulously handmade cars. Like other contemporary practitioners - hotrod builder or "fine" artist - with new technologies at hand, Butler is able to push his medium to new levels. He accomplishes this by scanning the Polaroid images created with the pinhole camera into the computer to create exquisite large-scale digitally produced images.
This is Jack Butler's third solo exhibition with Sherry Frumkin. He is professor of art at California State University since 1988 and while a dedicated teacher, has actively exhibited his work both in the United States and internationally. His work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, the Graham and Susan Nash Collection, Polaroid and many others.
January
14th–February 18th, 2006
Sid Garrison, who is known for his densely layered colored-pencil abstractions, embraces the limitations of his medium by immersing himself in the physicality of marking, incising and burnishing. He begins each drawing with one mark leading to thousands of additional strokes. He acts out of curiosity and through an incremental approach of accumulated marks seeks to discern and strengthen the drawing's internal balance with gradual permutations of space, depth and suggested movement.
The title of this exhibition and the inspiration for the drawings is a collection of found sound art recordings from the Conet Project that includes coded messages, music, numbers and signals transmitted around the globe during 50 years of Cold War espionage. While he works, Garrison listens to the recordings and responds, creating a visual jazz improvisation. In these drawings random marks, calligraphic forms, crosshatches and dots interrupt lyrical passages. Lovely arcs of color reach across empty space in a kind of visual Morse code. Like early pioneers of electronic music, Garrison gives shape to this random noise.
November 12 – December
24, 2005
The title of the exhibition is a little used term meaning to surge, rise or heave upward under the influence of a natural force.
A California native, Squaglia was born in Sacramento in 1970 and completed her BA in 1996 at California State University at Chino. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2000 and has shown extensively there. This will be her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.
Kimberly Squaglia's meticulous paintings look effortlessly created. Lace-like biological forms surge and rise, appear and disappear under layers of resin, replicating, accentuating and manipulating associations with landscape and scientific display. The images begin as doodles, paint drips and rough strokes, which stop and start seemingly at whim. Subtle and masterful changes of hue create the illusion of space and movement, breath and pulsation. Suspended in layers of resin, the shapes are squirming forms of life trapped forever for our enjoyment, surging and heaving just beneath the surface.
Squaglia's work is included in "Populance" curated by Terrie Sultan and David Pagel. Like other artists included in this traveling exhibition, which originated at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, Squaglia’s works are "celebratory and edgy" with "traces of vulgarity promiscuously intermingled with the fine-tuned nuances of highly aestheticized delectation." (Blaffer Gallery)
A conversation with Sami Shalom Chetrit, an Israeli poet, essayist, educator and activist, and Mahmood Ibrahim, a Palestinian historian, activist and educator. Co-sponsored by the Levantine Culture Center: www.levantinecenter.org
A panel discussion with journalists Amy Wilentz, Lebanese Daily Star correspondent Hussein Ibish and LA Jewish Journal Editor Rob Eshman.
A dialogue led by Rabbi Steven Jacobs of Temple Kol Tikva , Dr. Nazir Khaja of the Islamic Information Service and friends.
Sherry Frumkin Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural installation of an innovative traveling photography-based exhibition by photojournalist Barbara Grover, This Land To Me - Some call it Palestine, others Israel. The exhibition will take place from November 20 through December 31, 2004 with an opening night reception on November 20th from 6-9 pm.
Few other issues fuel global immutable tensions and violence as does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet few people have ever had the chance to meet someone who lives the conflict every day. What do we really know about the conflict beyond the bloody images filtered through the nightly news? In "This Land," a deeply moving and challenging picture of the conflict, photojournalist Barbara Grover provides the public with that opportunity.
Hanging free form, 12 life-size black and white canvas portraits (44" x 60") are paired with 12 canvas panels (36" x 60") bearing first-person narratives by those in the photographs. With this approach, Grover offers viewers a unique opportunity to get to know six Israelis and six Palestinians on a very human level. Viewers will be surrounded by images, words and voices (a looped audio of excerpts from the actual interviews) as they make their way through the installation. Each photographic image is of a single person looking directly into the camera as if looking into the viewers' eyes; each narrative answers the question of what the land means to the person in the photo as if speaking directly to the viewer in candid, intimate terms. The people who call the land Palestine or Israel come to life in front of the viewer.
This installation is artistically groundbreaking in several ways beginning with Grover's reliance on the text as an equal and integral part of the experience and continuing with the size and placement of the photographs in the space.
"In this installation, the whole narrative is given a prominence and a life of its own," commented Sherry Frumkin. "Usually in photojournalism the photo takes prominence with the text reduced to captions. In Barbara's work, there is a symbiosis between the text and the photos. The pictures are beautiful but it is only when the text is read that the viewer realizes that these exquisite portraits are framed in violence. It is the union of the two that makes the installation so powerful and engrossing. The size of the presentation and its placement in the space also plays a significant role in how the photographs are perceived. The pictures are life size. The subjects are looking back at you. The space is tight. The installation provides a virtual encounter with everyday Palestinians and Israelis the viewers might otherwise never meet - an encounter that will engage and inform. But the public must also face the fact that they are in an inescapable labyrinth, brought face to face with their fears, prejudices and assumptions surrounding the conflict."
Barbara Grover left her political consulting firm, Skelton, Grover and Associates, in 1996 to take on the creation of photographic works that would effect social change. On assignment for a non-profit agency in the Middle East in 2000, she became closely involved with Israelis and Palestinians from all walks of life -- individuals who helped to put a human face on the bloodshed and anger seen nightly on the news - individuals who revealed the common bonds between many Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the complexities that make Middle East peace so elusive. She was struck by the "disconnect" between what she, as a journalist, was witnessing and what the average person abroad understands about the conflict and she wanted to provide a similar experience to others.
During the summer of 2002, Grover traveled from the Lebanese border to the Gaza Strip -- from the refugee camps and villages of Gaza and the West Bank, through the cities of Israel, to the kibbutzes on the Lebanese border where she photographed and interviewed the people.
"I was determined to find a way to let the public have the same kind of enlightening, face-to-face encounters I had had," said Grover. My hope is that I have provided the viewer with an opportunity to see beyond the stereotypes and into the humanity. This Land strives to empower both the people in the photos - people who rarely have a voice - and viewers, who will leave the installation with deeper insight into one of the most important issues affecting the world today."
A series of related events at the gallery will be offered to help the public understand the complexities, realities and diversity of perspectives that make this conflict so painfully difficult to resolve. Events at the gallery will include a talk on "Culture, Identity and Borders," with Israeli Sami Shalom Chetrit and Palestinian Mahmood Ibrahim (Dec. 2, 7 pm) and a panel discussion with journalists Amy Wilentz, Hussein Ibish and Rob Eshman on media coverage of the conflict (Dec 16, 7 pm). On Sunday December 19 at 4 pm, Rabbi Steven Jacobs of Temple Kol Tikva and Dr. Nazir Khaja of the Islamic cultural Center will engage in an interfaith dialog. All events are free and open to the public. The installation will then travel around the US and overseas.
The project is supported by The Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Levantine Cultural Center, and the Middle East Peace Network, a California 501 (c) 3 that is the project's fiscal sponsor.