Katie Ryan
Tasteful Improvements
September 10 – September 26

Opening reception: Friday, September 10, 7-10pm

Tasteful Improvements is a solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Katie
Ryan. For this exhibition, Ryan will create a large-scale geometric
sculpture modeled after Russian tile stoves, and will also be
landscaping the exterior of the gallery. This site-specific sculptural
installation unites seemingly disparate elements of both Ryan’s
practice and the exterior and interior of the gallery. Drawing upon
the artist’s interest in décor and ornamentation, combined with
minimalist sculptural formal qualities, Tasteful Improvements aims to
transform the site by highlighting the gallery’s scale, architecture
and landscape.

Katie Ryan received her BA in fine art and anthropology from Pitzer
College in 2006. Ryan has exhibited in Los Angeles, Seattle and New
York. She currently lives and works in Northeast Los Angeles.

Refreshments generously provided by:

Davida Nemeroff | POTPOURRI
Opening Saturday June 12th
8-10 pm

Dorothy: I wish I could explain it, but I cant.

I was feeling jealous and lonely… and god knows what else…

Blanche: Magenta.

Dorothy: s’cuse me?

Blanche: Magenta.

That’s what I call it when I get that way…all kinds of feelings tumbling all over themselves.

Ya know…you’re not quite blue cause you’re not really sad. And although you’re a little bit jealous, you wouldn’t say ‘you’re greeeen with envy’. And every now and then you realize you’re kinda scared… but you would hardly call yourself yella. (giggles)

I hate that feeling! I just hate it. And I hate the color magenta.

(giggles again.)

That’s why I named it that.

Magenta.

Davida Nemeroff is an artist and the proprietress of Night Gallery. Originally from Toronto, Nemeroff recieved an MFA from Columbia University in ‘09. For POTPOURRI, her second solo project in Los Angeles, Nemeroff explores the multivariate forms of femininity in photographs and objects. Nemeroff appears courtesy of The Company.

Tragic Dinner Theatre: a fundraiser for workspace

BUY TICKETS NOW!!

Tragic Dinner Theatre, directed by Anna Wilson, combines the aesthetics of ancient Greek theater, Commedia Dell’Arte, tableau vivant, magic lantern shows and Carnival to bring to life a modern interpretation of Ovid’s Tereus. Join us for an afternoon of food and entertainment including lavish banquet, set before the stage, offering fruit, olives, cheeses, and pastries that could have been served at a party in ancient Greece. Tragic Dinner Theatre is a fundraiser to support upcoming programming at workspace.

Date: May 23, 2010

Time: Doors open at 2:30

Place: The American Legion in Highland Park
227 North Ave. 55, Los Angeles CA 90042

Ticket Cost: BEFORE: $20 minimum donation to workspace. AT THE DOOR: $25 cash only please!

For More Info: www.tragicdinnertheatre.com or contact us at info@workspace2601.com

RAID Projects and workspace are joining forces for one month to bring you a single entity: RAIDspace/workPROJECTS. In a series of four one-week exhibitions opening every Saturday in April, four independent curators were invited to organize shows that take place in both spaces at the same time, in an attempt to bridge spatial and temporal gaps present in the narrative of art viewing around Los Angeles.

Opening April 24th, 7-10pm
April 24-29, 2010
Curated by Elizabeth Cline

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This is the last opening in the month of programming that constituted RAIDspace/workPROJECTS. During the opening workspace and RAID Projects will also be releasing a ‘zine catalogue detailing the activities from the past month!

Refreshments generously provided by Samuel Adams.

RAID Projects and workspace are joining forces for one month to bring you a single entity: RAIDspace/workPROJECTS. In a series of four one-week exhibitions opening every Saturday in April, four independent curators were invited to organize shows that take place in both spaces at the same time, in an attempt to bridge spatial and temporal gaps present in the narrative of art viewing around Los Angeles.

Curated by Zemula Barr, Sarah Brin, Melinda Guillen and Jennifer Lieu
Nice to meet you: Over
April 17 – 22, 2010

Performance 7-9pm
Installation 9-10pm

Nice to Meet You: Over is a performative exchange between two artists intended to be a reification of the spatial distance between workspace and RAID Projects, marked by the contemplation of voyeurism, the notion of virtual space as a meeting site, and the tensions forged by continuously expanding social networks. Each artist will manifest these themes through their implementation of archaic modes of communication such as fax machines, handwritten letters, and typewriters, as they attempt to get to know one another from a distance. While both participants have strong themes of engagement and mediated communication within their respective oeuvres, their identities will remain undisclosed until the opening, in order to maintain the quality of the mediated, first encounter.

Juxtaposing instantaneous and delayed forms of communication, attendees at both spaces will be able to simultaneously witness the encounter in-person, as well as through remote video feeds. Printouts of artists’ communiqués and artifacts from the performance will be on view at both workspace and RAID Projects, through April 22.

About the artists –

…

About the organizers –

Zemula Barr, Sarah Brin, Melinda Guillen and Jennifer Lieu are co-organizers and sometimes friends. For three consecutive summers, all attended Kamprow, a camp for humorless, conceptually dense children in Falmouth, MA, from 1989-1991.

*Image by Zemula Barr with text generated in Self-Portrait Bot.

RAID Projects and workspace are joining forces for one month to bring you a single entity: RAIDspace/workPROJECTS. In a series of four one-week exhibitions opening every Saturday in April, four independent curators were invited to organize shows that take place in both spaces at the same time, in an attempt to bridge spatial and temporal gaps present in the narrative of art viewing around Los Angeles.

Julie Shafer

Curated by Jessica Minckley
Outside the Project
April 10 – 15, 2010

CANAL curates the work of photographers Sidonie Loiseleux, Nicole C.
Russell, Ruby Johnson, Julie Shafer, Lindsay Ljunkull, Siri Kaur, Heather Rasmussen, Zoe Crosher, and Renee C. Martin. Outside the Project is a physical and online exhibition of works that are not part of these artists’ practices. Most of them work in series or within some sort of self-imposed structure. The photographs in this exhibition are taken between these projects, but are to be considered art objects, despite their lack of structure. Within the context of his exhibition, these photographs are likened to one off drawings or artworks other artists make.

CANAL has curated one artwork from each artist to be exhibited at RAID
Projects in a traditional format, however, more works are visible online. To access this element of the show, there will be Internet access and a public computer available at Workspace during the week long exhibition, and on theCANAL website.

RAID Projects and workspace are joining forces for one month to bring you a single entity: RAIDspace/workPROJECTS. In a series of four one-week exhibitions opening every Saturday in April, four independent curators were invited to organize shows that take place in both spaces at the same time, in an attempt to bridge spatial and temporal gaps present in the narrative of art viewing around Los Angeles.

Curated by David Horovitz
DRUGSTORE KIOSK
April 3-9, 2010

RAID will feature:
Marley Freeman
Paul Branca
Mary Walling Blackburn
John Sisley
Miranda Lichtenstein
Annegret Kellner
Emilie Halpern
Barbara Ess
Daniel Gustav Cramer
Alex Klein
Sarah Rara Anderson
Graham Parker
Suzie Silver
Marijke Appelman
Jon Pestoni
Josh Kit Clayton
Amy Lam
Luke Fischbeck
Michael G. Bauer
Avalon Kalin
John Pena
Santos Vasquez
Zach Houston
Michelle Blade
Graham Anderson
Steve Kado
Ken Ehrlich

workspace will feature:
Haris Epaminonda
Marius Engh
Vlatka Horvat
Charlotte Moth
Kristina Lee Podesva
Lisa Tan
Oraib Toukan
Lucy Raven

Drugstore Kiosk will exhibit two new organized projects by David Horvitz that will feature 35 international artists. RAID will debut DRUGSTORE BEETLE (Sitodrepa Paniceum). workspace will re-exhibit Kiosk, recently shown at Golden Parachutes in Berlin. Horvitz’s practice can be found somewhere in between (or beyond) the two positions of artist and curator. What he produces are frame-works in which other art-works can exist both independently and as a component within the system. These systems examine exchange, distribution, and reproduction – and can be seen as parallel to interfaces and frame-works of contemporary digital-culture.

The project at workspace, titled Kiosk, is an exhibition of 24 5″x7″ photographic prints by 8 artists. The prints were produced using the photo kiosk of a local drug store. These kiosks become places of reproduction and distribution for this exhibition. All 24 image files are freely available for download on workspace’s site, and via a burned CDR in the gallery-space. The show becomes a “traveling show” through dispersive reproduction. The Kiosk exhibition in Berlin will close almost the exact same moment it opens in Los Angeles, 6,000 miles away. A group of international artists were selected whose practices explore various ideas of travel. Lisa Tan’s photographs were all shot in foreign cities, while Kristina Lee Podesva’s focuses on the global nature of contemporary North American life. A trip to Japan is the source of Lucy Raven’s photographs. For Oraib Toukan a juxtaposition on political art tourism: a man photographing the Apartheid Wall in Palestine, within the frame of her own photograph. A supplementary reader will accompany the exhibition that will include texts chosen by the artists. Included will be John Berger, Joan Didion, Homi K. Bhabha, Werner Herzog, Italo Calvino, George Bataille, among others. This will also be available as a PDF download and via the burned CDRs.

In a reverse direction from Kiosk, instead of distributing into the open, DRUGSTORE BEETLE (Sitodrepa Paniceum), exhibited at RAID, aims to infiltrate into a closed circulatory system: the library. Using the process of the library donation, 30 exhibitions-in-a-box were donated by Horvitz to various art libraries around the world. From Los Angeles to New York to Tehran to Shanghai to Denver. Before these exhibitions were gifted, Horvitz purchased an ISBN and coordinated the meta-data for the exhibition to be uploaded into Worldcat, the database librarians use to input and receive a publication’s information. Since the information will exist in two digital databases, the hope is that this exhibition can slip with ease, like a sly fox, into collections around the world (the title refers to the most notorious of book-worms, burrowing into books and shelves). Though, there is certainly the risk of these being rejected, returned, or lost, giving it a similar fate to the open qualities of Kiosk. You never know what may happen to them. Each exhibition contains the work of 27 artists. All works are loose, and contained in a box like structure called a four-flap, an archival casing librarians use to contain loose prints so that they may be shelved with the books in the collection. What results, when accepted, is an exhibition ready to be checked-out. Or, for non-circulatory collections, an exhibition one may view, with white cloth gloves and a surrounding silence, inside of the library by appointment. RAID will be checking out the exhibition from USC’s Architecture and Fine Art Library. On display will be various types of prints, the archival four-flap container, and other documentation/ephemera that surrounds the project. Some works, such as the paintings by Marley Freeman, Paul Branca, and Graham Anderson, will be unique works (at each library is a similar but different painting). Avalon Kalin and Santos Vasquez’s photographs were made inside other libraries. Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons presents small musical notation, which is different at each library and would combine to make the complete piece when played all together. Similarly, Daniel Gustav Cramer has put in a different colored paper in each one, which when combined would form a complete rainbow.

A precedent to DRUGSTORE BEETLE (Sitodrepa Paniceum) is Marcel Duchamp’s boîtes-en-valise, miniature replicas of his work bound in a leather box, which he was making duplicates of. Yet, it is not just the similarity between the exhibition in a box – or the duplicates of identical exhibitions in boxes – but Duchamp’s own trickster qualities. When the Second World War broke out across Europe, Duchamp found himself dressed as cheese buyer from Paris, sneaking the boxes through Occupied France to Marseilles, and then to Lisboa, and then across the Atlantic to New York in 1942. As Duchamp’s boxes were disguised as cheese to cross international borders amidst a World War, these come as gifts amidst hard economic times (an economic period in which libraries are most grateful of donations because many face budget cuts). Yet, unlike the story of the Trojan Horse, this gift is not guised as a gift with the sole intention of infiltration. It is given as a true gift – as a sacrifice, and with nothing expected in return. In the case of Marley Freeman (as with everyone’s pieces): all of her paintings are given away, with the potential of them all disappearing as well. That is the sacrifice.

The time and thought and energy put into something, which in a simple gesture, is given all away.

POTPOURRI
Davida Nemeroff (June 12th, 8-10 pm)

Tragic Dinner Theatre: a fundraiser for workspace
(May 23rd, 2:30pm)

Synopsis :

48 hours in Coney Island, a few days before the final closing of the famous amusement park. Between beach scenes, rides, wanderings, the film shows both past and present of the place: as a place for experimental, technological and cultural architecture, producer of futuristic mythologies, Coney Island was also one of the last places for collective and popular gatherings (in the heart of a market-oriented society) : the mermaid parade, the hot-dog contest, the fireworks, etc. But the topic allows also the filmmaker to propose a new form of documentary, with very specific ethical and aesthetic options, which refers to the tradition of the great American photography and goes further in the « cinéma-vérité »
with anthropological finality (from Jean Rouch to Frederick Wiseman).

Marion Naccache was born in 1979 in Paris. Co-director of the Paris Underground Film Festival and founder of the Strip Film Festival (2003-2007), which screened creative documentaries, artist films, poetry and dance films, she has both studied and taught contemporary poetry at the Ecole Normale Supérieure lettres et sciences humaines. Before Coney Island (last summer), her first feature length film, she made several short films, some of them in collaboration with Tom Jarmusch, such as the (the dead fish story), which screened at Miami-Basel Fair in 2007, and at the Chelsea Hôtel, in 2008.