WPA is please to announce a new show by Adam Janes. Carpenter's carpenter (plan your escape) is a short film, soundtrack, and installation loosely based on the work of cult movie writer, director, and composer John Carpenter. Though "plan your escape" was taken from the advertising campaign of Carpenter's "Escape From L.A.", most of the project steals its rough structure from Carpenter's first major release "Assault on Precinct 13" which was released the year of the artist's birth, 1976. "Assault on Precinct 13" is an updated version of Howard Hawk's "Rio Grande" in which a lone sheriff holds off an entire gang of ruthless villains with a small band of talented gunslingers and crooners. "Rio Grande" is said to be a allegory for blacklisting in Hollywood, as well as a critique of McCarthyism. For the project at the WPA, a window will be added to the gallery. The artist's short film and soundtrack will be made from the installation process. Carpenter was chosen as the model for the project not only because of his low budget, do-it-yourself simplicity but his relentless obsession with "remakes" and odd pop-cultural cross breeding.

Artist Statement:

I have always been interested in how personal or universal histories manifest themselves in objects and how associative meaning is embedded in form, material, and surface. For the past several years I have been making straightforward sculptural objects that have been caught in the act of morphing between body and product, nature and prop. Through a synthesis of source material, a loose conceptual framework is created and informs the shapes and the palette of the project. However, it is important that these fused sources remain somewhat elusive, allowing the objects and "what they are" to be fluid rather than fixed. A kind of open ended-ness that permits the things I make to remain mysterious, yet not unfamiliar, not predetermined but always in the process of revealing themselves.

Concerns in the more recent work have shifted from earlier ideas of how nature and the body are represented by the manufacturing industry, to notions of how science and technology reshape our world and our sense of what is natural. This inquiry has taken the form of an unabashed pursuit of the sublime in the form of perceptual experiments. And, although I hope the work continues to dazzle and puzzle the viewer as it has in the past, now the surfaces have the potential to tip into a more perceptual space, a deeper space than what is delineated. Static objects with real time reflections collapse two dimensional representations of the here and there to create the sensation of a partial recall. Using the elemental components of our existence, the planets, the moon, the ocean, I am attempting to choreograph a kind of reverie in the space. Glimpses of a life lived are intersected and partially obliterated by the shadows and auras created from the objects placed in front of light sources. The result is a playful yet seductive environment that gives a nod toward fashion as much as it does to the Cosmos.

The title of the show is an abbreviation of a recorded message by Nick Sagan, son of the late Carl Sagan, for the Voyager Golden Record. The gold plated copper records were aboard both Voyager I and Voyager II, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth and are intended for extraterrestrial life or future civilizations, which may find them. At a time when mankind first started exploring the Universe, it was a kind of Noah's Arch and the first moment in history to reach across those distances. Comos, the television series, was a lifetime's worth of thinking by the fearless Sagan. His contributions to mankind were infinite and his research transformed planetary science. In 1990, The Voyager took one last photo It's home planet. Earth appeared as a tiny blue dot in a vast sea of darkness. The social, cultural, and spiritual implications of this upheaval are incalculable. It enabled us to share the dawn of a new consciousness, real time unfolding in the grandeur of the Universe. As I sit alone in my studio, attempting to make something out of nothing, I am comforted by my relationship to the Universe and how I, and others, might better understand our place in it through the work I make.

Rachael Neubauer, 2010.

Sunday 7pm, March 25th.
WPA will present a screening of video work as a closing to the current show.

WPA is proud to present Sun Zoom Spark, featuring work by Julie Becker, Katy Crowe, Pamela Jorden, Alice Könitz, Virginia Holt, and Terri Phillips.

Inspired by movement, magnetism, and the poetic energy of the Captain Beefheart song Sun Zoom Spark; this exhibition is a diverse group of paintings, sculptures, and drawings that generate momentum amongst and beyond themselves.

Does it start at the bottom or does it start at the top?

Organized by Pamela Jorden, the exhibition is inspired by the characteristics of kaleidoscopic vision, the way it dissolves an orientating register, how it alters images with shifting perspective and reflection. Ultimately these qualities demonstrate that visual experience includes objects and the spaces between, with colors and impressions, changing, reconfiguring, affected by circumstance and time.

The work included is all possessed of a tactility and a material immediacy. A beautifully idiosyncratic portrait, a rocket ship, a geometric sculpture, a grouping of mirror drawings, and two abstract paintings, in concert these artworks are a complicated picture, a series of relationships moving and interlocking in dynamic arrangement.

Closing Party and Performance March 20th.
Reception begins at 6pm. Performance commences at 9pm.

‘Introducing Achillia’, written and directed by Andrew Hahn

Achillia ………………………………………… Sarah Tadayon
Countess ………………………………………. Terri Phillips
Militant Girls …………………………………. (TBA)

WPA is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and prints by Andrew Hahn. “Paintings for Achillia” features three oil paintings that continue Hahn’s investigation of the female portrait, but here his ghostly cinematic and disembodied faces achieve a grand scale, and the figurative fragmentation of bound feet shows up in two of the paintings. For Hahn, these works are like film stills from a surrealist movie about a female Achilles, a perversion of the Greek myth, that has yet to be made. The paintings’ surface remains relatively flat, though complex with Hahn’s layering techniques of both scraping wet and sanding dry paint, creating filters and blurred lines, and the occasional element of spray paint, all making the canvases, and the fleshy subject matter, appear attacked.
Like in his earlier series of 50 photo realistic watercolors of crime scenes or his feature-length bio-pic on the Unabomber, these new paintings are about the procedural, assembling clues in a documentary fantasy, privileging fiction over fact. The depths of literature as well as the movement of projected film can be allegorized as a motive for Hahn’s mechanics of painting, wherein he has set up his own classical story of fear and seduction, paranoia and vulnerability.
Also on display is his varicolored collection of ‘Unfinished Girl’ monotypes. In the context of this installation, the artist has referred to these quickly painted and transferred portraits as “a casting call for various Achillias.” The chance blurring and smearing created in the printing process does much of the work in creating the psychological story of his subjects. These prints are installed in the office alongside the same lithographic press from which they were pulled.

Andrew Hahn lives and works in Los Angeles.

WPA is pleased to announce an exhibition by Ryan Tomcho.
"Interrupture" is a collection of canvasses which present nonrepresentation as a space made up of disparate elements, intermingling through a space both flat and illusionistic. Activation is created through the mutual interruption and tension of movements similar, opposing, and nonrelated. The surface isn't just there to expose and exploit the literal material of which it is made, nor is it there to be forgotten. Instead, materials, surfaces, marks and gestures are all represented as illusions of themselves. The surface is in fact a thin layer of pigment applied by a machine. In a sense, the false tactility of the brushmarks heightens their presentness. One moment in time becomes many, orchestrated through a whole which is not unified or singular, but uncertain, irregular, meandering, and unstable.

WPA is pleased to announce a performance
on December 24th from 8:30pm.
featuring:
David Hughes, Derrick Maddox and John Williams.

WPA is pleased to announce an exhibition by David Hughes.
David Hughes’ sculpture is discursive and infused with personal narrative.  His work can be seen as a peculiar kind of storytelling.  In Hughes’ world, the practicality of objects is isolated from both use and subject.  The care is taken in the synthesis of a unique material language, not in the directness of pointing.  His work is at once about the anxiety of effort and the ease of a complex gesture. 
Hughes’ art encompasses everything from performance, sound, video and film, to various forms of painting and drawing, all siphoned through the expanded definition of sculpture; even his writings have a materialist quality.

David Hughes lives and works in Los Angeles.

With the closing of Terri Phillips show we will also be hosting the inaugural WPA Soup Kitchen event.
From 4pm on Saturday Dec 12th.

WPA is proud to present an exhibition of new work by Terri Phillips. “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World’ is an outlandish collection of things, pieces of darkly remembered moments that invite contemplation. Phillips’ describes some of her sculptures as ‘the outside coming in’, a sensation like walking toward the edge of a movie set, toward or away from a suspension of disbelief.

Terri Phillips has exhibited internationally. Originally from Alabama, she now lives and works in Los Angeles.

WPA Screening
Screening this Sunday 15th Nov, 7pm, will be a double-bill screening of Charles Irvin’s ‘Membrane Lane’
and Andrew Hahn’s ‘Manifesto’.Two mind-bending true stories, one night of experimental narrative video at WPA.

‘Membrane Lane’, Charles Irvin, 2009, 31 min.
Presented in the style of conspiracy theory documentaries, Irvin’s ‘Membrane Lane’ places The False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the backlash against progressive movements of the 1960's and 70's. Blind acceptance by many of the mythology of False Memory Syndrome grossly underscores America's culture of denial, fueled by a dangerous fiction that it is exceptional among nations. This belief of American exceptional ism too often keeps citizens from acknowledging and confronting the destructive aspects of culture and society, whether it's our excessive consumption, denial of our racist and violent history or social problems like child abuse.
Produced, written, directed by and starring Charles Irvin.

‘Manifesto’, Andrew Hahn, 2007, 52 min.
Aping the style of tv news docudrama's, “like a self-conscious PBS Frontline episode”, Hahn’s ‘Manifesto’ is a no-budget bio-pic on the American terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, starring David Hughes as Ted. Following the course of his eighteen year bombing campaign against industrial society, we get an askew glimpse into his mind and methods.
Produced, written and directed by Andrew Hahn.

Screening begins at 7pm, Sunday, November 15. WPA, 510 Bernard Street, Chinatown, LA 90012.

WPA is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Fil Rüting,
"Tri Repetae - One 24th of a Second".

*Trichromacy, the condition upon which humans perceive color, is a fundamental exploration point in "Tri Repetae". Sampled from iconic film, the videos and prints in this exhibition contain ghost like figures in shades of red, green, blue, moving within a stationary camera space such as a hallway, trash heap, or skate park. These images hint at a sublime subtext within the original sampled narrative releasing the imagery from the restraints of its linear form, by continuously cutting the frame in overlapping time. One 24th of a second is the time in which a single frame of film is seen; these prints as single frames however implicate the multiple frames found in cinematic film. This literal liberation of image and sound from the formal and conceptual constraints of historical linear filmic space succeeds predominantly though this direct relationship to time. Time is represented as historical form, context, and idea. Rüting’s playful reconstructive approach to sampled cinematic imagery implies a sort of visual haiku; instead of three lines of text, we have three colors, three compositions… a tri repetae.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Fil Rüting now lives and works in Los Angeles.

*The human eye contains three types of color receptors (cones), with different absorption spectra. The RGB (red, green, blue) additive color model used in video and other electronic devices, was derived from this trichromatic perception of color.

WPA presents “,” an exhibition of recent work by Michael Minelli. This is the second in a series of exhibitions scheduled at WPA, a new artist-run space located in Chinatown. Minelli’s work has long been invested in the quid pro quo between popular media discourse and the individual subject. In this recent series of sculpture and drawing, Minelli renders microphones, boom stands and free standing banners as avatars of public address. However, as opposed to being either “behind” or “in front of” the mic, the voice in these works emerges as stuck somewhere between states of mediation and misrecognition. Minelli’s use of materials and language suggests how distortion itself might be claimed as a site of agency. Be it through quotation, lyric or utterance, the voice in “” erupts as a shower of alternative somebodies; occupying positions of both call and response.

Michael Minelli has exhibited his work in the U.S. and in Europe. His commission from The Wexner Center for the Arts entitled not by everybody will be exhibited at the Design Museum of Holon in Holon Israel as part of the international exhibition Only Now in January 2010.

Contact information | 213-503-5762
info@michaelminelli.com

Gallery open 12-6pm, Thursday - Saturday or by appointment.

WPA presents, Movies for Free, on our open-air patio
(concessions available, bring chairs or blankets)
510 Bernard Street, Chinatown, LA, 90012
BEGINNING THIS SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 6TH!

Aliens, Amy Sarkisian, 17 min., 2004
Valley Girl, Michele O'Marah, 112 min., 2002
Two way-out remakes of movies made in the mid-80s by two of Los Angeles' most way-out artists.  Not to be missed.
Sept 6, 8pm

WPA presents Four Baboons Adoring the Rising Sun an exhibition of paintings by Charles Irvin. This is the first solo exhibit at WPA, a new artist-run space located in Chinatown. The title refers to the granite sculpture placed at the base of the Temple of Luxor in ancient Egypt.  This massive sculpture shows baboons raising their hands, singing, and dancing in homage to the rising sun, which they guide and assist in its passage through the gates of day.  Just as the Egyptian King Ramesses II appreciated this sculpture, enough to have his name inscribed upon the breast of each baboon, so does Irvin find fascination in this and other mythological concepts and belief systems that he explores and gives form to in this group of paintings.
 
Charles Irvin makes paintings, drawings, videos, performances and more. Most recently his work was presented at the Hammer Museum as part of Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A.

WPA is an art space organized by artists. This is our inaugural group show featuring the members of WPA.

Bart Exposito, Andrew Hahn, David Hughes, Charles Irvin, Pamela Jorden, Michael Minelli, Rachael Neubauer, John Pearson, Terri Phillips, Fil Ruting, Henry Taylor, Ryan Tomcho, Tyler Vlahovich.

WPA is a multi-purpose acronym; it can stand for anything you like, but it does intentionally recall the Works Progress Administration, Roosevelt’s New Deal relief agency that highlighted the arts and employed artists as artists during The Great Depression. The title of our first show is taken from a 1939 WPA poster, An Exhibition of Selected Skills of the Unemployed.