8373 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90069 . www.luzart.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Carmelita Greco
Creative Director & Founder
info@luzart.com
gunPOWers, June 29 – August 4, 2018
Opening Reception June 6th, 5-8 pm
Balancing Power and Freedom
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” (The Bill of Rights, Amendment II)
LUZ ART is honored to be presenting gunPOWers, an exhibition assembling four distinctive artists who directly and indirectly reference the Gun, along with all its immense powers, politics, and history.
Brooklyn-born artist, convicted forger, and weapons expert Alfredo Martinez is inarguably the most notorious of the four artists. His stark diagrams of pistols and rifles portray the firearm as a mechanical object; fearsome, yet as graphically indelible as a samurai sword above a mantle. An artist in mid-career who’s represented in MoMA’s collection, Martinez will also be exhibiting for the first time Me in China, the first drawing to depict one of many other stories that touches upon violence.
Julian Curi is distinguished to be the youngest of the artists, although presenting the largest work of the exhibition. Advanced Infantry is composed of a literal army of over 3,000 posed soldiers, squaring off against a relatively insignificant threat. Curi’s art works involve themselves in dominant cultural forces and masculinity.
Ernesto de la Loza has been a key part of the older generation of street-art muralists in Los Angeles since the 1970s– laboring alongside LA painters like Kent Twitchell and Judy Baca, and mentored figures such as Chaka and Heaven. Nearly drafted in the Vietnam era, De la loza stands as a foil to any “gun culture” or cliched patriotism, exclaiming in his career, “I don’t paint guns, soldiers, or the American flag!”. The gun is intentionally set aside for paintings about the power of women, the power of words and titles, the power of place and the environment.
Sam Minkler is a photographer and an associate professor at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, Arizona. His photographs, both color and black & white, depict Native American subjects in the portrait and documentary tradition. Sam reference’s the gun as a form of protective power. There are animals like sheep and horses, eye-catching details and bejeweled filigree, remarkable sky and earth, and then also the gun– held proudly by farmers and those who live close to the land, but also held as if to speak against any further incursion and harm that dates back to American beginnings.
All four artists in gunPOWers are males, of Latino and Native American ancestry, and U.S.- born. Their art works and biographies allow a glimpse not just to individual personality and ethnic history, but amidst and against techno-driven odds. This artwork focuses on the gun issue with clarity, revealing invisible hands – for a national and global community, a picture of a more honest and humane coexistence.
