Join Brand Library & Art Center for an Artist Talk featuring Joshua Hagler, artist of the current exhibition in the Skylight Gallery. This event is free to attend. Refreshments will be served.
About the Moderator:
Ignacio Valero is a current associate professor of humanities and sciences at CCA. He has also taught at UC Berkeley, the University of Madrid, University of the Andes, and Xavier University of Colombia. Ignacio was formerly with the International Center for Environmental Education and the United Nations environment and development programs UNEP and UNDP. He was a senior associate with the Colombian Science Foundation, deputy director of Colombia’s Environmental Protection Agency, and a member of the presidential advisory council for the writing of the new Colombian constitution. He continues to present work and lecture internationally.
About the Artist:
Joshua Hagler has exhibited in galleries and museums in North and South America, Europe, and Australia. He is a columnist for Venison Magazine and a recipient of numerous awards and residencies. In the summer of 2017, he was awarded a spot at MICA’s Alfred and Trafford Klots Program for Artists in Brittany, France. A solo exhibition at the Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico is planned for November of this year.
On view at Brand:
In the Skylight Gallery:
Joshua Hagler – The River Lethe
In the Atrium Gallery:
Elizabeth Dorbad – Itinerant Architectures.
Since 2006, Joshua Hagler’s work has responded to religious fundamentalism in America, the history of Westward Expansion, notions of progress and exploration, mythology, and the poetics of theoretical physics. This current body of work draws inspiration from Lethe, the Greek mythological river of forgetting. It was said that one drinks from Lethe before being reborn, losing most or all memory of the past. German philosopher, Heidegger interpreted Lethe not as a simple accident of forgetting, but as a “concealment of being.” The task for Heidegger was “unconcealment,” in turn Hagler sets to uncover personal truths by examining America’s cultural amnesia and psychological repression.The works comprising The River Lethe were made over a two year period beginning in Los Angeles and ending at the Roswell Artist in Residence Program in New Mexico.
Elizabeth Dorbad’s on-going, global series Itinerant Architectures makes use of mobile home trailers as subject matter, material and symbol. The nomadic structures are of course found throughout the world, but in the woods and junkyards of California the use of these vehicles as buildings takes on particular associations evoking thoughts of frontierism, Western expansion, and civilization on the fringe of wilderness. The site-specific works, architectural interventions and sculpture rendered from architectural refuse point away from the built world and back toward the wilderness: iconic, heroic and untamed. Initiated in 2012, Itinerant Architectures has had iterations in Memphis, Baltimore, San Francisco, Oakland, Badger, Berlin, Kassel, New York and Los Angeles.
Opening Reception: June 30th. On view through August 24th, 2018.
