http://cb1gallery.com/project/sing-body-curated-soo-kim-virginia-arce/
CB1 Gallery is pleased to present “Sing the Body,” a group exhibition curated by Soo Kim and Virginia Arce, that brings together works by Andrew Cameron, George Domantay, Lisa Ohlweiler, Hayley Quentin, Amy Russell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Freddy Villalobos, and Charisse Pearlina Weston.
Through their respective evocations, elisions, and departures from representation, the works in this exhibition resonate with a shared concern for the vulnerable and contingent conditions of being. Some works in the exhibition draw from discreet archives imbued with a sense of intimacy, while others are invested in the paradoxically delicate and destructive potential of the human body and subsequent structures of relation. As a cohort, the works in “Sing the Body” propose a multiplicity of silent and pronounced ways in which our shared desire to create cohesion from experiential fragments underscores a tacit understanding of our own precarity.
Andrew Cameron lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA and MFA from Art Center College of Design. He has been in various group shows in Los Angeles including Drawing A Blank at David Kordansky Gallery, US EST at Pepin Moore, A Movie Will Be at Control Room, and Immitation Rocks at NoPlace in Oslo, Norway. . He would love to be a translator, but his accent is always better than his speech.
George Domantay has created performances and performance installations at many venues in Southern California including LACE, Deep River, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, Mount Saint Mary’s College, Track 16 at Bergamot Station, RAID Projects, FAR at the Los Angeles Zoo, Action Space at the Brewery, Lemoyne Kennels, Spaceland, Intersections Eagle Rock, and as a featured performer at the 2003 fundraiser for the Los Angeles Community Garden Project. He was also a performer at Beyond Baroque as a proxy for Daniel J. Martinez, and in 2008 was included in a group show curated by Glenn Kaino at the Warhol Foundation in Pittsburgh. Domantay has a BA in Studio Art from UC Riverside and an MFA from UC Irvine.
Lisa Ohlweiler is a Los Angeles based artist who received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MFA from the University of Southern California. Aiming for a space between active engagement and cool observation, her photographic works aspire to create an impression akin to the moment when a word used everyday suddenly becomes strange to the ear and demands to be contemplated as through it were heard for the first time. Lisa’s work has been exhibited at Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles; Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles; Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles; Margo Leavin gallery, Los Angeles; Bellfast Exposed, Bellfast and The Tool Room Gallery at Bell Arts in Ventura.
Hayley Quentin’s paintings challenge the conventional representation of male beauty and eroticism in art. A Los Angeles native and Otis graduate (BFA 2008), she spent 7 years living and working in the UK and France before returning to Los Angeles in 2016. Working primarily in oils, she repurposes traditional art making processes to create a lens through which the viewer sees the painted body. Hayley has exhibited both nationally and internationally including the Bergamot Station Arts Center, and her work has been featured in various art publications, including the inaugural issue of Create Magazine. She is a featured artist with Artisster, an international art collective based in Hamburg, Germany.
Amy Russell is a second generation Angelino. She studies graphic design and photography at Pratt Institute in New York in the mid 1980’s. While she was a graduate student at CalArts in the early 1990’s, she began teaching art in high school. Amy’s work has a basis in photography, but drawing has become a significant and meaningful extension of her photographic art practice. In her renderings of photographs, she’s able draw attention to aspects of found image that she’s interested in, in the same way that the act of photography is about choosing. The process and evolution of Amy’s artwork has been highly motivated by aspects of her personal life; the content of the work has always been personal as well. She “draws” from that which is close at hand – from pictures of her children sleeping to drawings made from pictures in her family’s photographic archives. Amy has been in numerous group exhibitions, including at Paul Morris Gallery and Silvershed in NY, Four Walls in San Francisco and The High Dessert test site in Wonder Valley. Her solo exhibit at ACME Gallery in Los Angeles was Pick of the Week in the L.A. Weekly when it opened. Amy has two children and teaches full time, but still manages to find time to make art.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. He received his BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts and a MFA from University of California Los Angeles. His photographs, books and installations are rooted in portraiture, homoerotic visual culture and the function of the studio. Portraiture is the foundation of his practice. The subjects appearing in the work are a cast of friends, intimates and muses. They are founded in ongoing relationships mediated by the making and production of photographs. Paul’s work has been exhibited at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York; DOCUMENT, Chicago; Artspeak, Vancouver, Canada; and more.
Freddy Villalobos is an interdisciplinary visual artist who uses text as an integral part of his practice. A Los Angeles based artist who grew up in the city’s South Central neighborhood, Villalobos combines references of high and low culture to interrogate issues of American social structures, power relations, capitalism, and identity. Villalobos’ work unpacks discourse within a complex narrative; and, is fabricated on the conviction that ideas can impact change within daily lives.
Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer who interrogates language, representation and history through the deconstruction and reconfiguration of text, photography, and archives of black experience. She has exhibited across the United States, most recently at the San Diego Art Institute. In 2016, she participated in residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and the Elsewhere Museum. She has received awards from the Artadia Fund for the Arts, the Santo Foundation, the Sally Hands Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art. Her writing has been published in Art and Culture Texas, Pomona Valley Review, Not that But this, and she is the author of The Red Book of Houston: A Compendium for the New Black Metropolis (2015, self-published), A Vessel. A Case. A Fruit, for Touching (2016, self-published chapbook), and co-author of Fantasy Objects: an artist book of text and images (2014, onestar press).
Virginia Arce received her BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in photography at Otis College of Art and Design, and will receive her MFA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of California, Irvine this June. She is the Chief Editor for Haunt Journal of Art, a peer-run art journal that provides a platform for speculative writing around theory, criticism, and philosophy.
Soo Kim is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Kim’s work is in the public collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Broad Foundation, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, North Carolina Museum of Art, and The Escalette Collection of Art, Chapman University.
