POSTCARDS FROM THE LEDGE
SUSAN LOGORECI
NO PLACE
MICHELLE ROBINSON
MAY 4 – MAY 25, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION, SATURDAY MAY4TH, 5 – 8PM
LAUNCH GALLERY
170 S. LA BREA AVE.
LOS ANGELES, CA 90036
LAUNCH Gallery is proud to present Los Angeles based artists Susan Logoreci and Michelle Robinson as they examine place and our ever-evolving relationship with our city and the dwellings we inhabit here. Susan Logoreci has been making complex drawings of Los Angeles for over 20 years. Her drawings depict the intrinsic anxieties and possibilities frequently revealed in our city’s energetic forms. This current series, Postcards from the Ledge, serves as an expressive record of this place continuously evolving and forward facing while depicting the city’s humanity and our seen and unseen connections to each other. For Michelle Robinson, No Place considers the vulnerability of memories to change over time, using digital interventions that are reinterpreted with paint and fiber arts. Images of home become tender remnants that can never be fully resolved.
Susan Logoreci –
With this body of work, I am interested in the Los Angeles that extolls values like creativity, inclusivity, and renewal while simultaneously becoming more unlivable and expensive, seemingly defying its beliefs. This exhibition is inspired by B-roll images from TV and movies, stock photos, and real estate images that continue to sell the idea of Los Angeles. These images are at once idealized and forgettable, buoyant but dense.
Recently, I had two eye surgeries (my 5th and 6th) to repair a genetic misalignment of my eyes. This disorder gave me a confused vision and made me experience space as a flattened plane. As it progressively worsened, it made maneuvering through the world increasingly difficult. I often felt like I was falling, misunderstanding, and abstracting what I saw. Rather than hide this affliction, I found the visual misunderstandings created an interesting, optical warping. Viewing an energetic pulsating of competing images put me in a unique position to question what I saw.
‘In Postcards From The Ledge’, Los Angeles is humanized, idealized, vulnerable, and a little lonely. For better or worse, it’s where life happens at its boldest and most imaginative.
Michelle Robinson –
‘No Place’ is a meditation on the frangibility of memory of home. I began with a question: What happens when an AI is tasked with synthesizing a new image from photographs of my childhood houses? Will it discover an idealized form, or is it impossible to resolve? Is the image of a house/home as slippery as its concept?
I trained a Generative Adversarial Network AI using a data set composed solely of my photographs of suburban neighborhoods I have lived in. The entity built invented images out of randomly generated noise that were then compared to the pictures provided. With each successive attempt by the AI, I became more intrigued by the process of emergence and the peculiar errors introduced along the way. I pulled several stills from the AI’s evolutionary sequences, starting with an undifferentiated wall of pixels and ending with something nearly recognizable as a house.
I transposed these images by hand into small cross-stitched pieces and embroideries, using stitching as an analog equivalent to the pixel. Such handcrafts also reference women’s work, domestic labor, nostalgic memories, and home-sweet-home. Through repeated acts of tender translation between myself and the AI, between digital generation and painstaking analog labor, I am generating a feedback loop that both loses and gains information along the way. The glitchiness of my memory is reflected back at me as I make and remake my childhood home.
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About the Artists
Susan Logoreci drawings have been seen in Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, and many other periodicals. She has drawings in several collections including the U.S. State Department, City National Bank, Creative Artist’s Agency, Marriott and Hilton Hotels, Los Angeles Metro, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and several law and urban design firms. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She has completed several public projects including a 10,000 square-foot floor and 28 wall pieces in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and eight large mosaics in the Sepulveda station on the light rail, Expo Line station in Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Michelle Robinson is a multi-disciplinary artist and animator. She studied architecture and visualization at Texas A&M University, and holds an MFA in visual art from New Hampshire Institute of Art. She has had her work published in Diffusion of Light, The Hand, Frames, and Precog. Exhibition highlights include solo shows at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, CO, The Wright Gallery at Texas A&M University, and the Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery at Coker University in NC. She has been awarded residencies with Kipaipai at the Joshua Tree Center for Photographic Arts in 2022, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 2023, and PLAYA in 2024. She has been an artist and supervisor with Walt Disney Animation Studios for over 30 years and lives in Los Angeles.
LAUNCH LA believes exposure to the arts enhances quality of life and strengthens community for all through the shared appreciation of creative expression in all its forms and hybrids. LAUNCH LA is passionate about providing all artists regardless of race, color, creed or sexual orientation with quality opportunities to present themselves and their creations that reflect our times to a curious and enthusiastic audience at important happenings throughout Los Angeles.
Media Contact:
James Panozzo
james@launchla.org
323.899.1363
