Primary is proud to present Self-preservation (with or without applause), a group exhibition organized by A.G. featuring works by Theodora Allen, Christopher Culver, A.G., Victoria Fu, Beatriz Olabarrieta, Tony Matelli, John Riepenhoff, Torbjørn Rødland, Amanda Ross-Ho, Ed Ruscha, Sara VanDerBeek, and Siebren Versteeg. The works in the exhibition, spanning painting, photography, sculpture, video, and neon, function much like self-aware vessels encapsulating portraits of the anxieties related to acknowledgment, self-care, validation, time, defense and, collectively, self-preservation.
As part of the exhibition, A.G. writes:
I heard a rumor when I was young that Walt Disney had his head cryogenically frozen. At the time I thought it was odd and egotistical, and quite presumptuous. As an adult, it makes sense. The "magic" that Walt fabricated, and is still being fabricated by the Disney conglomerate today, was, indeed, fabricated. What that implies is that the magic one feels was willed by another's desire to will it. There is a grand shadow that looms, mischievously tormenting, much like Peter Pan's own shadow, transcendent of its ability to be categorized as either benevolent or malevolent. Much like Peter Pan, the Lost Boys, and Walt himself, mortality, time, and maintenance are ever paramount, no matter how much pixie dust we use in our skincare regimen.
It's possible that Walt Disney's desire to immortalize his existence and the desire to spark joy in others came from the same psychological space. It makes me rethink his iconographic statue, Partners- tall and proud as he holds hands with his own creative expression, personified here as an enthusiastic mouse walking on two legs. In this case, sculpture stands to act much like a memorial, or tombstone, and in many ways, the highly visible statue is more successful at encapsulating Walt's immortality than his alleged frozen head. The power of this object, willed by the desire to self-preserve, both one's self and one's own creative expression, as equals, could very well be more effective at maintaining a legend than a legendary decapitation- certainly a more applaudable deed.
Opens : December 2, 2019 at 5 PM
About the Artists:
Theodora Allen (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA) Theodora Allen holds an MFA in painting from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BFA in painting from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA, and has completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. Allen’s paintings are quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling. Drawing from music, literature, myth and nature, Allen’s meditative compositions investigate themes of temporality and eternity, exploring a space between the physical world and an interior mindscape.
Through a rigorous painting process, Allen’s evocative imagery becomes ghostly. Allen paints in thin, meticulous layers of watercolor and oil on linen. Translucent coats of oil paint are applied and removed, until the fabric itself shows the weather of its making. In this action, the artist’s process is a mediation between defining and dissolving the picture plane. Sources of illumination, like a candle or moon, play an important role in radiating light throughout the composition. Evanescent surfaces, polluted spectrums, and radiant jewel-toned blues animate the forces of darkness and light.
Allen’s motifs engage with a visual language of utopian and metaphysical ideals, resonant in the work of visionary poet and painter William Blake, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, early Symbolist painting, and the zeitgeist of 1960s California. Her emblems stand in as markers of time, symbols of persistence, the uncontrollable, and the inward looking.
Christopher Culver (b. 1985 Miami, FL, USA) is an artist and writer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Matthew Grumbach writes that “the black and white paints that demarcate Culver’s most recent body of work materialize the dualistic magic of cinema and terrorism. This is in part due to the technique Culver has developed to create his paintings that builds on the legacy of camera-less photography. The majority of the process takes place on a horizontal plane using wet enamel as a negative image, a fixer (Gamsol), and a stop bath (cold water) akin to photographic processing. Culver plays with light and shadow by fixing the wet enamel onto the linen before applying black pigment spray paint. He washes portions of the canvas using squeegees and sponges before repeating the process over. The works provoke an ocular adjustment similar to the physiological response by which the eye acclimates to a darkened movie theater. Once one undergoes this pupillary dilation, the paintings begin to emit a spectral glow. The apparitions that appear are houses.”
Culver holds an MFA from The University of Texas at Austin where he studied at the School of Fine Arts and School of Architecture. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in painting and urban studies. He has had solo exhibitions at Redling Fine Arts (Los Angeles, CA, USA), Yautepec (Mexico City, MEX), and Queens Nails Annex (San Francisco, CA, USA) and participated in group exhibitions at Lomex (New York City, NY, USA) and Lucas Page Gallery (New York City, NY, USA). He was a contributor to The L.S.D. Journal by Line Script Diary.
Victoria Fu (b. 1978, Santa Monica, CA) is a visual artist who received her MFA in Art from CalArts, MA in Art History/Museum Studies from USC, and BA in Art History from Stanford University. Her art installations have been exhibited at venues including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA; 52nd New York Film Festival, New York, NY; IX Nicaragua Biennial, Managua, Nicaragua; among others. Recent solo exhibitions include Belle Captive at Simon Preston Gallery, New York, NY, and at University Art Gallery, UC Irvine, Irvine, CA; and Bubble Over Green, The Contemporary, Baltimore, MD. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and was a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Fu lives and works in Los Angeles and San Diego, where she is Assistant Professor of Film/Video in the Visual Arts at University of San Diego.
The artwork considers new conditions of cinematic spectatorship and image currency in the digital age. As meditations on sight, perception and image-making, the audio-visual installations mix photographs, video screens and projected light in an interplay between objects, moving and still images. A rendering of landscapes in which our notions of what is “real” are slippery, the work questions the cultural and psychological spaces of viewership that define "the cinematic"—and the aesthetic formulas that allow the virtual world to alter human experience.
A.G. (b. 1986, Miami, FL) is an artist living and working in Miami, Florida. After graduating from the New World School of the Arts, he received his BFA in Sculpture and Art History from the University of Florida (2009). He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent and upcoming shows in Los Angeles, New York City, Miami and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include TALENT at Primary in Miami, INTRO at Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles (2017), Don't tell someone that you like how they are doing something because they may stop to thank you at Regina Rex in New York City (2016) and Nobody knows me better than you at Locust Projects in Miami, Florida (2014). He has also been included in several group exhibitions, including The Coffins of Paa Joe and The Pursuit of Happiness at Jack Shainman Gallery, NY and An Image at Oolite Art in Miami Beach, Florida.
A.G.’s transdisciplinary practice aims to utilize production, theatrical modalities, and show business as a realm of thought vis-à-vis reality as a malleable material and the self-direction and agency of identity-design. Through a compound practice of research and training in the fields of entertainment and conservatory style training, A.G. leverages the psychological findings as texts and object-based works, while simultaneously scrutinizing the exhibition site as a site of production and vice versa.
Tony Matelli (b. 1971, Chicago, IL) Tony Matelli's work is a well-crafted play of illusions. Superficially, Matelli's sculptures are immediately gratifying, like the special effects of Hollywood, but his hyper-realistic sculptures tend to have a thoughtful and deceptive depth. From painted bronze playing cards to full scale human manikins with real human hair, Matelli's sculptures not only exhibit a sophisticated technical execution but grapple with ideas that range from a stylized romanticism, that delves into personal destruction and reinvention, to the negation of consumer society. Matelli's pieces are memorable because they solicit a wonderful reaction of repulsion, humor, shock, fascination and confusion, while remaining pertinent and significant through their conceptual connotations.
He has had solo exhibitions at Leo Koenig in New York, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Uppsala Konstmuseum, and a mid-career survey at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum. His work has been included in group exhibition at institutions such as Serpentine Gallery in London, PS1 in New York, CAPC in Bordeaux, Barbican Center in London, Chicago’s MOCA, Swiss Institute in New York, Tate Liverpool, State National Centre of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm, among many others.
Beatriz Olabarrieta (b. 1979, Bilbao, Spain) graduated from the Wimbledon School of Art in 2004 and the Royal College of Art in 2007. She lives and works between London and Berlin. Recent projects include Dumb Bells, Serpentine Gallery London, All Over, Studio Leigh, London (2016) and The Boys and Girls Political, Lisson Gallery, London (2015), MOT International (2015) and Cell Project Space, London (2013 ). In 2016, Olabarrieta held the Plataform residence at Site Gallery in Sheffield and has recently been awarded the Joanna Drew Travel Fellowship for a research trip to Japan. She is a visitng tutor at Wimbledon School of Art, Royal Accademy of Arts, Newcastle University, England.
Beatriz Olabarrieta’s work is all about communicative errancy — the space of misbehaving words and images. She makes installations with text, objects and images where each component retains a certain elasticity. Rarely anything is fixed or glued and the work has a literal and metaphorical mobility. Speech is (mis)translated into textual and material acts, and there is a conversational and sociable tone between the various components in her installations. The sculptures are logographic and diagrammatic, continually pointing outwards to other things. There is a lexicon of simple and suggestive shapes. The profile of a face and onomatopoeic forms. The installations are often accompanied by sounds that merge static, and somatic references. The body belches and breathes as do the sculptures. There is a constellatory quality to the work with elements pushed to the edge of legibility.
John Riepenhoff (b. 1982, Milwaukee, WI) received a BFA from the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He is represented by Marlborough Contemporary, NY & London. Riepenhoff is also a curator and co-owner of The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI, collaborator at The Open, co-organizer of Milwaukee International and Dark Fairs, is an inventor of artistic platforms for the expression of others and regular food ideator. His recent exhibitions and curatorial projects have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Marlborough, and Swiss Institute New York, NY; Tate Modern, London; Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR; 356 Mission Rd, Los Angeles, CA; Poor Farm, WI; Lynden Sculpture Garden, Inova, and The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA. He also continues a program of the John Riepenhoff Experience at various locations around the world, most recently at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Misako and Rosen, Tokyo. He was the 2015 Milwaukee Arts Board Artist of the Year, co-chairs Friends of Blue Dress Park, founded Milwaukee's first Beer Endowment for artist-run organizations, runs The Oven at The Open in Milwaukee, and sits on the board of Riverwest Radio.
Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photographs, pushing the medium toward modes of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, and forging links between 20th century art photography and 21st century approaches to image-making common to advertising and social media. Often prompted by non-photographic imagery that he transforms into real-world photographic subjects, Rødland portrays scenes designed to generate psychological reaction through his depiction of highly sensory qualities. The physicality present in the work is driven by his use of film-based cameras and chemical darkroom processes.
Torbjørn Rødland has been the subject of many institutional exhibitions, including Fifth Honeymoon, a traveling exhibition produced by Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2018-2019). A selection of Rødland’s solo exhibitions include Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018); Serpentine Sackler Gallery (2017); C/O Berlin (2017); Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2014); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2010); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York (2006); and Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Stavanger, Norway (2003). His work is in the permanent collections of museums that include Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Malmö Art Museum, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Rødland lives and works in Los Angeles.
Amanda Ross-Ho (b. 1975, Chicago, IL) Ross-Ho aims to, in her words, “investigate the anatomy and life cycle of creative production.” Ross-Ho appropriates images and ephemera that she encounters to construct installations, stage photographs, and build sculptures that show points of coincidence or intersection, where everyday experiences are transformed into sites of layered meaning. Her use of found materials also marks an interest in “conflating or collapsing the authentic and the performed,” and she has said that her mixed-media works elaborate the failure of authentic gesture or original creation.
Ross-Ho has exhibited widely in museums and galleries worldwide, including solo exhibitions at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2017); Vleeshal, Middleburg (2016); Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2015); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2014); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016), Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2011); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2010); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); among many other institutions. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937, American) is an American artist whose oeuvre melds Pop Art iconography with the documentarian rigor of Conceptual Art. With a practice that spans drawing, painting, photography, film, printmaking, and publishing, Ruscha’s background as a graphic designer is evident in his subtle use of typography. He is perhaps best known for his artist’s books, such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), as well as his word paintings which skew the meaning of each word through color, background, and font. “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again,” he said of his inspiration. Born on December 16, 1937 in Omaha, NE, he grew up in Oklahoma City before moving to Los Angeles to study art at the Chouinard Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts). Deeply influenced by the culture and atmosphere of Southern California, Los Angeles as a place has proved to be a consistent wellspring for Ruscha’s imagination. In 2016, he was the subject of a sprawling exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, titled “Ed Ruscha and the Great American West,” it included 99 works which dealt with America’s captivation with the western landscape and manifest destiny. The artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He continues to live and work in Los Angeles, CA.
Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976, Baltimore, MD) Lives and works in New York. She has had one-person exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; and Whitney Museum, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kunsthalle Berlin; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Sara VanDerBeek’s photographs are based primarily on abstract sculptural forms that incorporate diverse sources such as art history books, personal images, magazines, and newspapers. Creating the sculptures in her studio, VanDerBeek photographs and often dismantles them, destroying all evidence of their existence save for the images. "I am fascinated by the transformative quality of photography," she says. "Photographs can affect your sense of time, place, memory, and scale and thus are attuned to the central aspects of our existence." Recently, VanDerBeek has taken to preserving and displaying her sculptural forms alongside her photographs, further complicating the relationship between object, image of the object, and the idea of the image as an object itself.
Siebren Versteeg (b. 1971, New Haven, CT) mines the digital realm for content, hacking and manipulating systems of image dissemination found in cyberspace. Creating algorithmic programs that respond to and distort online imagery, Versteeg then presents the results as still painterly abstractions, or displays the programs on monitors. Daily Times (2012) is a real-time digital program presented on a monitor, which downloads a scan of The New York Times’ front page daily; the program then gets to work on it, producing strokes of color across the page that respond to the particularities of that day’s layout, thereby engaging with notions of agency, choice, and chance, and how they intersect with digital streams of information.
He holds an MFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago (2004) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1996). Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted at University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Michael Jon & Alan, Miami, FL; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Max Protetch, New York, NY. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; Krannert Art Museum, Urbana-Champaign, IL; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; National Museum of Art, Prague, Czech Republic; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY, and Clifton Benevento, New York, NY. Versteeg has received a MacDowell Fellowship (2016), Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005), The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Merit Fellowship (2004), and Stone Fellowship for Graduate Study from The University of Illinois at Chicago (2002), and was a Kennedy Visiting Artist in Residence at the University of South Florida, Tampa (2009). Prominent collections featuring his work include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI. Versteeg lives and works in Queens, NY.