July 31, Ali Kheradyar

Position 

Curated by Ali Kheradyar 

Position is a one-night group exhibition featuring works by Skip Arnold, Brian Doan, Tricia Lawless Murray, Clifford Owens, and Johanna Reed. 

These warped self-portraits range from sexual to political, and are perversely nostalgic. The extreme chaos of Arnold’s “Head Shaking”, the inevitable melting of Doan’s ice “Self-Portrait (being Ho)”, the seductive and contemplative imagery of Lawless Murray’s “I AM THE SUN”, the visceral memory of Owens’ “Belt Piece”, and the poignant, yet illusive happenings of Reed’s “Criticality” all mystify the real as they individually and collectively perform Position. 

(front gallery wall)

Brian Doan

Self-Portrait (being Ho)

10"x16"x6"

ice

(gallery from left to right)

Clifford Owens

Belt Piece

2004

mini DV, edited and desaturated

Tricia Lawless Murray

I AM THE SUN

2012

12"H x 12"W x 5"D with audio 3:58 minutes

archival pigment print, spray paint, 33.3 rpm record, wood

Johanna Reed

My New Criticality and Other Stories from the Contemporary Art World

Book of stories, 10 pages, 4.25" x 5.5", edition of 20

Skip Arnold

Head Shaking 2

2009

16mm color film transferred to DVD

For 24 years Skip Arnold has maintained a transgresssive practice of performance, film and installation art. His work finds its foundations in the historical canons of performance that address and dissect the body politic – confronting the body as politicized, enculturated, but also addressing the body through the lens of humanitarian and ontological inquiries pertaining to strength, endurance, existence, and presence. Skip Arnold is uncompromising in his work – he does not follow current trends, nor does he get stuck doing the same performances over and over. While he retains certain themes or courses of inquiry (the body, narcissism, the cinematic, dissection of a cultural / or social existence), his work has evolved considerably, especially with his recent sojourn in France.

Brian Doan is an artist and photographer based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Photography in Riverside, California, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, Mexico, the Victoria & Albert Museums in London, the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum, and the Milan Triennale. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including from the California Council for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Fellows in the Humanities, and the Fulbright-Hays.

Tricia Lawless Murray was born and raised along the coast in Southern California but completed both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Northern California. At UC Berkeley she studied Art History through the lens of class, gender and race and at California College of the Arts she studied photography and video embracing the performative aspects of feminist self-representation. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally, most recently at Hasted Kraeutler in NYC and Jancar Gallery in LA where she is represented. In the past year her work was featured in LA Weekly, La Lettre de la Photographie, Conveyor, Kroutchev Planet Photo, American Suburb X, Fraction and other publications. Her work is in the collections of the Allan Kaprow Estate and the Getty Research Institute and it has been published in the Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography, Volume II. In the fall her work will be included in the Gomma book titled MONO. She will have a solo show at Jancar Gallery that opens in October. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Clifford Owens’ art has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the United States of America and abroad. He studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mason Gross School of Visual Arts Rutgers University, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He was an artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem and he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Clifford has received many grants and fellowships including Art Matters, Louis Tiffany Comfort Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, New York Community Trust, Lambent Foundation, and the Rutgers University Ralph Bunche Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Publications and reviews include New York Times, Art  +Auction, Village Voice, Art in America, The New Yorker, Greater New York 2005, Performa: New Visual Art Performance, and Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education.  He has lectured widely about his work, and has held visiting artist faculty positions at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. In 2009, Clifford was Hanes Visiting Artist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His project Anthology was the subject of a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 and will also be the subject of his forthcoming book Anthology. Clifford was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971, and he currently lives and works in Queens, New York where he raises his young sons Inti and Joaquin.

A born lever-puller, Johanna Reed's got money to blow. Before graduating from UCLA with a degree in design, she studied astrophysics for three years, and before that fronted the junk-punk band Buttcheek Doofus (with her father on bass). Between that and her current pursuit of an MFA in Art from CalArts, she's worked as an opera set designer's archivist, a phone sex operator, film critic, underwear slogan writer, and environmental engineer. As an artist, she's a writer, who makes work with and in front of live people, and the only physical objects she allows herself to produce are books. Her work has been performed at the Hammer Museum, Perform NOW!, Machine Project, POST, and Anatomy Riot in Los Angeles; Southern Exposure in San Francisco; and Prinzessinnen Studio and the basement of Jahnstrasse 6 in Berlin. Her writing has been published in Pank Magazine, InDigest, and in three limited edition books for WHL Studio. Her latest play was Motherload, a 30-hour durational performance based on Hecuba, the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripedes. The only untrue part of this bio is the second clause of the first sentence.

Ali Kheradyar is a Los Angeles based artist. She attended New York University and received a Bachelor of Arts in Individualized Study, concentrating in dance, music, and performance. Her cross-disciplinary interests include photography, performance art, dance, and writing. She received her Master's in Performance Studies from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in May 2011.  Kheradyar's work has been shown at Third Streaming, NY, Western Project, CA, Torrance Art Museum, CA, PØST Los Angeles, and Project Space Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany.  She is represented by Western Project in Culver City.