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Monday, December 29th, 2008
BUSY WORK NYE
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$15 at the door without!
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Monday, December 29th, 2008
ERIN COSGROVE
Monday, December 29th, 2008
Date: December 9 - March 15, 2009
LOCATION
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Phone: 310.443.7000
The Museum is located at the northeast corner of Westwood and Wilshire Boulevards in Westwood Village, 3 blocks east of the 405 freeway’s Wilshire Boulevard exit.
The UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts is located on the upper level of the Museum. An elevator to the galleries and the garden courtyard provides easy access for wheelchairs. The Grunwald Center is open by appointment only, Monday through Friday from 10 am to 4 pm. Please call 310.443.7078 to schedule a visit.
Erin Cosgrove’s epic animation, What Manner of Person Art Thou? (2008), follows Yoder and Troyer, the only survivors of two small Amish-like colonies in the Northwestern U.S., after a series of catastrophes and epidemics. The two set off on a journey to find any remaining relatives and begin dispensing violent justice on the evildoers of contemporary society; each encounter represents one of the seven deadly sins. The striking visuals are inspired by the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry. The video is a darkly funny tale of the corruption of modern life and the hazards of morality. Cosgrove lives and works in Los Angeles and this is her first solo museum exhibition.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Blood and Irony
By Julian Gough
I yearn for sex, and food, and status, yet when I get all these things, I want more. There must be some greater thing that would satisfy all yearning forever…
People have come up with many ideas to satisfy this human ache. Most have been called religions and involve stories designed to make you feel better (you are not a serf, you are the beloved son of God).
Religious stories have grown less effective as the advancing tide of science has washed away their foundations. Yet the stories science tells don’t satisfy our needs. So the various arts—once humble servants of religion—have been promoted. Art museums are the cathedrals of our time. Neoconceptualism has taken over the role of Jesuitical Catholicism: intricate, elitist, conceptual, and aping the intellectual rigor of science without actually achieving it.
But the masses never cared for ideas, concepts. The masses went to mass for a regular, often violent story that ultimately reassured. That need for a regular, weekly comforting fable of redemption is met today by the popular art forms: romance novels, soap operas, Oprah, cartoons. That transition, from religion to secular modernity, opens up a huge cultural space. This is the space in which Erin Cosgrove operates. And with What Manner of Person Art Thou? (2004–2008), she takes on animation, because the cartoon—pure art, free to do anything at all—most clearly reveals our needs.
Shirana Shahbazi
Monday, December 29th, 2008LOCATION
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Phone: 310.443.7000
View Map
The Museum is located at the northeast corner of Westwood and Wilshire Boulevards in Westwood Village, 3 blocks east of the 405 freeway’s Wilshire Boulevard exit.
The UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts is located on the upper level of the Museum. An elevator to the galleries and the garden courtyard provides easy access for wheelchairs. The Grunwald Center is open by appointment only, Monday through Friday from 10 am to 4 pm. Please call 310.443.7078 to schedule a visit.
Zurich-based artist Shirana Shahbazi’s photographs capture the quotidian moments of life whether it’s a close–up of a gem, a still life, a fallen bird or a portrait of a young girl. She often transforms her photos by hiring commercial sign painters to reinterpret the imagery or commissioning carpet-makers in her native Tehran to weave the pictures into small carpets. During her stay in Los Angeles as a Hammer artist-in-residence, Shahbazi explored the city and developed a new body of work that captures Los Angeles and its surroundings. Her project for the Lobby Wall incorporates several of these new photographs as well as a wall-size painting made by Iranian sign painters, after one of her photographs.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Shirana Shahbazi’s photographs draw attention to photography under normal conditions.1 But what are the normal conditions of photography? Shahbazi answers the question through the presentation of photographic sequences. She has formed a practice that reads like a notebook on the conditions of photographic meaning. A book she produced in 2001,Goftare Nik/Good Words, established this methodology. The book contains an unbroken sequence of full-bleed color photographs Shahbazi took in her homeland, Iran. (The images are part of a larger project with the same title, undertaken between 1999 and 2003.) Despite the potential political weight of the subject matter, the sequence results not in a political statement, but in a series of views of the normal, everyday life of contemporary Iranians. Goftare Nik illustrated how the camera, in the hands of a citizen rather than the state, might delineate a sense of place outside of ideology.
The everyday is a common theme in Shahbazi’s work. Whether she is working in the western United States, Shanghai, her current home of Zurich, or elsewhere, Shahbazi has a sense for capturing the quotidian. Yet the books and finely tuned installations that result from these travels yield other motives. While her images may entice us with a sense of place, the sequences she presents become their own unique places of meaning. Consisting of a selection of photographic genres, and occasionally photographs translated into painting (sometimes then translated back to photography), these sequences are an analytical reflection of photographic media. Engaging its myriad forms, Shahbazi uses presumably “normal” photography to underscore the constructed nature of photographic meaning.
