Art Basel is landing this week in Miami, bringing with it a slew of satellite fairs that stand to benefit from its miasma of cultural cache, if not the spillover from its crowd of collectors, dealers, and artists. Here we highlight a trio of projects that spotlight LA artists, debuting during the flashiest fair week of the year.
Buck Ellison, Sunset, 2015. Image Courtesy Park View.
This year, NADA has moved from its louche digs at the Deauville resort to the roomier Fontainebleu Hotel. The expanded space has allowed for participation from younger unconventional galleries. Paul Soto’s Park View gallery is a synecdoche for what makes the current LA art scene so dynamic. The gallery is actually Soto’s 300 square foot apartment in the Westlake-MacArthur Park neighborhood, the living room and front closet are devoid of any trappings of domesticity, thus comprising the main exhibition space and “project room.” The space is just over a year old and has already shown work from both established and emerging artists. Park View participates in NADA (booth 2.15) for the first time this year, showing new work by Katie Aliprando, Benjamin Carlson, Buck Ellison, Elif Ekran, and Mark A. Rodriguez—all up and coming LA artists working across painting, sculpture, and photography; representing the range of Park View’s program. “Everyone is LA based” Soto says “but they have been schooled in different places. It really speaks to the gallery’s mission of supporting emerging LA artists.”
*NADA runs Dec 3-5 at the Fontainebleu Hotel Miami
Elif Erkan “Terroir (Home)”, 2015. Image courtesy Park View
The F Word is the fourth documentary from filmmaker Robert Adanto exploring themes in contemporary art. The f-word here is Feminism, and the film documents practices from 13 feminist artists working at the nexus the internet, the body, and the network of dialogues that makeup its current moment. Two of the artists profiled in the film are at the forefront of experimental feminist work here in LA: Ann Hirsch, who just closed a solo exhibition at Smart Objects in Echo Park, embraces the vagaries of technology to examine the vagaries of identity and sexuality in popular culture. Her videos and installations are at once explicit, intimate, and hilarious—her most infamous project involved becoming a rather successful cam girl, racking up millions of views on YouTube. She also hosts an itinerant series of “comedy-as-therapy” sessions with artist Ed Fornieles at various gallery venues around Los Angeles. Poet and artist Kate Durbin’s projects take on a slightly more academic bent, blurring the line between documentation and performance. Her web-based projects function as reliquaries of online and pop culture, from the Tumblr teen girl aesthetic to the flurry of discourse that once bloomed around Lady Gaga. Her 2014 experimental novel E! Entertainment was reviewed widely across disparate press, through her latest site, Cloud 9, is an enigmatic homepage of dollars and glitter that asks any female-identifying artists to anonymously submit stories outlining “what you have done for money”.
*The F-Word screens at Coral Gables Cinema in Miami Saturday Dec 5 at 1pm
Kate Durbin “Hello, Selfie!” performance, 2014. Image courtesy Transfer Gallery, NYC.
Dan Bayles paints deceptively soothing compositions that metamorphize the maladies of modern industrialism and bureaucracy, turning the moral imperative of traditional landscape and still-life painting on its head. The discrepancies between the symbolic promises of civic architecture in Washington DC contrasted with the reality of the city’s gritty, troubled environs was the subject of his recent solo exhibition at François Ghebaly Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. For this year’s Positions sector at Art Basel Miami, Ghebaly will present new work by Bayles created especially for the fair. Given Bayles’ recurring interest in the relationship between politics and aesthetics, his solo project for the prestigious fair is sure to be apropos, if not exemplary, of the critical and commercial tensions running throughout the week.
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