A Home In the In-Between

Arezoo Bharthania; curated by Jason Jenn

June 3rd – June 25th, 2023

Gallery Hours: Th – Sun, 12 – 4 PM

Opening Reception: June 3rd, 2-5 PM

Lydia Takeshita Legacy Exhibit

Kamol Tassananchalee, Josh Friedman

April 20th – May 23rd, 2023

Gallery Hours: Th – Sun, 12 – 4 PM

Opening Reception: April 30th, 3-5 PM

Alien Race - Envisioning sites of our our future ancestors

Curated by Labkhand Olfatmanesh

October 15th–November 13th, 2022
Opening Reception Saturday October 21st, 2022 from 12-5 pm

Taking place in LA Artcore’s two gallery spaces:

LA Artcore at Union Center for the Arts,
Little Tokyo 120 Judge John Aiso St., Ste. A, Los Angeles, CA 90012

LA Artcore Brewery Annex
at the Brewery Arts Complex in Lincoln Heights
650 South Ave. 21, Los Angeles, CA 90031

Gallery hours - Thursday-Sunday 12-6 pm (in both locations)

Exhibiting artists:

Dove Ayinde, Katayoun Bahrami, Zeina Baltagi, William Camargo, Community Quilting Bee, Shaghayegh Cyrous, Leslie Foster, Vanessa Holyoak, Coffee Kang, Alberto Lule, Yuchi Ma, Felli Maynard, Thinh Nguyen, Luciano Pimienta, Cindy Rehm, Michael Rippens, Jaklin Romine, Jeong (Llyn Stransky), Cedric Tai, Diane Williams

LA Artcore is pleased to present Alien Race - Envisioning sites of our our future ancestors, an exhibit that highlights underrepresented narratives surrounding access and belonging in relation to dominant systems within globalized contemporary culture through video, installation, sculptures, mixed media, photography, performance, ceramics, and textiles.

Through its 21 artists, Alien Race proliferates the uniquely interconnected positions and circumstances of its artists as they mediate realities shaped outside of images of a hegemonic American ideal and transform rigid definitions of a normative American identity. Presented throughout each of its gallery spaces, Alien Race traces lost time as a result of exclusionary systems through strategies of protest, collective care, and renewal.

LA Artcore is a non-profit art space dedicated to the creative exploration, discovery, and expression of the global residents of LA while supporting the careers of emerging and established contemporary artists. Since 1979, LA Artcore reflects the diverse global perspectives of Los Angeles by engaging contemporary artists as the visual and performing conduits of and for the residents and communities in which they live, work and serve.

JOINT STATEMENT TOGETHER WITH ALIEN RACE EXHIBITING ARTIST: JAKLIN ROMINE

We have gotten to know the life and work of Jaklin Romine through engaging the artist’s story and artwork within this exhibit. ACCESS DENIED, a work of performance and video by Romine that would otherwise be turned on for this exhibit, has been left intentionally turned off, though its facilitating architecture still remains: A 38 x 52” monitor, and its folded slab of packing foam base.

ACCESS DENIED follows the artist to various art spaces in Los Angeles. Stationed in the middle of the frame with her back turned to us, we see Romine still, but gazing forward as she confronts a flight of stairs as the only access way to enter each space she encounters. The starkness between the artist facing a backdrop of a stairway (or stairwell) is heightened as people move in, out and around her and the tensions become unequivocal. Through this, the stillness is held by Romine, who brings viewers into the range of what can felt. This piece is vulnerable in its confrontation.

In learning about Romine’s life and work, we invited Romine to take part in this exhibit on view here in Little Tokyo. The exhibit also extends to our Brewery Arts Complex space. Having only one space which is accessible to wheelchairs and not the other for the artist to access is regrettable due to a lack of planning and a failure of consideration to the reality of the artist’s life and work.

Our assistive lift, installed at the Brewery on October 15th of this year ultimately was chosen from an able-bodied perspective, and without consultation to the artist or from another dependable source. The Brewery space’s inaccessibility was not announced before or upon inviting the artist to exhibit.

The artist came to find out about the Brewery space being inaccessible during the exhibit, by arriving in the same way that occurs in ACCESS DENIED. In this moment, life and art collided. To lack the foresight and consideration to have not incorporated accessibility successfully into our mission is what caused harm.

Through this experience, we are made to see our own role in inaccessible spaces. It has compelled our organization to take steps toward complete accessibility. We encourage you to reach out regarding our progress to make the Brewery accessible. We apologize to the wheelchair users everywhere and promise to do much better to bridge the gaps of inaccessibility and our role within our ableist culture.

This statement was a generative collaboration, and a generous gesture by the artist, to allow her work to stay in the exhibit, although modified to be turned off, and with the incorporation of this statement. Together, this is an exercise in mutual solidarity toward accessibility and a more accessible future.

In These Times is a personal and communal exercise in wrecking ideas of normative time. Bianca repurposes her own archive of family photos, community conversations, and collected videos, to build a multi sensory installation. With bath towels, meditative prayer, and star gay-zing Bianca maps the multiplicity her own experience of queer, diasporic, neurodivergent, multiracial time.

Every year, Level Ground's Residency Program provides a space of experimentation, collaboration, and mentorship for a new group of emerging artists who have been historically marginalized from the art world. The artists, who create work at the intersections of identity, are provided with resources and guidance over a year-long cycle. The program culminates in what is for many residents their first solo gallery exhibition.

Osamu Kobayashi

Hand In Hand

Nov 13th–December 18th, 2021

Reception: December 11th, 4-6 pm

Open Thursday–Sunday by Appointment

For press inquiries and appointments, please contact Pranay Reddy at laartcorepress@yahoo.com or at (310) 598-8867

(Los Angeles, November 13, 2021) LA Artcore is pleased to present Hand in Hand, a solo exhibit of nine paintings on view at LA Artcore’s Little Tokyo’s gallery space by artist Osamu Kobayashi.

Within a culture of information overflow and spectacle manufacturing, it is an exceedingly rarified and radical gesture to remain rooted to the traditions of one’s discipline and map new ground, while also resonating a sense of now­­–or beyond. The artist continually foregrounds these opposing forces across ten oil paintings of varying scale on view at LA Artcore in Downtown Los Angeles through December 18th, 2021.

Kobayashi decidedly works within the confines of the stretched canvas, and self-consciously synthesizes the medium’s historical lineages and movements while implementing on his own exuberant abstract visual lexicon. Functioning as mechanical and conceptual puzzles, the works’ presenting of a bevy of squiggling lines, shapes, and artificially-hued planes belies their painstakingly planned construction and painterly execution. The works are constructed non-hierarchically in relation to canonical art-historical and New York City-specific art movements, and abstractly position the artist’s everyday musings of life in the city, in relation to the medium’s underlying governing logic and rules. The work’s meanings are activated in the works’ ruptures in perception between planned and improvised formal choices. The works aesthetically confront how choices are rendered visible, what systems govern what is seen and what is obscured, and how human interaction and bodies are in continual dialogue with ordered environments. Kobayashi’s works critique the institution of the medium, metaphorically to one’s relationship within layered constructs of time and social space. Through his painting process, Kobayashi elicits a sense of painterly agency in relation to the spaces one inhabits as sources of both tension and vitality.

Osamu Kobayashi (b. 1984) received his BFA in Painting at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, and the New York Studio Program in 2006. Kobayashi has had numerous solo and group exhibits including most recently at AplusB Contemporary Art in Brescia, Italy in 2020 and in 2018 at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, Florida. Kobayashi was awarded residencies at Lepsien Art Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany in 2019 and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in 2017-18. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Artist Reception:

October 29th, 2021, 7-9pm

Viewers are invited to explore an immersive environment by L.A.-based artist Il Sang Yoo. Numerous fabrics in varying shape, size, color, and texture are stretched, cut, twisted, torn, knotted, pulled, and woven to produce an immersive environment that interacts with the gallery's architecture. Yoo's installation explores interiority that is echoed by way of the installation's combining heaps of fabric scraps using varied techniques of manipulating fabric. 

On opening night this Friday the 29th between 7-9 pm, the installation will be accompanied throughout its duration by sound from artist Eugene Moon, whose building and use of wooden and stringed instruments are informed by extensive research into classical Korean instruments and music. 

*Refreshments will be served. Please observe social distancing while wearing a mask indoors. We appreciate your help!