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! 

Zara Monet Feeney

September 5–29th, 2019
Reception:
Sept. 8th, 2019 1-3pm

(Los Angeles) LA Artcore is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles based artist Zara Monet Feeney. This exhibition showcases Feeney’s current research on trajectories re-examine voyueristic compositions, the male gaze, and socio-sexual empowerment issues.

As a gay feminist, she designs her work to engage with historical and contemporary notions of intersectional feminism and patriarchal authority. Meticulously controlling the play between the subject and the space it occupies, the work is able to guide, critique and call into question the intention of the viewer’s gaze. The subjects are posed, the color schema is non-naturalistic, the spatial play is ambiguous. She skews the locus of composition, reverses the light logic, exploits value relationships, all in hopes to present a mysteriously contrived yet intriguing aesthetic. She precisely layers candy-like flat surfaces over highly rendered illusionistic space, and then back again. It is her intention for the work to reify a sort of psychological, reflexive experience, when the thing being viewed demands a self-critical penetration of vision. Feeney feels there is a specific moment when we believe an illusion, or become seduced by something outside of ourselves. When this happens, we are not looking at something, but looking at ourselves perceiving it. By challenging traditional modes of representation and exploiting optics of value and color, she hopes the viewer will call into question the generic way a painting is received.

Zara Monet Feeney has been published in Huffington Post, Manifest, Juxtapoz, Beautiful Bizarre, Young-Space and Art in America periodicals. She has been awarded solo shows at Carnegie Art Museum- Oxnard, LA Artcore Gallery, CES Contemporary Gallery, Namba Gallery, CAP Gallery, Eastern Projects Gallery and Sleeth Gallery, to name a few. Her credentials also include numerous national and international art residencies and first place honors at juried group exhibitions. She works as a college art professor at California State University, Northridge, Moorpark College and Ventura College. She received a BA from UCLA and an MFA from LCAD, studying under acclaimed artists such as Lari Pittman, Barbara Kruger, and Catherine Opie.

Jennifer Lanski
Places: Famous and Ordinary

5-29 September 2019

OPENING RECEPTION
3-5pm
Sunday, 8 September, 2019

LA Artcore is pleased to present Places: Famous and Ordinary, Jennifer Lanski’s first solo exhibition of drawings and photographs with the gallery. Lanski’s drawings and other projects often appear traditional at first glance and then reveal their social or critical component upon deeper consideration. Her work is frequently serial in nature and possesses underlying humor. Often in a project, a seemingly rigid structural system must stretch under unanticipated or uncontrollable conditions.

            In her Time/Temperature series, Lanski drew outside each day, determining the number of minutes spent drawing by the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. The materials Lanski used interacted with the weather, making each drawing both a visual representation of an actual moment in time and place, and also a document reflecting the experience of its own making. Drawing outside gives the project a performative element: by placing herself in public view every day for a year to do her work, Lanski effectively moved the private studio out into public space. One motivating idea behind the work is the exploration of what it means to be an artist in the world in the 21st century.  Allowing the public to engage daily with a practicing artist and see the creative process, both over the course of one drawing and a span of 12 months, led to spontaneous interactions that can often be found in the text in each drawing.

            In the artist’s Famous Places series, Lanski represents a famous place through drawings of figures photographing that place isolated against an absent background. Though the place is visually absent, its implied presence is represented in a variety of ways, as the nature of representation itself is explored. The photographing figures depicted are simultaneously capturing the place where they are and separating themselves from being fully present by mediating their experience through a screen.

            In the National Park series, Lanski’s recent photographic prints of digital collages, numerous found photos taken by tourists and all including the same sign are combined into one image, leading to the partial obliteration or disappearance of the visitors and revealing their transience compared to the sign and landscape. Like in Famous Places, this series again explores the ways we experience and represent a landscape, a monument, or a work of art itself.

            Jennifer Lanski is a Los Angeles based artist who earned her BA from Yale and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. She is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and several Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Grants. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in such venues as Brand Library and Art Center (Glendale, California), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, South Bend Museum of Art (South Bend, Indiana), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and Artower Agora (Athens, Greece), with a previous solo show at Proxy Gallery (Culver City, California).

Art Nomad in the Grid Pt.1

Tsunemi Kanda

Toyoko Katsumata

Makoto Kobayashi
Mitsunori Kurashige

Kei Nakamura

Chieo Senzaki

Masami Yoshioka

1-25 August 2019

OPENING RECEPTION
3-5pm
Sunday, 4 August, 2019