YOUNG PROJECTS
Opening Thurs Jan 26, 6:00-8:30 Runs through March 2, 2012. B210 & B230 Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA 90069. 11-5 Tues-Friday. Free admission. 323-377-1102
Main Gallery:
An Inducement, A Deliquescence, A Pungency Enveloped in a Caress: Recent Video Work by Matthew Weinstein
Project Space:
Suspension: A Two Person Exhibition with Reynold Reynolds and Kevin Cooley
“An Inducement, A Deliquescence, A Pungency Enveloped in a Caress: Recent Video Work by Matthew Weinstein
YoungProjects is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Matthew Weinstein in Los Angeles. The New York-born artist has shown at the Denver Museum, the Mint Museum (NC), The Wexner Center (Ohio), Portugal Arte 10 (Lisbon), Musee Matisse (Paris) Kunsthalle Vienna, Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich) and many others. His work is also included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection, as well as other key collections.
Weinstein is known for creating sophisticated 3D animation work that uses the kind of visual language generally associated with major animation studios such as Pixar and DreamWorks (i.e. advanced software, motion-capture, and professional actors and musicians including Tony award winners Natasha Richardson, Hope Davis, Dennis O’Hare, Blair Brown and the Balkan Beat Box). However, the artist’s esthetic draws mostly from his painting and sculptural practice, which draws equally from antiquity as it does Pop art, Ikigama and classic cinema. Here porcelain pigs and candy-colored koi perform perverse musical numbers and soliloquies alike, often addressing the viewer directly. The result is an otherworldly, often hallucinogenic experience that remains utterly unique within the realm of contemporary art.
An Inducement, A Deliquescence, A Pungency Enveloped in a Caress, a line taken from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ famous celebration of artifice, Against Nature, (1884) will present most of Weinstein’s most recent animations, including the West Coast premier of his latest, The Childhood of Bertold Brecht, which the artist calls a “non-narrative musical tale of disillusionment and greed.” (Brecht’s theories of theater have long been an influence on the artist). Chariots of the Gods, 2009, (ft Natasha Richardson, 17 mins); Siam, 2008, (14 mins); Three Love Songs From the Bottom of the Ocean (14 mins) and more will be presented.”
Suspension: A Two-Person Exhibition with Reynold Reynolds and Kevin Cooley
“YoungProjects is pleased to present Suspension, a two-person show exploring the relationship between time and image through the work of the Berlin-based experimental film artist, Reynold Reynolds and the New York-based Kevin Cooley.
The exhibition was designed as a response to our epoch’s troubled relationship to time, which the author Mary Ann Doane attributes to “the prevalence of, and the adaptation to, Cinematic Time,” by culture at large. The show will include Cooley’s large-scale ceiling projection, Skyward (2012), which presents a series of disparate time-based moments that have been seamlessly woven together into a unified whole. Beginning in downtown Los Angeles and ending high above Pacific Palisades the piece literally stitches together LA’s disparate ecologies while creating an impossibly long tracking shot through LA’s famously horizontal environs. Yet as a kind of rebuttal to Gursky and Crewdson’s “godlike” camera, the viewer’s POV remains earthbound, which in turn creates a seductive meditation on expansiveness.
Reynolds, who originally studied physics before being tutored by the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, uses a combination of stop motion techniques and rigorously staged mise-en-scene to create extraordinary cinematic works that zero in on the tension between the frozen, recorded moment and celluloid movement. Three dual channel works, Secret Life (2008), Secret Machine (2009) and Six Easy Pieces (2010) will be included, as well as a 4-channel work, Seven Days Till Sunday, which was co-directed by the Irish artist, Patrick Jolly. (The piece is In Memoriam, after Jolly’s passing earlier this month)
Reynolds has received numerous awards for his experimental films and installations, including the festival award at the European Media Arts Festival Osnabrueek; First Prize at the Black Maria Film Festival, and First Prize at the SxSW Film Festival. He has also presented his work at the Tate Modern, the New Museum of Contemporary, PS1, the Berlin Biennale, the Moscow Biennial, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Roma.
Cooley has shown his photographs and videos at the Swiss Institute NY, White Columns, Massimo Audiello, Site UK and is included in a number of important private and public collections including the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum.
Cooley’s work at YoungProjects is in conjunction with the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, which will be showing Cooley’s photographs concurrently. Skyward was partially funded by the Experimental Television Fund.”
-JO
