"C.O.L.A. 2001: New Work by Ten Artists"
2001-05-25 until 2001-07-15
Skirball Cultural Center
Los Angeles, CA, USA United States of America

A collaboration between the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and the Skirball Cultural Center, the exhibition features new work by ten distinguished artists who received the 2000-2001 Cultural Grants to Individual Artists/C.O.L.A. fellowships. Initiated in 1996, as part of the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department's Cultural Grants Program, the fellowships support mid-career, local artists in the creation of new work. The works in the exhibition are in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, drawings, photographs, film, installation, photo-based painting, and computer-generated projections. A series of related events plus a comprehensive full-color catalog, underwritten by United Airlines, accompany the exhibition.

The C.O.L.A. exhibition is the culmination of the year's Individual Artist Grant-supported activities. Each artist received an award of $10,000 to encourage the creation of new work, and in recognition of individual achievement, impact in the field, and sustained dedication to art making. This year's recipients for Visual Arts, whose works will be exhibited at the Skirball are: Laura Aguilar, Sandow Birk, Tom Knechtel, Robert Nakamura, John Outterbridge, Sarah Perry, Susan Rankaitis, Jennifer Steinkamp, Bruce Yonemoto, and Liz Young. The panel of arts professionals who selected these visual artists for awards was Jay Belloli, Tomas Benitez, Sari Frilot, Karin Higa, Thomas Rhoades, and Erika Suderberg.

Margie J. Reese, recently-appointed Cultural Affairs Department General Manager for the City of Los Angeles, comments: This year's C.O.L.A. exhibition presents an exciting cross-section of the most current work by some of the very best artists who choose to live in Los Angeles and influence its culture. Over the past five years, this successful grant program has been committed to representing the complexity of the artistic experience in a way that reinforces the importance of individual differences within the cultural fabric of our communities. While financial need is not a determining factor for these grants, they do enable artists to devote more time to a single piece of work, to work on a larger scale, to acquire new materials and equipment, and/or to realize works that could not otherwise be attempted.

Uri D. Herscher, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Skirball Cultural Center, comments: We are delighted to host this year's C.O.L.A. exhibition. We are dedicated to strengthening community and presenting new ideas about art and culture to a broad, diverse audience. The exhibition promises to be engaging, thought-provoking, and interesting to anyone who cares about the art of our time, and the memories and personal histories that inspire it.

For the exhibition, Laura Aguilar has created a new series of self-portraits, Stillness and Motion, set in the desert landscape of New Mexico and Texas. Snarled, weathered tree trunks, large rock formations, and the spacious horizon create a potent backdrop for Aguilar's figure studies.

Sandow Birk's new paintings and etchings are based on eighteenth-century narrative engravings by the British artist William Hogarth. Birk has produced his own morality play: The Rake's Progress -The Life and Times of Rafael Perez. The paintings depict the complicity and eventual downfall of Los Angeles Police Department officer Rafael Perez, the Rampart Division police officer whose confessions and accusations have produced a scandal of catastrophic proportions in Los Angeles.

Tom Knechtel shows a significant new painting and several drawings. The Gaudy Presence is a densely filled canvas, a mix of ancient legends and contemporary symbols that explore the inner world of human experience.

Robert Nakamura screens his new film, The Brighter Side of Dark: Toyo Miyatake, 1895 - 1979. With this film, Nakamura presents the Japanese American community through the photographic images and films of Toyo Miyatake, whose career spanned several periods of cultural and social change. By focusing on the life of this artist, who was very much engaged with other modernists of the 1920s and 30s, Nakamura reveals the vibrant artistic and intellectual life of Los Angeles's Little Tokyo district prior to World War II. The film also explores the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war, and the turmoil of the social and political activism of the 1960s.

John Outterbridge presents a re-creation, and reinterpretation of a public art structure he helped create in 1970 for Studio Watts, which was later destroyed. The original structure was intended as a place of healing in Watts after the 1965 riots. The new structure, designed by Outterbridge with the firm Raw Architecture, will be placed in a park-like area and will include works by other artists who contributed to the original structure. It will also serve as a place for meeting and communal development, providing a sense of opportunity, of rebuilding, of community pride, of self-sufficiency, and of collectivity.

Sarah Perry is showing a number of new works, all made from found objects near her home in the desert, including old hardware, sheet metal, bird feathers and bones of dead animals that range from miniscule remains of mice and lizards to almost mammoth-sized cattle bones. The cattle bones have been assembled into a nearly 9-ft. tall rocket ship entitled Beast of Burden.

New mixed-media photographic works by Susan Rankaitis explore human thought processes in concrete and abstract photo imagery. The questions that drive Rankaitis' art arise as a result of new scientific thought and technological developments. Rankaitis' new works include images of the human brain derived from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and are contained in an installation entitled Peripheral Memory.

Light artist Jennifer Steinkamp uses sophisticated computer animation software to produce colorfully exuberant, site-specific projections. For the Skirball Cultural Center she has produced an animated pattern of light entitled Tra-La-La-Boom. Light, motion, and placement contribute to the sensory illusion of both space and time.

Bruce Yonemoto's new works reflect his continued interest in both art and film and their capacity to define identity and illusion. Yonemoto uses the movie projection screen as an illusionary surface, like the surface of a painting. Yonemoto's La Vie Secrete-Moi and La Vie Secrete-After Magritte are Chromogenic (color) photographic prints that play off the art works of well-known artists in combination with his own new images.

Liz Young is an installation and performance artist as well as a sculptor. Young's art has often addressed issues of body modification and replacement. Her new installation work at the Skirball is entitled Miss Fits and Will Knot and includes a number of new sculptural works presented within a paneled room. Here, she has crafted a business man's suit and a nurse's uniform that have the look of what she terms: the birthday suit that we all wear. Viewers are also presented with a number of animal creatures whose imitation skins are made from a range of flesh-toned materials including girdle fabric, plastic bags, and bandages.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of California

Other Important Exhibitions in Los Angeles