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Long Beach City College Art Gallery
Press Release
Exhibition: Greece is a group exhibit with artists
Heyward Hart, Olga Koumoundouros,
Gala Porras-Kim, Neal Rock, Rachelle Rojany.
Dates: Feb 11 - March 15, 2014
Reception: Tuesday, February 11, 7 – 8:30 PM
Hours: M – Sat, 9 Am – 3 PM; T & W, 6 – 7:30 PM
Location: LBCC Art Gallery, K-100
4901 East Carson Street
Long Beach, CA 90808
(562) 938-4815
Long Beach City College Art Gallery is pleased to host the exhibition Greece, a group exhibit with artists Heyward Hart, Olga Koumoundouros, Gala Porras-Kim, Neal Rock, Rachelle Rojany, Feb 11 - March 15, 2014, with a reception on Tuesday, February 11, 7 – 8:30 PM.
Influences of the past together with the contemporary play out uniquely in the potent works of each artist in the exhibit, political to poetic, fact and fiction.
Heyward Hart
Equal parts Youngwood Court* and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the subject of this work is an inscrutable network of history, cinema, and mythology. Though each piece differs in its method of production, they are united by an interest in materiality and the potential for unexpected relationships to arise between the concrete form of the objects and the elusive nature of their subjects.
*R&B singer Norwood Young’s former home in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Allegedly inspired by a dream, he erected 19 replicas of Michelangelo’s David on his front lawn.
Debts to the power utility from unpaid bills currently amount to €1.3 billion and is growing at an average rate of €4 million per day is the title of a new installation by Olga Koumoundouros that engages with her understanding of the recent Greek economic crisis. Using slouching drywall and the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, Koumoundouros constructs an enclosed environment that considers the austerity plans for her so-called motherland; all translated through a sheltered adolescent perspective of repudiation and longing.
Gala Porras-Kim incites an open system for interpreting the Phaistos disk, an artifact from Crete containing undeciphered script, and invites the viewer to language abstraction through recodification. Despite their current stasis, the pending decipherment of ancient scripts proposes a futurity of stories from the past unfolding in the present. One part of the hand-drawn diptych renders the artifact splayed on view from all sides while in the adjoining part, the individual elements of incised script are re-collated into another symbolic order, presenting a new possibility of meaning.
Neal Rock
A herm is an ancient Greek statue of human dimensions, typically a vertical column made from marble or stone with the head of a deity adorning its crest, usually but not exclusively the Greek god Hermes. Perhaps more importantly the herm was used as a boundary marker, placed at the peripheries of villages and towns, with both spatial and ethical inscriptions carved into them. They were also apotropaic objects - of magic and ritual - the herm is certainly more than the sum of its physical parts. The herm enables the ‘I’ to step out of the work, within a painting practice it allows the conjunction of seemingly different languages and economies of painting to be brought together. Things that are made, found, manipulated and partially destroyed find their place on the walls and floors of a given space. Different modes of painting, brought together through the herm, orchestrate meaning as a coming together of different boundaries and histories of its recent past. Windows that look out and through, skins that adorn, conceal and mask, the underside or reverse of an object whose facade cannot be seen. These are just a few examples of the bare mechanics of how we have faced, understood and felt our sense of the world through painting, structural traits that should always be up for grabs - to be questioned, re-thought and inflected.
Rachelle Rojany
The monsters that we create have many faces. For the novelist Anne Carson, the Greek mythological winged red monster Geryon (a herder of cattle written about in the poems of Stesichoros and depicted in ancient artifacts), offers all kinds of tantalizing possibilities: an ancient deity or a private muse or a mythologized artist. With the Geryons, Rojany slips the Geryon off of the painted Greek vase, and hand-builds miniature statuary of its likeness to serve up for our consumption.
These are free events. Parking is available for a $1.00 fee in designated student lots, such as Lots C, D, E and F in unmarked slots.
Please contact HK Zamani at (562) 938-4815 for further information.
