Alison O’Daniel | JPW3 & Sayre Gomez
Quasi-Closed Captions | Z2
JULY 20 - AUGUST 17, 2013
Presented as Samuel Freeman Gallery on La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles.
Alison O’Daniel : Quasi-Closed Captions
JPW3 & Sayre Gomez : Z2
July 20 – August 17, 2013
QUASI CLOSED-CAPTIONS
Alison O’Daniel’s new body of sculptural work was inspired by the musical score to her upcoming feature-length film The Tuba Thieves (one scene of which will be shown concurrently in LA Louver’s Rogue Wave exhibition, alongside a second set of sculptures). For this score, O’Daniel commissioned three composers (Ethan Frederick Greene, Christine Sun Kim, and Steven Roden) to respond to poems and other nuanced references that she set up as a basis for their musical compositions. O’Daniel’s sculptures translate her own physical experience of listening to the score into narratives that contribute to a larger biographical imaginary. O’Daniel treats them as expanded cinematic forms, each object with its own narrative arc examining non-verbal communication.
O’Daniel—who is inspired by her own hearing impairment—uses sound as a way to inform the visual grammar of her films and sculpture. Her work evolves through situations of missed information, absence of detail, and blank spaces, which strive to open up new relationships between the body and knowledge: “Knowing is different when you don’t have access to information. [It] becomes abstract, psychedelic, profound, broad, exciting – a precipice where the imagination steps in to round out capability.”
‘Quasi-closed captions’ refers to O’Daniel’s interest in the differences in content between information conveyed in subtitles for a Deaf or a hard of hearing audience, and the actual words or sound being delivered, despite the general subtext remaining the same for both. Throughout this expanded body of work, her sculptural objects, film, and score act as quasi closed-captions for one another.
O’Daniel’s previous feature-length film Night Sky premiered at the Anthology Film Archive in conjunction with Performa 11 and the exhibition Walking Forward-Running Past at Art In General, New York. The film has been presented with live musical accompaniment by various musicians or with live Sign Language accompaniment at The Nightingale (Chicago), MOCAD (Detroit), NYU, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Jurassic Technology and other venues. Her own writing on Night Sky was recently featured in Artforum’s 500 Words. O’Daniel is a recent recipient of an Art Matters grant and a Franklin Furnace Fund fellowship and just completed a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She holds an MFA from the University of Irvine, a Postgraduate Diploma from Goldsmith’s College, a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. O’Daniel (b. 1979 in Miami FL) lives and works in Los Angeles.
JPW3 & SAYRE GOMEZ: Z2
Z2 is the second collaborative installation of painting and mixed media works by JPW3 and Sayre Gomez, and continues where their first, ZZYZX, left off.
Presented in 2011 at Las Cienegas Projects, ZZYZX used an associative, poetic logic to summon the imaginary of ZZYZX Road, a mythologized yet actual location at the end of the alphabet (and in the Mojave Desert)—where hints of vibration, noise, speed, thievery, ‘Arab drift’ car culture, linguistic nonsense, and other forms of general lawlessness might intermingle. The artists, who are longtime friends and work in neighboring studios, have overlapping tendencies that bind their work, culled from a shared set of cultural aesthetics and a growing ambivalence toward the act of appropriation. Yet it is their differing attitudes toward their mediums – and to the tactility of the image itself – that is key to their new collaborative dialogue.
JPW3 (J. Patrick Walsh III) uses sculpture and assemblage, performance, video, painting, and sound in a synesthetic practice merging scientific and personally idiosyncratic interests to arrive at altogether new meanings. His material explorations emanate from an intuitive understanding of stillness, vibration, energy, and sound: the specific silence of an anechoic chamber, the musical hum of a well-tuned engine, or the explosive burst of a popcorn kernel. From a somatic and fetishized relationship with these phenomena and the subcultures or objects that surround them, he creates a material and sensorial language that is at once physical, humorous, gritty, and atmospheric. For Z2, JPW3 will feature, along with mixed media sculpture and video, a set of wax transfer paintings that abstractly incorporate the found print imagery of electric burners, Ferrari engines, tuning forks, and other recurring motifs from his machine-centric studio lexicon.
In his technically precise paintings, Sayre Gomez considers the complications at work within any aesthetic experience. Gomez often appropriates internet-based images, which he then spins through any number of formal exercises or conceptual procedures in order to reframe how meaning is located. Serial variation of recurring imagery has become a preferred strategy to this end. Ultimately, he is “not so interested in what an artwork means, but rather how it means”. Of ever-increasing interest to Gomez is the loss of an image’s physical presence, despite his willing participation in the digital proliferation. In his most recent works, painted images emerge from beneath a veneer of fingerprints and markings referencing a vocabulary of lost tactility.
JPW3 holds an MFA from the University of Southern California and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Select solo and collaborative exhibitions include SumpPump, with Ryan Foerster, David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (2013); Feelings, with Sayre Gomez and Bobbi Woods, Michael Jon Gallery, Miami, FL (2012); Angle of Incidence, with Alex Prager and Larry Fink, Actual Size, Los Angeles (2011), and My First 69, with Natalie Labriola, Monument 2, Chicago, IL (2010). Recent group exhibitions include Nackt Glaubigen, curated by Davida Nemeroff, Infernoesque Berlin (2013); The New Now, Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles (2103); IT-THOU, Michael Thibault Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); and Adult Contemporary/Family Romance, Kavi Gupta Berlin (2012). JPW3 has performed at galleries, institutions, and art fairs around the United States, including PS1 Queens, NY; NADA Miami Beach; D’Amelio Terras, NY; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles; Yale University, Newhaven, CT; Creative Time Club 205, NY; and Cleopatra’s, Queens, NY. Writing on his work has appeared in Opening Ceremony online, Artforum, Notes on Looking, and ArtSlant, amongst other publications. JPW3 (b.1981 in Tallahassee, FL) lives and works in Los Angeles.
Sayre Gomez has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Europe and America. Select solo exhibitions include Slippery, The Hole, NY (2012); This Is To Sink, Michael Jon Gallery, Miami, FL (2012); Windows and Mirrors, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago (2011); Self Expression, Or Fog and Other Works, Kavi Gupta, Berlin (2010); and a forthcoming solo exhibition with Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include Always Yours, Des Objets Manqués, Des Monuments, Balice Hertling, Paris, FR (2013); More Young Americans, Organized by Marc-Olivier Wahler and Susanne Van Hagen, Hotel De Miramion, Paris, FR (2013); Xstraction, The Hole, NY (2013); Kiss Me Deadly, Paradise Row, London, UK (2013); Deep Space, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); and L’idee Fixe, Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2012). Gomez holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and BFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. His work has been reviewed or featured in Flaunt Magazine, Contemporary Art Daily, Artforum, ArtSlant, ArtInfo, Elle Magazine, Notes on Looking, and other prestigious publications. Gomez (b. 1982 in Chicago, IL) lives and works in Los Angeles.
