Big Haul III

RAID Projects is pleased to present the third iteration of Big Haul, an installation series by Sibyl Wickersheimer and Janne Larsen. Big Haul is a ‘Call and Response’ installation series relying on two petroleum based products chosen for their ability to contract and expand repeatedly. Larsen and Wickersheimer both come out of the theatrical tradition of set design and their approach to manipulating the materials involves the spectacle usually reserved for the stage. This exaggeration transforms the gallery space into a stage space. The artists ask the visitors to be both spectator and actor as they explore the installation from outside the space and within.

In this third part in the series, Larsen and Wickersheimer, use the long, narrow space of the gallery in a playful way transforming the space respectively into a very large pair of pants and a nest-like exploration game, reminiscent of a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. 

Larsen’s pants will be open on June 9th from 7-11pm 

Wickersheimer’s response will open on June 23rd from 7-11pm. 

Geneva Skeen will be preforming on June 16th.

Wear pants. Be prepared.

Janne Larsen is an artist and set designer living in Los Angeles. She has a degree in philosophy from DePaul University and received her MFA from CalArts. She has designed theater, opera, dance and installations throughout Los Angeles and New York. Her theatrical work has been seen at Symphony Space, Horsetrade Theater, Bootleg Theater, Pomona College, Cal State L.A., Caltech and Cal Poly. Her artwork has been exhibited in Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Workspace, Weekend Gallery, Telic Art Exchange, Hi-Lite, Open Space, Outpost for Contemporary Art and The Washington Museum of Art. An upcoming book of her sculptural work will be published by Insert Press in 2013.

Sibyl Wickersheimer has designed a wide range of projects bringing her work to a variety of venues internationally. Recent projects include: What About Dick? written and directed by Eric Idle, Crescent City a new opera with The Industry LA, the set for Transit Space created by Diavolo Dance Company, and The Unfortunates, a new musical for Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2012-13 season. Sibyl’s theatrical set design credits include productions at Lookingglass Theatre, Berkeley Repertory, South Coast Repertory, The Geffen Playhouse, The Kirk Douglas Theatre, The Natural History Museum of LA County, The Actors’ Gang, Theatre at the Boston Court, EST-LA, and Circle X. Sibyl’s photography and installation work has been exhibited in Hi-Lite, Weekend, The New Chinatown Barber Shop, Gallery 825, Shoshane Wayne Gallery, Andrew Shire Gallery, Hatch Gallery, Latch, and the Pacific Asia Museum. Sibyl is also an Assistant Professor in the USC School of Theatre.

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Prophecy Territory

Behind the Dutch Door at Raid Projects

The first in a series of apocalyptic multimedia extravaganzas.

As long as there has been civilization, there have been prophecies of the end. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn. The reason for the total abandonment of Mayan cities remains uncertain in the eyes of science, yet their calendar end date has been seized by contemporary society as the next chance to imagine our end.

As the apocalypse looms, what does it mean for people living their lives? Is it right to trust in the moment, rather than the end? Should people skip work and plant community gardens? Is it back to bartering and six shooters? Is this finally the chance to set out for uncharted landscapes hunting the treasures that haunt your dreams? To some the end is a grim and brutal final judgment, to others the dawning of a
golden age.

Prophecy Territory is the first in a series of End of the World Events at the Dutch Door aimed creating a pleasurable
environment to embrace the end of the world.

Dutch Door swings open at 7 with food, music and dancing

Work by: Vanessa LaValle, Robin Latkovich, Liza Rifkin, and Wes Johansen

Organized by Molly Shea and Intuitive Research Society

For more updates and info: dutchdoor.tumblr.com or 
IntuitiveResearchSociety.blogspot.com

Next exhibition: MUC’s Carnival of Insecurities Friday, May 4th, 2012 7 to 10 p.m.

Hungry Me, Tender You – Josh Atlas and Michelle Carla Handel, curated by Carrie McILwain

Hungry Me, Tender You
Josh Atlas and Michelle Carla Handel, curated by Carrie McILwain

Due to popular demand, the run of the exhibition has been extended to April 15th.

Details for closing reception event soon…………………

Exhibition Dates: March 3rd through April 15th
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 3rd,7 – 10 pm
Closing Reception: Thursday, March 29th, 7 – 10 pm

RAID Projects is proud to present Hungry Me, Tender You, an exhibition of figurative sculptures and drawings by Josh Atlas and Michelle Carla Handel. Please join us for a sumptuous affair of form, texture, and writhing candy-coated bodies.

The works presented here are figures of desire. They are abstracted personal lusts driven by the need to touch, coerce and manipulate materials into strange bodies. Both artists approach their work with a sense of humor and play, creating forms that straddle the line between sensuous and revolting.

Atlas creates adorable “girlfriends” out of pool toys, icing, donuts and googly eyes in an attempt to satisfy his jumbled desires for love, sex, and comfort eating. Rather than hide his personal lusts, he uses humor to make work that is equally absurd and empathic.

Handel’s forms are perversely intimate and alluring. She uses textiles to make her sculptures appear soft or cuddly, even as they bulge and contort around their underlying tensions. Handel’s work speaks to the constraints levied upon body or flesh, that of time, biology, or gravity.

Underneath their playful and humorous sides, both bodies of work show vulnerability as they grapple with failure. Atlas’ dessert women are earnestly trying to satisfy a range of bodily urges, but ultimately, they know they are untouchable. Handel’s sculptures seem to be burdened by their own mass, with wrinkled limbs that are coiling around themselves, too tired to hold a pose.

Josh Atlas received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2005), where hebecame interested in integrating comedy and art. He has participated in exhibitions at Allegra LaViola Gallery (New York), Daniel Cooney Fine Art (New York), MonkeyTown (Brooklyn), and NTBA Gallery (Los Angeles) and participated in benefit auctions for Equality California and the Red Cross. Josh Atlas lives and works in Los Angeles.

Michelle Carla Handel received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. Exhibitions have included a solo show, ‘Strange Skin’, at WEEKEND gallery, and inclusion in 2011 GLAMFA and BOOM Socal MFA shows. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Panel Discussion: General Opposition Party: The Relevance Of Painting In The 21st Century

The recent survey of Los Angeles modern and contemporary art known as Pacific Standard Time is seemingly creating a canon of what is “worth” talking about in LA. The survey is heavy handed in Conceptual works, complete with an elaborate performance festival that features spin-offs, reperformances, reprisals, and resurrections. In what may be an apologetic to Los Angeles’ relevance to the global art market, it has left many with the question, “what about painting?” What is the relevance of the history PST explores, to the reality of the contemporary scene?

General Opposition Party: The Relevance Of Painting In The 21st Century will explore the contemporary nature of painting in relationship to the institutional and commercial state of the medium. In reponse to the Torrance Art Museum exhibition, To Live and Paint in LA, The Center of the Universe exhibition at RAID Projects, (for which this event serves as the closing reception) and Pacific Standard Time, the panel, moderated by Jason Ramos will discuss how “value” is determining worth in the Los Angeles art community with regard to contemporary painting.

Panelists: Constance Mallinson, Christy Roberts, Chris Trueman, Josh Atlas, more TBD.

Moderator: Jason Ramos

Produced by Christy Roberts and RAID Projects

Sunday, February 26th
3pm – 5:30pm 
Free beer

Current exhibition: Center Of The Universe: Flack, Presneill, Ramos

RAID Projects presents
Center Of The Universe
Jon Flack, Max Presneill and Jason Ramos

Opening reception February 4th, 2012, 7-10 pm

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In the wake of the Torrance Art Museum’s broad survey of the state of LA painting – To Live And Paint In LA, RAID Projects is proud to present current work of the artists behind mounting that exhibition – curators Max Presneill and Jason Ramos, and preparator Jon Flack (whose work can also be found in the TAM exhibition).

All three painters have expanded their studio practice into the other necessary roles for a thriving art community, with a sense of participation and duty that has been a defining mark of Los Angeles contemporary art in recent years. At the center of these artists’ universe has always been their own studio practice, and the current exhibition at the TAM produced by them is a direct line from their specific interests into a larger context.

Center Of The Universe presents these three artists’ work, in an effort to complete a circle of context and provide evidence of the extra-studio trend in art today.

Pics of Dana Maiden: Margins and Rocks

Current Exhibition – Dana Maiden: Margins and Rocks

Opening reception Saturday, January 14th, 6-10 pm

RAID Projects is pleased to announce Margins and Rocks, a solo exhibition of new work by Dana Maiden. Featuring large sculptures, a series of photographs and a video installation, the exhibition locates Maiden’s practice at an intersection between the physicality of sculpture and the disembodied perception of photographic space.

Photographs taken in museums, hotels and vacant lots in Mexico City, Havana, and Los Angeles are the starting points for the multi-media works in the exhibition. Within these locations, Maiden directs her attention to physical margins made of stone, concrete and wood. She then manifests theses materials as recoded photographic objects made from ink and paper. This mirroring effect becomes increasingly complex and self-reflexive as the space of the photograph confronts the space of the gallery three-dimensionally, or unfolds within its own frame. Maiden’s recursive explorations seize fissures in the simulacra, expanding the borders of the images into the tensions of space.

Maiden’s photographic sculptures recall Borges’ description of a map so detailed that it corresponds exactly in size to the territory it represents. The paper map is soon broken down by wind and rain, and the holes in the copy render it obsolete. Similarly, in Maiden’s work, the viewer becomes aware of the frayed edges demarcating our notions of simulation and utility. It is in these margins that Maiden discovers the locus for authorship. Imagining new possibilities for residual objects and places that seem to exist outside the constraints of usefulness, the artist pauses to consider the space behind a billboard, a concrete rimmed plot of vacant land, and the sidelines of a museum’s diorama.

Dana Maiden lives and works in Los Angeles. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes photography, sculpture, video and performance. She earned a BA in Visual Arts, Art History and English Literature from Columbia University (2000) and an MFA in Sculpture and Photography from Claremont Graduate University (2008). She is the 2008 recipient of the Feitelson Fellowship, and has been an artist-in-residence at SOMA in Mexico City, Proekt Fabrika in Moscow, Art Shanty Project in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. Recent exhibitions include the UCR California Museum of Photography, Vincent Price Art Museum, 3rd Moscow Biennale, Open Field at the Walker Art Center, High Energy Constructs, Kristi Engle Gallery, Chime & Co., Cerritos College Art Gallery, Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery, Solway Jones Gallery, Sea and Space Explorations, Track 16 Gallery, DEN Contemporary and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art.

RAIDers in New American Paintings and current AIR links

Former RAID AIR and curator of our recent fall show, Imposter, Janene Nagy, is featured in the current edition of New American Paintings.

and….

Here are links to RAID’s current AIRs

Stephen Parise (SE, FI)

Mindy Kober (US)