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Found / Made An online exhibition featuring: Deborah Aschheim, Jan Blair, York Chang, Sam Durant, Tm Gratkowski, Kathleen Henderson, Stas Orlovski, Camilla Taylor, HK Zamani and Jody Zellen We spent 2020-2021 in the grip of history. It was a time of isolation. It was a time of worry. It was a time of protest against racial injustice. It also became a time to reflect on the historic events we found ourselves living through. Some artists looked inward, others looked outward. The artists in this exhibition created works to remember places, people, experiences and even political events, preserving and transforming these moments into works of art. At protests, vigils, memorials, voter drives and political actions, Deborah Aschheim took note of who was by her side and then transformed photographs of those in attendance into black and white line drawings. Jan Blair chose to find positive moments culled from the Sunday edition of the New York Times published between October 2020 and July 2021, making collages with texts and images that celebrates the absurdities of everyday events with pointed juxtapositions. Bringing together two images and one caption, York Chang mined print media to create humorous as well as unsettling couplings in his Factographs. Sam Durant perused the media for images of statues under attack, transforming these moments of destruction and celebration into monumental drawings In April 2020, Tm Gratkowski began a project he called the Covid Quilt, making drawings of random things that held his attention that day and assembled these small 4.5 x 4.5 doodles into a giant quilt. Kathleen Henderson transforms a 1950s childrens' game into an series of drawings that examine the myriad interpretations of crusts and crumbs. Inspired by imagery appropriated from historical sources, Stas Orlovski has created a series of small drawings that reference the memories and dreams of his childhood. Camilla Taylor responded to the social isolation of 2020, by creating and mailing out 105 unique prints dotted with small linocut symbols. HK Zamani's Fashion Erasures obscure the central figure in advertising images to create silhouettes now set against a blank page. Jody Zellen cuts up pages from Artforum Magazine to create silhouetted figures and then juxtaposes these collaged elements with drawn doodles that fill the empty spaces. Click the thumbnail images below to view the works. |
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Deborah Aschheim These drawings bear some small witness to history being made right now. I am drawing people I meet at protests, vigils, memorials, voter drives, lobbying and organizing and mutual aid actions I participate in, starting with the protests the weekend after the Presidential election in November 2016. Deborah Aschheim creates large scale immersive installations, sculptures and drawings based on invisible worlds of memory, communication, transportation and information. Her work attempts to reconcile the physical structures of the built environment with the human experiences that buildings and cities contain and support. Aschheim received her MFA from the University of Washington. She has exhibited extensively across the United States and internationally. www.deborahaschheim.com www.neverfacebook.com |
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Jan Blair I work with the The New York Times Sunday papers in much the same way that an archaeologist searches for bits and pieces in a dig site: I gather found images and bits of text in order to discover/uncover information about a culture. I then reconstruct and synthesize this information, give it my interpretation of its meaning, and re-present these elements in snapshots I call "pages." These "pages" are part of a body of work entitled, The Covid Pages, culled from 40 consecutive NYT Sunday editions dating form October 4, 2020 through July 4, 2021. Born in Milwaukee, WI, Jan Blair now lives and works in Claremont, CA. Blair received an AA Degree of Applied Science/Photography from Milwaukee Technical College (1977), and a BFA/Photography from California State University Fullerton (1993). Initially, her work focused on black-and-white documentary-style photography. Blair moved from San Francisco to Claremont in 1987 and began working with The New York Times papers in 2010. She continues to excavate the paper every Sunday, as part of the ongoing series, In the New York Times, Who Knew? |
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York Chang Factography is a concept that was coined by the Soviet avant-garde to describe the aesthetic practice of embedding facts within storytelling to create a greater collective truth. York Chang applies this term to his Factographs, an ongoing series of collage works that describe the visual ordering of photojournalistic images by anonymous algorithms, which drive networks of diverse images into our consciousness in an immersive, perpetual visual campaign of montage, without time or directional constraints. In these dyadic works, complex formal and conceptual relationships between pairs of images and text eventually emerge like functions in a mathematical equation. York Chang (b. 1973, St. Louis, MO, lives and works in Los Angeles) makes conceptually-driven work which investigates the shifting relationship between text, images, and belief, and considers how our sense of reality is manipulated by fractured narratives in evolving forms of visual propaganda. He uses mixed-media strategies, such as appropriation, collage, and decollage, as interventions into information systems, newspapers, archives, and modes of display and public address. His work often foregrounds the labor of looking, through the searching, sorting, and consumption of images. www.yorkchang.com |
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Sam Durant Iconoclasm is a series of large-scale graphite drawings which depict some of the most dramatic examples of iconoclastic destruction. The attacks on statues document a range of archival sources such as photography, newspaper and televised imagery, illustrating a broad historical and transnational arc. The drawings highlight the long history and international scope of image breaking and feature significant examples of religious, cultural and political destruction. Examples include religiously motivated acts from sixteenth century European Protestant destruction to contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, in addition to politically and culturally motivated acts, such as the 1871 toppling of the Column Vendome in Paris, in which artist Gustav Courbet participated, and against communist statues in Europe and Africa; the cultural revolution in China; removals of colonial statues in the Carribbean, Central and South America; and nationalist uprisings of 1956 in Hungary and Egypt, among others. Sam Durant is an interdisciplinary artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. His methodology is research based but with an emphasis on social engagement, often working with communities and groups in collaborative and performative formations. Durant is based in Berlin and Los Angeles and teaches art at the California Institute of the Arts. www.samdurant.net |
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Tm Gratkowski Survival is a very subjective experience and nothing has been more profoundly true over the past two years as we all learn how to cope and deal with our individually disrupted lives. For me survival became paramount as I was left facing some very unexpected circumstances as the pandemic began in early 2020. What I learned to appreciate was the parts of you that don't change and the particulars, among insurmountable obstacles, that define you. For the past two years I have mainly worked on smaller works that when accumulated over a period of time become something more substantial. The images shown here represent some of the Covid-Quilt project I began on April 6, 2020. I decided on a project that was less involved and easier to manage than my usual collages, many of which were made on a 6 month road trip. I made these drawings (aka: doodles) on 4 1/2" x4 1/2" paper about the random things that held my attention for that moment each day. As the project developed over time the drawings started to take on a life of their own as they began to include current news headlines, various protests and many facts about covid infection rates. The drawings also included personal feelings and frustrations as the drawings revealed a more shared emotional state we were all experiencing. The time frame for the Covid-Quilt was 432 days (April 6. 2020 - May 14, 2021). I made one final drawing the day after I received my 2nd vaccine on 5.14.2021, plus one additional last drawing. In the end all of the drawings will be combined into one large - 126" x 96" - quilt. Tm Gratkowski uses paper as his primary material to create collages, installations, and sculpture. His artwork is a form of visual data gathering in which he aligns the act of looking with that of reading by using images, and text to create a critical visual narrative about the culture of information we live with today. His material source, typically pulled from fashion and design magazines, creates a densely layered and constructed surface. Tm received a BS and a BFA from UW. After attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna Austria. Tm moved to LA and received a MA from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. You can see all the individual drawings here: www.instagram.com/tmgratkowskidraws |
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Kathleen Henderson
I did a series of drawings inspired by children's games from the 1950's. My favorite is a game called Crusts and Crumbs. It’s a "hunting game." People are either "Crusts" or "Crumbs" and they chase each other around. The rules call for the game to be played in the street. It reminds me of the bait and switch politics that gets the Republican base out to vote against their own interest every time. When the two richest people own more wealth than the bottom 40% and the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 92%, we are all Crusts and Crumbs fighting for the scraps. Kathleen Henderson is a visual artist living and working in the Bay Area. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo shows in LA, and San Francisco as well as the Drawing Center in New York. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is currently a staff artist at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, CA and senior editor at the Creative Growth magazine. Known primarily for her drawings made with black oil stick on white paper, Henderson has incorporated color into this new work; in some instances suggesting a bloody rawness and at other times a queasy green toxic ooze. www.kathleenhenderson.com |
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Stas Orlovski Over the past year and a half my gaze has turned inward. I have produced a series of small drawings that are decidedly more autobiographical referencing memories, dreams and events from my childhood. Recurring images of heads, feet, hands, eyes, ships, mountains, mirrors, curtains, sculptures, books, botanicals and abstracted running figures explore themes of migration, loss and desire. Elements in these drawings are appropriated from a range sources and historical periods, including Victorian scrapbooks, natural history illustration, Modernist movements (Surrealism, Cubism, Suprematism) and my collection of Soviet-era Russian children’s books. Using collage, ink, charcoal, graphite, watercolor and any other materials on hand, these drawings are a way for me to process images and ideas. Stas Orlovski is a Los Angeles based visual artist whose work includes painting, drawing and time-based media. Orlovski was born in Kishinev, Moldova in 1969. When he was a child, his family fled the Soviet Union to Tel Aviv, then Paris and eventually settled in Toronto, Canada. Orlovski studied art in Toronto and Los Angeles, receiving a BFA from York University, a B.Ed from the University of Toronto and an MFA from the University of Southern California. www.stasorlovski.com |
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Camilla Taylor At the end of 2020 and in early 2021, attending galleries in person was not feasible due to the pandemic. This project responds to the social isolation of 2020, and my desire to create intimate physically present art experiences. I created and mailed out 105 unique prints, made using small linocut symbols, each symbol inspired by a story from my year, and each print a different collection of stories--a bit of conversation between the recipient and myself. Camilla Taylor is recognized for her monochromatic and intensely introspective works on paper and sculpture, which utilize figurative and architectural forms. Taylor’s artworks reflect the viewer’s internal lives as well as collective issues we experience as a society. Raised in Provo, Utah, Taylor attended the University of Utah and received a BFA in 2006, and an MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2011. Taylor lives in Los Angeles, CA, with her partner and 3 cats. www.camillataylor.com |
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HK Zamani HK Zamani’s new works Fashion Erasures challenge class consciousness, standardization and expectation. The obscuring of found images cancels their conventional orthodoxies while embellishing and empowering them to suggest both their primal origins and a potential undiscovered future. HK Zamani is a multidisciplinary artist, and founder of PØST, an alternative exhibition space in Los Angeles, where more than five hundred exhibits have been hosted. He has exhibited extensively, is a recipient of COLA and CCF Grants, and is in the collections of LA County Museum of Art and Berkley Museum of Art. www.hkzamani.com |
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Jody Zellen Jody Zellen's Artforum Collages are made from cutting up black pages from old Artforum magazines that had piled up in the studio. The silhouetted figures and shaped are collaged to the paper and the jremaining space is filled with stream of conscious doodle-drawings. Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist who works in many media simultaneously. She creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artist’s books. www.jodyzellen.com |
