THE FRONT

May 13- June 4, 2017

May 13- June 4, 2017

Opening reception Saturday May 13th, 6-10pm

Room 1:

Ryn Wilson
Fracture

Fracture is a collection of photo and video collages focused on the mystical nature of landscape with an element of the impact humans have on it. I find patterns within the scenery and emphasize it through structural manipulation of the imagery. I utilize geometric obstruction to interrupt the landscapes, creating a sense of the sublime in conflict with human-made order. I try to find the intersection of the imperceptible forces within nature and the human tendency to try to control it. I cut up, puncture, sew into and rearrange visual elements to create a new environment. In addition to the imagery I generate, I use found slides and photos in the collage. Much of the source material was generated while visiting nature preserves around the world. I fear that the privilege of enjoying these uninterrupted landscapes is one that may not exist one day.

Ryn Wilson is a multi-media artist in New Orleans. She works in photography and video, often incorporating other techniques such as collage, sewing, painting, drawing and installation. Her themes revolve around human/nature in conflict with social constructs, with an emphasis on feminism, the environment and identity. Ryn works as a costume designer and has been a member of the artist run gallery, The Front, since 2014 where she exhibits, curates and co-founded an annual shorts film festival. Her work has shown in exhibitions and film festivals around the world, including the International Video Art Festival, Oslo, Norway; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway; Digital Interactive Art Space, Vallensbaek, Denmark; Feral Gallery + Breve Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico; Art Lab and Makii Masaru Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan, Galerie im Andechschof, Innsbruck, Austria; The Great Wall of Oakland film series, Oakland, CA; and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA.

www.rynwilson.com

Ryn Wilson, Interruption, archival inkjet print, 11in x 17in, 2017

Room 2:

Cinema Arcane
Stephanie Barber, Angela Ellsworth, Janie Geiser, Florencia and Maria Guerberof, Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, Shana Moulton, Saige Rowe and Selina Trepp

A mini theatre screening a 48-minute program of short films on the themes of feminism, the environment and mysticism.

Stephanie Barber, To Be Old, video, 22sec, 2011
 

Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Her videos are concerned with the content, musicality and experiential qualities of language and her language is concerned with the emotional impact of moments and ideas. Each ferry viewers through philosophical inquiry with the unexpected oars of empathy, play, story and humor.

Barber’s films and videos have has been screened nationally and internationally in solo show and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema and Fandor.com. Her books Night Moves and these here separated... were published by Publishing Genius Press in 2013 and 2010 respectively. Her recent collection of very short stories All The People was published by Ink Press Productions in 2015.

www.stephaniebarber.com

Angela Ellsworth, Kicking Up Dust, video, 2min 37sec, 2014
 

Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist traversing disciplines of drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Her solo and collaborative work has taken in wide-ranging subjects such as illness, physical fitness, endurance, religious tradition, and social ritual. She is interested in art merging with everyday life where public and private experiences collide in unexpected spaces.

Her work has been reviewed in Art News, Frieze Art, Fiber Arts, ArtUS, and Artforum.com. She has presented work nationally and internationally including the Getty Center (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia), Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, Poland), National Review of Live Art (Glasgow, Scotland), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, CO), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale, AZ), and Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ).

www.aellsworth.com

Janie Geiser, Cathode Garden, video, 7min 46sec, 2015

Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, film, installation, and visual art. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its sense of suspended time. One of the pioneers of the renaissance of American avant-garde puppet theater, Geiser creates innovative, hypnotic performances and installations that integrate performing objects, puppets, and projection. 

Geiser’s films have been presented at the Whitney, MOMA, LACMA, the Guggenheim, Redcat, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Wexner Center, the Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, Strausbourg Museum, and at numerous festivals including the New York Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, London International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Viennale, and more. Her film The Red Book was selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, and her films are in MOMA’s permanent collection. One of the pioneers of the renaissance of American avant-garde puppet theater, Geiser also creates innovative, hypnotic works that integrate puppetry and projection.  She was recently awarded a Doris Duke Artist Award, an unrestricted three-year fellowship. Geiser currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at CalArts.

www.janiegeiser.com

Florencia and Maria Guerberof, UNHEIMLICH, video, 9min 32sec, 2012

Founder of Asian Performing Arts UK, Florencia Guerberof was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1980. With a formation in visual arts, art theory and dance she reflects her aesthetic concerns on stage creating cross-disciplinary performances. Her interest in existentialism led her to investigate Butoh dance.

She is a recipient of the Scottish Arts Council Grant which enabled her to carry out an extensive research on Butoh in Tokyo under the mentoring of Yoshito Ohno among other Butoh masters. She has presented her performances in London at Siobhan Davies, The Blue Elephant Theatre, Café Oto and Shunt as well as at The Nightingale Theatre in Brighton. Currently, she is running Butoh Research Project in leading venues such as RADA (The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and SOAS University (The School of Oriental and African Studies). Florencia has toured Paris performing for “Danse Elargie” dance festival 2012 at Théâtre de la Ville and Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. She has also showcased her work in Berlin at HKW, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2013. She has recently founded Asian Performing Arts UK Ltd in London with the support of Sasakawa Foundation and the Japan Society. She currently lives and works in London.

www.florenciaguerberof.com

Originally from Argentina, Buenos Aires, Maria Guerberof has a background in philosophy and creative photography. Maria’s work as cinematographer includes the short dramas such as "Plagium" featuring Jason Flemying and Exec. Produced by Joe Wright (Atonement). Maria Directed and produced the short "Cry For All" which was selected for ArtWiki, Sheffield Doc fest mini-meet Market and selected at the 7th Berlin Biennale, having also distributed worldwide by Shorts International Uk. In 2013 Maria had three films at the Cannes Short Film Corner. Currently Maria is also directing personal projects and collaborating in the media department for Asian performing arts UK.

www.guerberof.com

Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, Smudge series, video, 7min 13sec, 2014

Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain is a Los Angeles based multi-media artist. Her work explores feminism, and her mixed Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Jewish identity through lens based media and installations.

Her work has shown in several venues and festivals including the Venice Biennale, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Los Angeles Filmforum, the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in New York, and ImagineNATIVE FIlm + Media Festival. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College in 2008 and a dual Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in Photography/Media and Film/Video in 2014. She teaches and curates at the Echo Park Film Center, and also works at the California Institute of the Arts.

www.evelaurynlafountain.com

Shana Moulton, Decorations of the Mind II, 2011, 11min 55sec

Shana Moulton creates performance and video works that examine bodily and spiritual anxieties and their relationship to popular culture, self-help goods and functionless consumer objects. In her works, Moulton creates surreal narratives about the life of Cynthia, a woman trapped in a mundane life searching for enlightenment. Cynthia engages in pathetic situations that become playful and profound. Using visual and aural displacements to create narrative twists, Moulton reveals the strangeness of reality and an endless labyrinth of associations that can be drawn from the trashiest of media and consumer goods. Through her banal home decorations, Cynthia searches for fulfillment, purpose and salvation. Her struggles with the mundane, the eclectic and the disposable, offer a unique perspective on the relationship between spirituality and consumerism in contemporary society. 

Moulton’s work has been exhibited at SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; MOCA London, London, England; and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA among other galleries, museums and festivals around the world. She has been featured on Art 21 and been written about in the New York Times, Art Forum, Art in America, Frieze and Bomb Magazine among others. She has been an artist in resident at Harvestworks, New York City, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Smackmellon. She has also received fellowships and grants from the Experimental Television Center, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYFA, and Creative Capital. She currently works in Brooklyn, New York.

www.shanamoulton.info

Saige Rowe, Three short physical movements followed by a general lull, video, 3min 22sec, 2016

Born in 1993, Saige lives and works out of Conyers, GA having received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Rowe has exhibited recently at Day & Night projects in Atlanta, GA via Selena Gallery (New York, NY) as well as Esther Yang Project Space (Atlanta, GA); Bodega (New York, NY); exo exo (Paris,FR); and at Species (Atlanta, GA) in collaboration with Linda Moncada for is this a love connection.

www.saigerowe.info

Selina Trepp, Cracks and Smacks, video, 2min 48sec, 2015

Selina Trepp, Cracks and Smacks, video, 2min 48sec, 2015

Selina Trepp (Swiss/American b.1973) is an artist whose work explores economy and improvisation. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is the goal, living a life of adventure is a way, embarrassment is often the result. She makes animations and combines performance installation, drawing, painting, and sculpture to create intricate setups for photos and videos.

Selina Trepp's work has been exhibited widely internationally and has received several awards and honors including the Swiss Art Award and the Illinois Arts council Fellowship. In addition to the studio-based work, Selina is active in the experimental music scene. In this context she sings and plays the videolah, her midi controlled video synthesizer, to create projected animations in real-time as visual music. She performs with a varying cast of collaborators and as one half of Spectralina, her audio visual collaboration with Dan Bitney.

www.selinatrepp.info

Rooms 3 & 4:

4 Queens
Courtney Asztelos & Mark Brandvik

4 Queens is a multi-media showcase that speaks to themes celebrated in mythical places like Las Vegas and New Orleans. For Courtney Asztalos, the casino is both mythical and accessible; a place where its inhabitants can transcend personal identity in a variety of ways. Her photographic work investigates the physical spaces of casinos and the women who present themselves within that orbit. Las Vegas artist Mark Brandvik navigates a course connecting visual vernaculars to an allegorical stage that links personal history and collective archaeology.

Courtney Asztalos makes photographs, video, and music. She has exhibited her work at PØST in Los Angeles (CA), Meinblau in Berlin, the Multimedia Museum in Moscow (Russia), Crisp-Ellert Museum in St. Augustine (FL), the Film House in Edinburgh, and more. Her work is in a variety of Special Collections libraries such as UCLA Arts Library, Duke University, Texas Tech University, Vanderbilt University, University of Central Florida, and the University of Miami. She received her MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University, and graduated from Florida State University with a BFA in Studio Art.

Mark Brandvik received his BFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1996 and his MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998. Included in New American Paintings, Top Ten Now Los Angeles, and recognized in Las Vegas Weekly as Best of 2014 for Narrative Sculpture, and the recipient of several grants, commissions, and residencies, his work has been exhibited in the United States, Canada, and Europe and is found in private, public, and corporate collections. He has taught art since 1997 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the College of Southern Nevada. The artist lives and works in downtown Las Vegas.