Gordon Chandler, The “Game” Show
The Lois Lambert Gallery of Functional Art
Bergamot Station, Santa Monica
September 13 - November 9

Many of the galleries at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica are going through a mid-year change of exhibitions. One notable new show opening this Saturday at the Lois Lambert Gallery at the station is The “Game” Show by Gordon Chandler, named for Chandler’s oversized game boards made of society’s cast-off goods. The gallery hosts functional art, perfect for Chandler’s work, which is function in form as well as message.

Chandler has been challenging the value of objects and materials via sculpture for over three decades. By exaggerating size and abandoning orthodox materials for, say, scrap metal and auto parts, his works become critical of the use-value paradigm. Chandler achieves a similar effect when he makes a giant crossword puzzle out of steel, elevating the mundane not only by increasing its size, but also by considering it as an art subject.

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“TOLERANCE” is a Green and Fair-Trade 160 page book printed on recycled bleach free paper with vegetable based ink, featuring 159 full-color images including numerous essays written by the artist. The book is being released in conjunction with Chris Mars’ exhibition at Billy Shire Fine Arts, Sept. 13 – Oct. 4, opening reception and book signing will be on Saturday, September 13th from 7 pm – 10 pm. The exhibition will consist of 30 new oil paintings and will be Mars’ first out-of-town public appearance since 1996. Mars will also be signing “TOLERANCE” at the Laguna Art Museum on Sept. 14 from 3 pm – 6 pm.

Rock star, recluse, brother, activist. Artist. Chris Mars’ work graces the hallowed halls of museums throughout America and is tattooed on calves and biceps throughout the world. “Tolerance” is the long-awaited collection of his work.

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Kim Light/LightBox presents You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth, the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based collaborative artists Simmons & Burke. Simmons & Burke’s works shimmer with highly faceted collage compositions of appropriated images, celebrating contamination by digital replication, popular culture, and the history of art.

The visual and audio components are marked by an intricate collage aesthetic, assembled solely from content carefully collected from internet sources. The artists’ user experience of browsing for digital source material heavily forms and informs these works; they relate this process to the chance operations of John Cage.

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This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs
The Huntington Library
Ends September 15

The Huntington Library’s photography exhibit, This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs, ends this week, timed perfectly with the close of another L.A. summer. In the show’s last week, you can go to the secluded botanical paradise of the many gardens at the Huntington before getting all thoughtful about the depiction of your complicated hometown in film over the last hundred and forty odd years.

Since 1860, both the physical landscape of the region, as well as the physical nature and awareness of the people living there, has been captured in celluloid. This photography attends to the complexities of the South Land, a place that any Los Angelino must feel bittersweet about. One must learn quickly in LA the difference between appearances and reality, an aphorism that the show’s photography points to. True, L.A. is the nation’s capital for fame, success, leisure, and glamour, but is also home to racial tensions, merciless traffic, and unfulfilled dreams. The photographs in the show represent the physicality of this binary that makes Los Angeles so alluring, yet somehow treacherous.

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The Altered Eye showcases an exciting and diverse group of established and emerging artists who are continually pushing the boundaries of their craft.  Impossibly beautiful, expressive and candid, meticulous, sensuous, innovative, narrative: all in a blink of the altered eye.

Cella Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery focused on developing the careers of both their established and emerging artists as well as catering to the needs of their clients. Cella Gallery is committed to nurturing the local creative community through their special events: Music Nights, Artist Salons, and new exhibits approximately every six weeks.

So what, or rather who can you expect?

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“Neofolk” is a new kind of folk art inspired by the narrative paintings of early colonial American and European folk art and the subconscious roots of Surrealism. “Neofolk” is the perfect way to describe multi-talented artist Anne Faith Nicholls’ current style. ”I like the way folk artists used paintings as a way to chronicle their day to day lives. So now, I am doing the same with my new experience in Los Angeles. It’s about change, relocation, growth, uncertainty, emotion, fear, love and perseverance. The show is unapologetically autobiographical and a great opportunity for a collector to obtain a deeply personal work,” states Nicholls, whose story is as colorful and unique as her art.

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“Fridays Off the 405″ featuring Monsters Are Waiting
and Justin Warfield & DJ Adam 12
The Getty Center
6 - 9pm

Start your weekend on top of the world, or at least atop LA, at the Getty’s “Fridays Off the 405” series. This weekly installment of FREE music at Los Angeles’s most monolithic museum couples twilight views of everything south of Mullholand as an alternative to the grinding gridlock of the 405. Tonight is the last Friday performance at the Getty, as the end of summer will end the program until the spring when it will be moved to Saturdays, the day when everyone is free to crowd up the galleries and gardens and ruin the vibes.

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Ed Ruscha: A Selection of Prints
The Greenfield Sacks Gallery
Bergmot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica

Hey cool post-modern art kids, you have just one week left to enjoy the Pop Art prints of Ed Ruscha at the Greenfield Sacks Gallery in Santa Monica’s haven for contemporary art, Bergamot Station. Ruscha’s textual “word paintings” are credited for the birth of the Pop Art movement, along with Warhol’s silk screened multiples and Lichtenstein’s comic reproductions.

Ruscha’s stark prints gain much of their notorious and sardonic satire from their simplicity. His works span multiple mediums, from photography and painting to print making as in the show, frequently featuring single words, phrases, or repetitions. This plurality of mediums and influences, however, ironically echoes the banality of LA life and the onslaught of text created by mass media, instead of the city’s rumored energy and potential. If his works seem at all dull or familiar, that is sort of the point.

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Giant Robot is proud to present The Wild Life, an art show featuring the work of Susie Ghahremani.

Susie Ghahremani is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Her artwork has appeared in The New York Times, Nickelodeon Magazine, and Martha Stewart Kids. Most recently, she has created work for Chronicle Books, Bank of America, and Target Corporation, as well as the highly acclaimed nature book I Love Dirt.

In addition to painting, Ghahremani crafts her own line of products incorporating her original illustrations onto stationery, apparel, jewelry, and other goodies. She has received awards from American Illustration, The Alternative Pick, and Giant Robot.

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Last week, Yoko Ono premiered her latest Wish Tree for Pasadena installaton. More than 10,000 people visited the One Colorado Courtyard in the first week.  The installation began with  21 crape myrtles at the center of this elegant art installation and is now covered in thousands of wish tags expressing hopes for the future from people who have come to visit the work. More wishes are being added at the rate of around 1,200 per day, with 5,000 over the weekend.

Wishes from Wish Tree for Pasadena will be joined with others from around the world and placed in specially constructed capsules to be installed in the area surrounding Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower on Videy Island, off the coast of Reykjavík, Iceland. The artwork is dedicated to the memory of John Lennon. The tower, a column of light emanating from a stone base with a radius of about 10 meters, is lit for two months each year starting on October 9, John Lennon’s birthday, and ending on December 9, the anniversary of his death. The artwork is also lit at certain other special times during the year. For more information, visit www.imaginepeace.com

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There is no part of my ego that is large enough that would allow me to call myself an art critic on any level. However, with the recently opened AutomoLove exhibit at the Antebellum gallery in Hollywood, I may have to start sipping wine and eating high priced cheese.

Thanks to artist and owner of the Antebellum gallery Rick Castro, fetish enthusiast and automotive junkies alike can come together and enjoy some spectacular shall we say, “different” pieces of art. Ranging from Playfully cartoonish to blatantly sexually suggestive, this collection of over twenty artist featuring paintings, photography and drawings, is guaranteed to hold something for everyone to appreciate. [ Read The Full Story -> ]

Circle In The Square
The Brand Library Art Galleries
1601 West Mountain St, Glendale

August 2 - September 5, 2008
Opening Reception August 2, 5 - 8pm

This show brought to you by circles
 and squares. Actually, the theme of this group exhibit at the Brand Library Art Galleries in Glendale is Circle In The Square. Believe it or not, not more than one artist has works that speak to this spatial subject matter; the group show includes works by Yesung Kim, Barbara Kolo, Susan Sironi, Luke Van Hook, and Cheryl Walker, with a special dance performance by Liz Curtis and Martha Carrascosa.

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