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Susan Cianciolo @ 356 S. Mission Rd, Jan 8 – Mar 13

7 January 2016

Susan Cianciolo‘s new exhibition Though I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not Love, I am nothing ‘Corinthians’ is opening at LA’s 356 S. Mission Rd, opening January 8 and running to March 13.

Cianciolo is a New York-based artist and fashion designer who has collaborated with her grandmother and Chloë Sevigny and mixes together the aesthetics of ‘bespoke’, ‘ready to wear’ with DIY.

Last November the gallery space hosted a conversation screening of Cianciolo’s early films.

As a part of the upcoming show, the artist will be teaming up with Kiva Motnyk on January 9 to put on a quilting workshop taking from the former’s successful noughties cool-girl brand: “Run”. The title of the event is called RUN and they will be making small quilts.

See the 356 S. Mission Rd website for (limited) details.**

Susan Cianciolo, Fall, 2010. Courtesy the artist.
Susan Cianciolo, ‘Fall’ (2010). Courtesy the artist.
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Maggie Lee’s Mommy @ 356 S. Mission Rd, Nov 5

5 November 2015

Beta Pictures is presenting Maggie Lee‘s new film Mommy with a premiere at Los Angeles’ 356 S. Mission Rd on November 5.

The New York-based, Taiwanese-American artist has been engaged in an expanded form of diaristic documentation since her teenage years – bringing together photography, zines and films making.

Her artistic practice concerns documentation of both the self and ideologies of alternative culture and their overlaps, with Mommy being based on the director’s story of her mother, before and after her unexpected death, and the secret artefacts she discovers in its wake.

See the Facebook event page and Beta Picture’s news page for details.**

 

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The alternative art space of 57 Cell

27 March 2015

A publication but also a two-person exhibition, the Gregory Kalliche-curated 57 Cell features an artist’s work as consumed and produced across interfaces. Image is representation, whether on paper or in pixels, and constructions also exist off-screen. This is where 57 Cell’s fourth print issue, launched on January 23 at LA’s ROGERS gallery, aligns itself so comfortably with its two presentations –.dream without loneliness by London-based Cristine Brache and DEFEATURIZED SPECIMEN by LA-based Ian Page –as it blurs distinctions between platforms.

The artists take seven pages each in the 14-page publication of computer-generated images presented in print with two front covers and no back in an egalitarian exploration of bodies, reproduction and objects in circulation. Brache’s ‘EXIT WOUNDS’ features three pairs of women’s legs, cut off at the waist and lounging in a bright white showroom with laced and feminised furniture. Only the odd butterfly tattoo and wedged or heeled foot accessory is there to interrupt the untouched purity of a scene that’s lit by lights and plunged into pitch-black darkness. The work title references the electrified objectification of the ‘Erotic Doll‘ of online wholesaler aliexpress.com in an accompanying text that reads “…pleasure constantly, as long as the battery, giving her power of love…” and employs an aesthetic specific to the Chinese-owned factories selling simulated persons for sex through a website.

Cristine Brache, ‘PLEASE, ETC’ (2015). Courtesy 57 Cell.
Cristine Brache, ‘PLEASE, ETC’ (2015). Courtesy 57 Cell, New York.

Page, on the other hand, presents the objects used by humans to reproduce themselves in DEFEATURIZED SPECIMEN. Only the residue of their existence is present in the plastic vials of presumed semen, packed tightly in a makeshift cooling container that’s left open and exposed to the elements in stands made from polystyrene insulation with a picture of the Pink Panther and reading “ZERO OZONE DEPLETION”.  A zoom in on the detail of the installation, under a rusty corrugated roof with solar panels, shows a low plastic picnic table with empty acrylic test tubes and instructions on how to fertilise an egg in a picture of a pipette and diagram of a cervix. There’s an empty Quaker Quick Oats container with “$ to help with Electric Bill THX !” Sex here becomes either clinical or utilitarian reproductive process, as in the detail of a cubicle for presumed deposits resembling an outhouse and featuring a children’s drawing of a parental euphemism for procreation in ‘STORK DELIVERS BABY’.

Ian Page, ‘SILPHIUM COIN CALENDAR’ (2015). Courtesy 57 Cell.
Ian Page, ‘SILPHIUM COIN CALENDAR’ (2015). Courtesy 57 Cell, New York.

The materials listed under some of the works in Brache and Page’s respective catalogues present the animated images populating these computer-generated spaces as actual objects. They’re listed as “steel plastic lettering, LED lighting with power supply” for the depiction of the back of the chipboard backing of the well-lit facade of Brache’s ‘SIGNING THE BODY’.  A glowing pink and purple sign screams “HOW AWESOME” above “I was calling my own name”, that on closer inspection hangs near a “china paint on bone china” that looks like a dog bowl. The full installation view of Page’s ‘STRAW BALE SPERM BANK’ includes “stucco, cinder blocks, LED rope, freezer compressor kit, straw, wood, plastic, polystyrene, donated semen in acrylic vials” except that these are things presented only through an image. It’s here that 57 Cell blurs the distinction between what is considered real and ‘unreal’. Where -like in Brache’s recent series of advertisements for contemporary Holy Water brand ‘Hi Girls Sleep Outside™(images top right) –image begets life begets image begets art and so on. **

57 Cell is an alternative space directed, curated and digitally modelled by Gregory Kalliche. Issue #4 launched at LA’s Rogers gallery on January 23, 2015.

Header image: 57 Cell Issue #4 cover. Courtesy 57 Cell, New York.

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