Ruben Ochoa

"A Recurring Amalgamation"
Susanne Vielmetter Projects
September 8 - October 20
Los Angeles

Ochoa's distillation of the urban landscape and concomitant labor issues coincide with a smart reinterpretation of minimalist language which he lays bare, literally opening up our preconceived solid urban forms (concrete walls, curbs, barricades). Using a material language of pallets, rebar, and concrete, Ochoa brings even the walls of the gallery into question as he examines the relationship of its empty space to ideas of containment and molding, in the dual sense of building structures and forming identities. The "recurring amalgamation" of the title also suggests Ochoa's past interests and shows - the pesky, destructive urban ficus tree, breaking pavement and destroying well-painted curbs, has appeared before but seems to have reached an apotheosis in this version.--Carrie Paterson




Anthony Giocolea
"The Septemberists"
Sandroni Rey Gallery
September 15 - October 13
Los Angeles


This bizarre video filmed in black and white can best be described for the uninitiated as "Matthew Barney at prep school." It's a quiet and slow piece that involves a group of pretty (white) boys in a country setting engaged in ritualistic activities that are both about a coming of age and death. There are scenes of harvesting octopus ink as well, and spinning cotton, both of which seem to scream out for a some reading of race politics in the film (it supposedly takes place on a southern plantation). However, the gallery information/artist statement have completely repressed this idea. I am curious about that decision and the insistence instead that the work is based on Peter and the Wolf, itself a loaded fable about difference, monstrosity and masculinity.--Carrie Paterson


Michael Queenland
"The MORL or NYC-Apartment"
LAX><Art
September 15 - October 27
Los Angeles

Queenland reconstructs his railroad apartment from the Bronx as to imitate the Museum of Romantic Life, "a mansion in Paris that, since 1987, has housed the personal effects of the French novelist George Sand." As a kind of Wunderkammer, Queenland's construction questions the nature of the museological artifact and it's bestowed "significance" as well as the cultural histories and legacies of cultures and people not included in the cannon of Western museological history. As a funny, but quite relevant, aside the space is designed to be 100% functional, with bed, living room and kitchen, the result of which is that the gallery staff sometimes hold meetings at the dining table with important collectors or conduct other business within the installation as if from a home office. Even though they have other desks available. The press release states that "The MORL or NYC- Apartment becomes a seamlessly integrated space of performance and theatre," and as such one of its accidental implications is that the business of art easily occupies the sanctified and "romantic" space of art. When the artist isn't looking. Queenland's work, as interpreted by his own gallery, adds its own (accidental) layer and legacy to the conception of cultural history. No matter your race, color, creed, in this world art-is-life-is-business, in the end.--Carrie Paterson


Joel Tauber
"Sick Amour"

Public Art Project at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA
and various sites throughout greater Los Angeles
April 2007 - ongoing

The culmination of 2 years worth of negotiations and studies, this project tracks the life of one lonely sycamore tree embedded in the asphalt at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena. Tauber investigates the science, environment, hazards and plagues of the tree while hopelessly falling in love with it. He has managed to successfully germinate the tree (which it couldn't do for itself within its confines) and get a commitment from the bureaucracy of the city and stadium to protect the tree. The seedlings will be dispersed throughout greater Los Angeles with testimonial plaques from Tauber about his experience with the tree's beauty and blights. The smallness of Tauber's gesture to save one tree is coupled with an over-the-top sincerity; this becomes an intervention itself into the easy environmentalism of the Prius and fluorescent light bulb because of the impossible commitment it has demanded as well as the emotional toll of hope, hopelessness, longing and loss.

Tauber's 12-channel video installation "Sick Amour" was seen earlier this year at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.--Carrie Paterson



Chen Xiaoyun
"Faint"
MC Kunst
Los Angeles
May 26 to July 14, 2007


Well-known in Asia, this was Chen Xiaoyun's first solo exhibition in the US. Video and large scale photographs demand a reconsideration of the Asian and specifically Chinese male within the idea of a collectively organized body. His solitary and desperately sysiphusian gestures, within photographs videos, emphasize suffering and alienation. The backdrop to these performances is the machinistic state-of-mind that governs his wayward, tautological action. Showing within a North American cultural context, he seems to re-place our conceptions of the individual as one 'naturally' imbued with freedom. References from Asian horror cinema complete the dizzying effect of man trapped within the endless void of himself, an existential projection of interior minefields. -Carrie Paterson



Andrea Bowers
"The Weight of Relevance"
Susanne Vielmetter Projects
Los Angeles
May 5 - June 16, 2007


Bowers is of the few artists in LA blending art, activism, conceptualism and feminism consistently in a multi-media practice. Recent shows have focused on radical environmentalists, demonstrators using non-violence, and abortion activists. In this show she brings back "out of the closet" the AIDS quilt as a symbol of activist perseverance and public distress at the new face of the disease - women, and women of color particularly. This show is catalog, in the sense of practices like Fred Wilson's, one that emphasizes social justice and brings the invisible to light. Bowers selected a panel from the AIDS quilt to be exhibited in an adjoining room, testament to her larger project of using art to activate the language of the living memorial in specific, emotion-raising and unforgettable terms.-Carrie Paterson


Andrea Zittel
"Critical Space"
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
Los Angeles
March 4 - May 14, 2007


One of LA's highly acclaimed female artists gets her due, accompanying the Geffen's other summer show: the monster feminist art retrospective "WACK!" Zittel's work is most interesting because of its cross-over and idealism. She is an organizer, designer, artist and business woman with a mind for the new American utopia - small, efficient, compact - which extends the idea and the icon of the "American frontier" seemingly toward infinity. References to socialism develop as extensions from early European modernism, ie. Loos, Neutra, Bauhaus, etc.-Carrie Paterson