Made by Hand
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Made by Hand, a group show curated by Los Angeles-based artist Heather Brown. The show features work by Pamela Jorden, Benjamin Lord, Allison Miller, John Mills, and Torbjörn Vejvi.
Made by Hand features work that demonstrates process felt rather than process fetishized. The objects gathered for this show have been imagined and built, not fabricated.
The artists in Made By Hand share a common exploratory impulse of significant depth, and their practices tend to favor creative departures over arrivals at discrete outcomes. The work in this show offers the viewer no proof that a transformation has taken place, nor does it present any mechanical rationale(s) to justify its creation. In the end, each of the artists in Made by Hand has in some sense created their own domain governed by a logic of its own.
Pamela Jorden stretches upholstery fabric over shaped supports; she pours, splashes, and rubs layers of transparent color over the surfaces of her paintings. In addition to painterly marksmanship, her compositions reflect the influence of movement, duration, and the forces of nature.
Benjamin Lord’s work explores fictional, constructed worlds which run parallel to familiar reality. His drawings are a form of serious play, in which the structure-defining hand of the artist takes many adopted guises.
Allison Miller takes an idiosyncratic approach to pattern and decoration in paintings that simultaneously establish and deny illusionistic space.
John Mills paintings are both illustrative and esoteric, with layers of lyric activity submerged just under the surface. Modernist glyphs beg interpretation and agitate against the strategic negative space.
Torbjörn Vejvi’s sculptures are both remembered and created anew. Crafted with a well- worn sensitivity, they speak with tactile geometry of an internal world.
Pamela Jorden lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California (1996) and her BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1992). Jorden’s upcoming solo exhibition at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery (New York, NY) will coincide with the publication of her first monograph including paintings from 2004-2014 and an essay by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer. Other recent solo exhibitions include Monte Vista to Central at Romer Young Gallery (San Francisco, CA). Selected group exhibitions include NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today at the Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, Ohio); Alice Konitz, Pamela Jorden, Jeff Ono at Samuel Freeman Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Forms of Abstraction at the Irvine Fine Arts Center (Irvine, CA); The Working Title at the Bronx River Art Center (New York, NY); Themes and Variations at the Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA); and (Keep Feeling) Fascination: Recent Abstract Painting in Los Angeles, Luckman Gallery, California State University (Los Angeles, CA).
Benjamin Lord has been making sculptures, photographs, drawings, portfolios and books for nearly twenty years. His work summons themes of space and place, reality and realism, art and artifact, with a special interest in experimental narratives and the poetics of illusion. He received his MFA from UCLA in 2002. A solo exhibition titled The New Retail Mycology was held in February at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Walker Art Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Allison Miller lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from RISD and her MFA from UCLA. Miller is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery, New York and has had multiple solo exhibitions at ACME, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include the Pizzuti Collection’s exhibition Now-ism: Abstraction Today, the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2012, Painting in Place, curated by Shamim M. Momin, as well as exhibitions at GAVLAK, Los Angeles, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria, Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe, New York, and Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, among others. Her work has been reviewed and/or written about in frieze, Artforum, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Hyperallergic and the Los Angeles Times and was included in Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting, by Bob Nickas. Miller was most recently awarded the 2014 SFAI Diebenkorn Fellowship.
John Mills was born in the UK in 1971 and emigrated to the US in 1977. He holds an MFA in painting and drawing from the California College of the Arts and a BFA from the University of Florida. Mills has exhibited his work nationally and internationally including exhibitions in Los Angeles, the SF Bay Area, NYC, and London. He is represented by Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles, where he recently had solo exhibitions at the gallery in June 2014 and Pulse Art Fair Miami Beach in December. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Torbjörn Vejvi was born in Vätjö, Sweden, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Malmö Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden and the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. Recent exhibitions include The object without is the object within, Glendale Community College Art Gallery, Glendale, CA; Prince at the Forum, Beacon Arts Building and Group Show, Las Cienegas Projects, both in Los Angeles; and Bullet Train, The Luggage Store, San Francisco.
About the Curator: Heather Brown received her MFA from UCLA in 2002 and a BA from UCSB in 1999. Brownʼs solo exhibitions include “Ruins” (Carter & Citizen),“Thank You For Your Childhood” (Parker Jones, Los Angeles), “Drawings” (Parker Jones, Los Angeles), and “Heather Brown: New Paintings” (Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles). Her work has been seen in group exhibitions at venues such at Weekend, (Los Angeles), Five Thirty Three (Los Angeles), Black Dragon Society (Los Angeles), Honor Fraser Gallery (Los Angeles) and Angles Gallery (Los Angeles) among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
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