Material Object
Charlie James Gallery is delighted to present Material Object, a group show curated by Justin Cole, featuring works by Phil Chang, York Chang, Justin Cole, Emilie Halpern, Soo Kim, Evan La Londe, and Gina Osterloh.
Material Object will examine palpable histories through materiality, process, research and/or traces and remnants of past events. The artwork provides a site for the accumulation of procedures to play out through process and materiality, allowing conceptual ideas to accumulate wear and tear through new permutations, essentially mining the work of art for untapped avenues of discourse, textuality, research and abstraction. The majority of the works comprising Material Object are concrete and assert their objectivity through their material, as a result the pictorial becomes more or less a byproduct of the production of the work.
Phil Chang received his MFA from The California Institute of the Arts and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has had solo exhibitions at LAXART and Pepin Moore. His work has been exhibited in group shows at Marlborough Chelsea, Renwick Gallery, and The Swiss Institute. His work has been written about in Artforum, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Artforum.com, and has appeared in Aperture, Blind Spot, and C-Photo. In 2010, Chang completed Four Over One, an artist’s publication that is published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Textfield, Inc. Chang’s curatorial projects have included Affective Turns?, a group exhibition that he organized in March 2012. He is currently visiting faculty in the Department of Art at UCLA and a lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design. Phil Chang lives and works in Los Angeles. Chang is represented by M+B.
York Chang (b. 1973, St. Louis, MO) is a conceptual artist and painter who manipulates the cultural projection of ideology, identity and political power. He explores the exhibition construct’s potential for literary fiction writing and turns forensic and archival information systems into supports for poetic gestures. Chang’s work often employs fiction and deception to blur conventional notions of authorship, appropriation, and credibility in cultural production. He earned both his BFA (1996) and Juris Doctorate (2001) from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Select exhibitions include Syrop & Chang at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery in conjunction with OCMA’s California-Pacific Triennial (2013), The Winners at Greene Exhibitions (2013), Antagonistics at Commonwealth & Council (2013), Second Life at 18th St. Art Center (2011); Ping Pong at Art 43, Basel, Switzerland (2012); The Workers at MASSMoCA (2011); Suelto at La Central Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia (2011); Open Daybook at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2011); ARCO Madrid with g727, Madrid, Spain (2010); ZOOM at the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2009); The Search for the Visceral Realists at the Federal Art Project, Los Angeles, CA (2009); Asian New Media, Center for Democracy at Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles CA (2008); Hard Left, at Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2008). York Chang was featured in a 2010 MOCA Panel on interdisciplinary arts with Lauren Bon and Jorge Pardo. He is a member of the Artist Pension Trust, a Creative Capital grant finalist, and a recipient of a 2011 Fellowship award at 18th Street Arts Center. His 18th Street Art Center exhibition Second Life was the subject of an August 2011 Los Angeles Times feature review. York Chang lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and is represented by Greene Exhibitions.
Emilie Halpern is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. She holds a BA from the University of California Los Angeles and MFA from Art Center College of Design. Halpern’s work has been exhibited widely including at Western Bridge, Seattle; Art Palace, Houston; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles; and Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson; Horton Gallery, New York; Leo Koenig, New York; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Galerie West, The Hague; and La Central, Bogota, among others.
Soo Kim studied at University of California, Riverside (BA), and California Institute of the Arts (MFA). Kim’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, at venues including The Getty Center, Los Angeles; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, California; Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange, California; Wallspace, New York; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California; and The National Center for the Arts (CENAR), San Salvador, El Salvador, among others. In addition, her work was included in the Gwangju Biennale (2002) and COLA Individual Artist Fellowship Award Exhibition (2011). Her work is included in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Gallery, and the Broad Foundation, among others. She is a Professor and Director of the Fine Arts Photography Program at Otis College of Art and Design. Kim lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Evan La Londe’s (MFA, Portland State University; BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art) work was recently included in Portland2014: A Biennial of Contemporary Art at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, Oregon, curated by Amanda Hunt; Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance, at Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland. His solo exhibitions include PDX Contemporary, Portland; White Gallery, Portland State University, Portland; Autzen Gallery, Portland State University and School 33 Gallery, Baltimore. He has has participated in group exhibitions including Smell the Bar Oil, w/PAINTALLICA, Rocksbox, Portland; The City and the City, LxWxH Gallery, Seattle; Terrain Shift, Works from the Miller Meigs Collection, lumber room, Portland; and Observer of Beautiful Forms, Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax. La Londe lives and works in Portland.
Gina Osterloh investigates operations of mimesis and perception, along with new ways of addressing identity through photography, video, and performance. Her photographs depict constructed life-size room environments activated through still performances, papier-mâché models and cardboard cutouts. Recent projects include the performance Prick, Prick, Prick – part of ongoing research examining call and response relationships between the body and the photographic frame, as well as repetition and rhythm produced by speech and actions. Osterloh’s documentary with New Vision, a blind massage therapist cooperative in Manila, Philippines, investigates perception and identity through the lens of blindness. Current and recent exhibitions include: This is Not America: Resistance, Protest and Poetics Arizona State University Museum; Demolition Women curated by Commonwealth & Council, Chapman University. Solo exhibitions include: Anonymous Front, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Group Dynamic and Improper Light Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions & Body Prop Silverlens, Manila. Reviews of her work include Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Art Monthly Australia, Art Forum, Art on Paper and Art Practical. Osterloh’s first monograph Group Dynamic is available through RAM publications, and is designed by Willem Henri Lucas. Gina Osterloh is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography and Integrated Media at Otterbein University. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in photography, interdisciplinary critique, performance, studio lighting, video art, and time-based media at the California State University of Fullerton, UC Irvine, the New York Film Academy, the University of Redlands, and the San Francisco Art Institute. At Otterbein University, she has developed the seminar for non-art majors: Representation and the Construction of the Image, which investigates the construction of race in the United States, western cultural connotation of light and dark, physical vision and perspective via the camera, in conjunction with hands-on studio projects including lighting for photography and the projection of self via the shadow. This past January 2014, Osterloh was invited to teach a practicum at the California Institute of the Arts, in the Department of Photography: Performance Before, Behind and With the Camera. She received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, 2007. Osterloh’s work is represented by François Ghebaly (Los Angeles) and Silverlens (Manila, Philippines).
Justin Cole is an artist and educator working in Los Angeles. He is an adjunct faculty member at Antioch University Los Angeles and a senior lecturer in Photography at Otis College of Art and Design. Cole received his MFA from UCLA and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Justin Cole has had two solo exhibitions at Pepin Moore. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Pepin Moore Gallery, Hayworth Gallery, bank, Co-Lab (Copenhagen), Robert Miller Gallery (NY), Centre pour l’Art et le Culture (France), Five Thirty Three, Actual Size, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, California State University Bakersfield, amongst others. He has been an artist in residence at MOCA (LA) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Justin was also a founding member of the artist group, OJO. OJO created projects for MOCA (LA), LACE (as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time), LAXART, the Studio Museum Harlem, Queens Nails Annex, ESL Projects, Consonni in Bilbao, Spain, amongst others. OJO has been featured in ANP Quarterly, LA Record, dublab, and LA Confidential Magazine. OJO is included in MOCA’s publication Engagement Party: Social Practice at MOCA 2008-2012, distributed by DAP.
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