Tell Me a Story and I’ll Sing You a Song

PastExhibition

Mar 22

Tell Me a Story and I’ll Sing You a Song
Curated by Bianca Moran

April 6 - May 4, 2019

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Tell Me a Story And I’ll Sing You a Song, a group exhibition curated by Bianca Moran, with works by Yasmine Diaz, Ramiro Gomez, David Huffman, Dulce Soledad Ibarra, Vincent Miranda, Star Montana, Chinwe Okona, noé olivas, Umar Rashid and Savannah Wood.

This exhibition showcases a group of artists whose practices are invested in the exploration of narrative and the ways in which the personal intersects and complicates the historical record. Through painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, and installation, these artists explore the nuance and tension that exists between personal histories and dominant historical narratives. There is in each piece the element of juxtaposition that puts forth a reconsideration of context and content, material and meaning. As such, each work is a gesture towards the formation of a visual language that can be read as annotations to the histories that have been built around and through but not from.

Yasmine Diaz navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity using personal archives, found imagery and various media on paper. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the highlands of southern Yemen, her mixed media work often reflects personal histories of the opposing cultures she was raised within. She has exhibited and performed at spaces including the Brava Theater in San Francisco, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, Human Resources in Los Angeles and The Main Museum. Diaz is a 2019 California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellow and has works included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The University of California Los Angeles, and The Poetry Project Space in Berlin. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ramiro Gomez was born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents who have since become US citizens. His work has been exhibited at LACMA, the Denver Art Museum, the MFA Houston, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the Crocker Art Museum among many others. In 2016 Ramiro Gomez was the subject of a book by award-winning author Lawrence Weschler titled Domestic Scenes - The Art of Ramiro Gomez, published by Abrams Publishing. Gomez’s work has been reviewed and discussed in the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, CNN, National Public Radio, CARLA, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, the LA Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Hyperallergic, and others. His work is in the collections of LACMA, the Denver Art Museum, the MCA San Diego, the Crocker Art Museum, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, JP Morgan and Chase, and Chapman University’s Escalette Collection among others. Gomez is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and PPOW Gallery in New York. Gomez lives and works in West Hollywood, California.

David Huffman is an artist whose paintings are an amalgamation of the worlds of formal abstraction and social identity. He is often identified with the Afrofuturist movement. Huffman has been shown nationally and internationally at ICA, London; Iniva, London; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; YBCA, San Francisco; the San Jose Museum of Art; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Berkeley Art Museum; and the Oakland Museum of Art, among others. He is the recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, the Artadia Foundation Award, and the Barclay Simpson Award. Huffman's work has been reviewed and written about in the New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, Artforum, Art Papers, Flash Art, Art on Paper, Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the International Review of African American Art, NY Arts, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Art Journal. He is an associate professor of Painting, Drawing, and Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Dulce Soledad Ibarra is an multi-disciplinary artist, curator, designer and non-profit arts advocate with special interests in community and identity-emphasized arts and opportunity. As a practicing artist, Ibarra discusses issues of generational guilt, intersecting communities, language, and cultural identities in videos, installations, performances, and participatory work. Looking through queer Brown/Latinx/Xicanx perspective, the work is fueled by emotional labor, persynal research and analyzation. Ibarra is in the MFA program at Roski’s School of Art and Design at USC and has shown at institutes such as Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Angels Gate Cultural Center, and the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University.

Vincent Miranda is an interdisciplinary artist from South Florida, living and working in San Francisco, California. Using sculptural investigations, his work explores an upbringing in the Contemporary South, particularly one viewed through the lens of Southern Hip Hop. There is this ambiance that pervades the region; this sedated, slow moving feeling. From this position, he explores the idea of The Come Up, the allure of the drink Lean, and its drive to sonically transform the music and landscape. Employing methods of mold making, drywalling, and hyperreal pigmentation, Miranda creates a space in which you're presented with both hanging skins and sagging walls; everything is Leaning and in tune with that feeling of the South. He received his MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2019 and his BFA from Florida Atlantic University in 2014.

Star Montana is a photo-based artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, Ca. Star was born and raised in Boyle Heights, California. Boyle Heights is a predominately Mexican-American neighborhood in the East Los Angeles area which has been the backdrop to much of her work. Star’s imagery deals with her family fragmented narrative, social environment, and identity.

noé olivas is a Southern California-based artist. Through printing making, sculpture, and performance, he investigates the poetics of labor. He considers the relationship between labor as it fits into the conceptions of femininity and masculinity in order to play with and reshape cultural references, narratives, myths, traditions, and objects, ultimately employing a new meaning. olivas received his BA in Visual Arts from the University of San Diego in 2013 and is currently an MFA candidate at University of Southern California. He lives and works in South Central, Los Angeles, CA.

chinwe okona is a multidisciplinary artist and writer, living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her work investigates the palpability of sentiment, nostalgia, and forgiveness, and centers self-documentation as the implement of memory creation. Her writing has been published in The Nation, The Fader, and Leste Magazine. In 2016, she founded PALMSS Magazine, an annual anthology of creative people of color and their work.

Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers) first began this project in 2005. Rashid set out to create approximately 300 + years of alternate history spanning from 1642-1890. His narrative is based upon the supposition that after the English Civil War ended in 1642, France and England were merged into a global super empire known as Frengland. In addition to focusing on the day-to- day operations of empire, he also focuses heavily on the issues of race, gender, class, and power within it. And as a global narrative, Rashid is able to work in a wide range of styles, mediums, and formats, as he researches and explores the cultures of the world. This particular narrative is not only informed by the past but also reaches forward and draws inspiration from the present, notably urban, pop culture, hip hop, and gang culture. Upon relocating to Los Angeles in autumn of 2000, Rashid moved into East Los Angeles where he was able to syncretize my African-American upbringing in Chicago with that of the Chicano culture in his current location. Rashid currently creating a micro-narrative dealing with his reinterpretation of Latin America’s colonial past from Los Angeles to Lima, and beyond.

Savannah Wood is an artist with deep roots in Los Angeles, Pasadena and Baltimore. Since returning to L.A. in 2015 after three formative years in Chicago, she has been doing curatorial and communications work at Clockshop, a multidisciplinary arts organization based in Frogtown. Savannah is interested in uncovering obscured histories, tapping into ancestral magic and disrupting linear readings of time. She makes photographs, clothing and plant-based sculpture.

About the Curator:
Bianca Moran is an independent curator and educator based in Los Angeles. She is invested in developing a curatorial practice that is engaged with a culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy. Her research interests include history, decolonial futurity, race and ethnicity, identity politics, education and pedagogy, political theory, film and visual culture. She is interested in the reimagining of art history and the spaces where art resides. Bianca is currently pursuing an M.A. in Curatorial Practice in the Public Sphere at USC and holds an M.Ed. in Education from UCLA and a B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley. She was born in Los Angeles and raised between the Bay Area and LA. Bianca is also a single mother raising her daughter, Paloma.