The Cartographer
The Cartographer
Curated by Alise Spinella
July 26 - August 30, 2014
SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present The Cartographer, curated by Los Angeles-based artist Alise Spinella. Through a diverse selection of works in media ranging from painting to collage, this exhibition pursues an abstracted idea of mapping. Works by Charles Gaines, Steve Roden, Joshua Segura, Alise Spinella, Clarissa Tossin, Cody Trepte, and Samira Yamin extend the practice of researching, recording, and reading far beyond geography, offering translations of the personal, the political, and the passage of time. Moving systematically between physical and psychic registers, these maps succeed in charting an elusive territory. Cartography here is less the science of relating places to places, more a method for locating oneself within a vast subjective landscape.
Trepte’s gray, hazy print began as a connect-the-dots of a telephone; as with the eponymous word game, subsequent generations of the image have served to compound the remove between the original and its referent. Similarly, Yamin’s meticulous cut-paper collages register both the poignant distance of autobiographical images and the artist’s intricate attention to that distance. The marks Spinella makes on her porcelain-smooth surfaces are not only balancing acts of color and form, but evidence of a personal performance. Tossin’s used napkins contain the residue of shared meals, the impressions of many lips, and function as records of her friendships. Segura’s drawings of John Berger chart his viewing of the critic’s Ways of Seeing BBC special, but might also be seen to reveal an obsession with aesthetics, with the male figure, and with the gaze. Gaines continues to employ the tropes of objective systems such as mapping to bear witness to moments of deep political commitment. And Roden offers a conventional map of a river delta, yet overlays it with fragments of poetry which, like the meandering names of small towns, read in any order.
Charles Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles, and is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and Susanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects. Gaines will be the subject of a major exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem opening this summer, and in 2012, the Pomona College Museum of Art and Pitzer College in Claremont, California presented a survey of his work from 1975 – 2012. Among numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and world-wide, Gaines’ work was recently included in Blues for Smoke, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Human Nature, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; both exhibitions All of This and Nothing and Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the 2007 Venice Biennale, Italy. He is a 2013 recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Steve Roden is a Los Angeles-based visual and sound artist. In 2013, Roden had concurrent solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and CRG Gallery, New York, and was recently commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to create a series of soundtracks for the Hans Richter film Ghosts Before Breakfast. In the last two years, his work has been featured in the first Biennial of Contemporary Art in Cartageña, Columbia; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the exhibition Silence at the Menil Collection; and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2012 Roden had a solo exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and a mid-career survey of Roden’s work, curated by Howard Fox, was presented at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California in 2010. Other solo exhibitions include the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; the Henry Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, Greece; the Tang Museum at Skidmore College; and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara. Roden’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Mercosur Biennial in Porto Allegre, Brazil; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; the Sculpture Center, New York; the Centre George Pompidou Museum, Paris; and the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Roden has released over twenty albums of audio works on labels worldwide.
Joshua Segura is an artist, writer, and educator living in Los Angeles. He received a BA from the University of California San Diego in 2009, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011. His drawings, texts, and painted works explore vocabularies, codes, and meaning as phenomenon. His work has been featured on KCHUNG radio, published in Concord Press, and shown at PØST.
Alise Spinella received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, a BA in Psychology and Computer Science from the University of California at Los Angeles, and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her artwork has been shown nationally and internationally at venues such as EXIT Art Gallery, New York; Art Mûr Gallery, Montreal; The Drake Hotel, Toronto; La Jolla Projects, Chicago; Cottage Home Gallery, Los Angeles; Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Public Fiction, Los Angeles; and The Los Angeles Convention Center. Spinella was an Artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center in 2013, and is a 2014 Hemera Foundation Tending Space Fellow. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Clarissa Tossin received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2009) and BFA from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (2000). Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including most recently Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer Museum and Bringing the World into the World at The Queens Museum. Earlier this year, her work could be seen at Fundação Iberê Camargo, in Brazil, as part of the exhibition Liberdade em Movimento. Tossin has had solo exhibitions at Galeria Luisa Strina and Sicardi Gallery. She was a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from 2010 to 2012 and participated in the Artpace International Artitst-in-Residency curated by Hou Hanru in 2013. Recent awards include a California Community Foundation Fellowship (2014), an Artistic Innovation Grant (2012) from the Center for Cultural Innovation and a Videoarte Project Grant (2012) from Fundação Joaquim Nabuco. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Gulf Coast Journal, X-tra Magazine, among others.
Cody Trepte is a Los Angeles-based artist who works primarily in drawing, printmaking and photography. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including: Anna Meliksetian | MJ Briggs, Los Angeles; Thierry Goldberg, New York; Eleven Rivington, New York; Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Florence; Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles; Austin Museum of Art; Weatherspoon Art Museum; Kunstverein INGAN e.V., Berlin; and participated in Made in L.A. 2012 at the Hammer Museum. Trepte received a BFA from New York University in 2005 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2010 and is represented by Anna Meliksetian | MJ Briggs in Los Angeles.
Samira Yamin’s practice explores systems of knowledge production through systematic interventions at various points in the life of the photographic image. Using repetitive, precisely articulated gestures, Yamin dissects, reorganizes, and often obliterates documentary images, resulting in a collision of representation and abstraction and the confusion of objectivity and subjectivity. Yamin has had exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles and the Camera Club of New York and will be an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency in the fall. Yamin received dual BAs in studio art and sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Installation
