Just after returning to town from SF, I got a message from Alex Lilly. He was having an opening that night in LA and wanted to remind me, which is good, as I was too jet lagged and tired to otherwise remember where and who I was supposed to be.
I hadn’t been to Jancar before, either now or as a toddler year old when it was in it’s previous incarnation. I was really pleased to see a tight little space on the 13th floor of a Wilshire office building transformed into a venue for highly political art. Kudos to Tom Jancar for being willing to show Alex and Kim Hubbard’s works - I can’t imagine that he expects any great income from selling Alex’s portraits of burning military vehicles, nor from Kim’s pencil drawings of largely anonymous resistance figures. I ran into a whole bunch of South Bay folks at the opening, too - Ron Linden, Marie Thibault, Maggie Tennesen, Linda Day, which was cool.
The gallery itself is a tight space, and I didn’t want to ruin everyone’s evening by shooting a ton of photos. I really liked the layout, though, and it’s a surprisingly sympathetic space to showing art, largely because the tremendous sense of space created by the windows which overlook Los Angeles takes some of the edge off of the limited square footage.
Alex Lilly
Alex was in my Contemplating Apocalypse exhibition at the Brewery Project in September, and I’m eager to work with him again. He’s possibly the most dedicated political person I know, and his work reflects it clearly. He’s also a tremendously talented landscape artist, who’s work I see as a return to classic modes of study and observation. His work in this show was a series of highly glossed paintings of military vehicles on fire in locales such as Beirut, Grozny and Iraq. I think he sees these destroyed vehicles as symbols of people’s triumph over military oppression and domination. As someone who spends a lot of time reading about 4th generation and asymmetrical warfare, I’m moved by the tremendous history of the reversal of fortune of nation states that lies in the heart of each burning tank.
at top - Alex is shown with one of his recent political posters. Alex makes some of the most pointed and direct posters that I’ve ever seen, they have a quality that seems to reject wit in exchange for raw emotion and response.
above - Visiting with Alex at the show was also an opportunity to return his Contemplating Apocalypse work, three paintings on a much larger scale, which he’s transporting home by stuffing them into a big duffel. Carrying it off he looked like a real honest to god cat burglar, so I made him pose for this photo.
