marshallastor.com

So you can see some of my work on La Brea right now. Earlier this year I was asked to write curatorial text, contextualizing the Boneyards project, a partnership between LA-based streetwear company Stüssy and Japan based brand Neighborhood. Other than the concept that my writing would appear in a newspaper-like publication cataloging the collection, I really had no idea what was going to be done with it. So after a lot of writing and revisions and a very cool day tagging along and shadowing a pile of interviews with the various tattoo artists who did designs for the collection, there was a launch party Friday night, where I was pleasantly surprised that not only was my text really amazingly incorporated into the newspaper, but that a huge chunk of it was transcribed in gangster style text on the entire frontage of the building (at top). The building is at 144 La Brea, directly adjacent to Fahey/Klein.

above - Smoky party interior. Black and white was the theme. Off to the right there were carnival games and prizes, lots of fake gross body parts.

above - Spiked and slightly deformed hot dogs, part of the whole free carnival chow action. There’s something a little disturbing about the way they plump and swell, isn’t there.

For those into more party shots, Quality Control posted a stack over at Hypebeast.

Technorati Tags: Boneyards, Stussy, Neighborhood, graffiti, text, launch party, stripes, hot dogs

For those not in the loop on her work, Jocelyn Foye captures the performances and actions, primarily by athletes, in clay and then uses those imprints to make sculptural works. Live performances/actions or photographic documentation of performances often accompanies the work. I’ve been working with Jocelyn for a while now, and commissioning, promoting or exhibiting her projects whenever possible. Jocelyn has work in New In Town?, a show opening next week at Angels Gate, which will feature a dozen of the artists who have joined the Center in the past two years. While Jocelyn and her husband Jeff are no longer at the Center, having secured a truly awesome live/work space in Pedro, both of their work will be featured in the exhibition.

Jocelyn has two pieces in the exhibition, one, a cast urethane rubber saddle, …and she rode it bareback., and another, a wall piece based upon the impressions and impacts of two members of the LA Derby Dolls, a banked-track roller derby association based out of a warehouse in Historic Filipinotown. I grew up watching the televised pro-wrestlingish version of roller derby, so I have a sort of childhood fascination with the sport, and I’m totally enthused that I’m going to be able to bring something related to it into my gallery.

Jocelyn invited me to stroll over to her studio to see and shoot the performance part of the project, which is where all of teh photos in this post are from. The two models for this shoot are Diana Brooks, a.k.a. Thunder Kiss and Kelly MacIntosh, a.k.a. Smacdown. Diana is in the pink helmet and Kelly is in the white one. Also featured in this shoot are Jocelyn herself, also shooting (seen at top), and Colin, one of her students who came by to help prepare the clay surface for the action. All 54 of my “good photos” from the shoot are in this Flickr set, if you want or need to see more than those featured here.

above - Colin smooths clay. Colin was extremely thorough and helpful in making sure that the surface was as smooth as possible. He had to catch a plane back to the UK the next day, which made him a double trooper for pitching in.

above - Diana and Kelly check out the surface. A lot of “How are we going to hit this? How hard can we hit this? Where should we hit this?” talk went on prior to the actual performance. One of the reasons I like Jocelyn’s work is that it involves non-artists in the creative process, that during her performances there’s a fascinating interaction between laypeople and art materials. In the two performances I’ve directly witnessed, there’s a period of cautious action and exploration, followed by enthusiastic engrossment in the action on the part of the performers.

above - Diana changes her wheels. I will admit here, I used to be an enthusiastic downhill rolllerblader (stop laughing now, please?), having basically grown up on a massive hill, where everything worth doing was down and miles away. So I totally get the importance of having the proper wheels for the job. The massive size of her skate key/multi-tool was totally impressive.

above - All dressed up and ready to go. Wardrobe is important for proper roller derby action. Both girls brought a mountain of getups. Roller derby is a little more honest and embracing about spectacle and theatre than most other sports.

above - Diana slides into the panel. The panel behind the clay was rather thin, so the whole time both women were trying to give it their all, but a little nervous that they’d blow out the panel. It buckled a little bit, but held up.

above - Kelly in flight, kicking the panel.

above - Diana grabs the top of the panel and slams into it high. The girls were trying to figure out novel ways to do damage to the top part of the panel.

above - Kelly doing a handstand reverse kick. It’s worth noting that she didn’t just do a handstand and kick the panel, she did a high speed approach into a handstand and kicked the panel.

above - Diana knees the panel. You can see a little of the bucking done by some heavy impact in the center of the panel here. One of the things about Jocelyn’s work that particularly fascinates me is the regularity and pattern of movement by the performers.

above - an amped up Kelly, post performance, with clay mess on helmet.

above - After the destruction was done, the derby queens pose for a post-performance photo. Come see the piece that results from all this fury and mess next week at Angels Gate, and don’t miss the massive two day Battle on the Bank tournament coming up next weekend. Roller derby teams from all over are coming together to battle it out in the blazing heat of the LA summer on the 28th & 29th.

Technorati Tags: LA Derby Dolls, Jocelyn Foye, art, process, performance, clay, sculpture, Smacdown, Thunder Kiss, roller derby, Kelly MacIntosh, Diana Brooks, LA art, documentation is everything, documentation, roller skating, skating

I guess I’m the curator for this project, I hadn’t really thought of it that way until today, but I’ve spent the past six months gnawing at my Executive Director’s heels for funding to buy a case of the discontinued Polaroid Type 55 instant 4″x5″ film that makes this project possible, so I guess I’m wearing that hat. But it’s really all about having an excuse to have Slobodan shoot the artists that make everything we do at the Center possible, and to document them as workers.

That’s CalArts student Lindsay Foster up top and Professor Allan Sekula below. The other six portraits can be seen over at the Angels Gate blog, and the entire series of 42 (so far!) can be seen in the project’s Flickr pool.

Technorati Tags: Slobodan Dimitrov, 4×5, Polaroid, Polaroid 55, Lindsay Foster, Allan Sekula, portraits, artists, Angels Gate Cultural Center, AGCC, portraiture

I’m busily getting a show ready at Angels Gate, Too Busy For Love, and I’m Too Busy to Post about non-AGCC stuff, so I’m cross-posting these images, since I like them so much, especially the blue on red image with Matthew working on his knees.   Show opens Sunday at 2PM -I’m really, really happy with it.  Come on down.

Still too busy handling last minute details, but working with Matthew on Too Busy For Love has been a really energizing experience.  With every step taken towards the completion of the exhibition, it feels more and more right.  I see his work all the time in the studio, but I’ve never seen so much of it all at once.  It’s definitely giving me a new perspective and a deeper appreciation of the level of his craftsmanship.

Above - Matthew untangling the coloured strings that come off of one of his larger pieces.  I just love the deliberate contrast of the red work on the blue wall.

Above - Matthew placing an element of one of his pieces.  Red walls in a gallery are a no-no, and this is red work on a red wall, a double no-no.  And it works.  The whole room just glows because of all of that bright orangey-red paint.

Too Busy For Love opens Sunday at 2PM, but attendees of tomorrow’s play reading in Gallery A will get to see a bit of a sneak peek…

Technorati Tags: Matthew Thomas, artist, art, solo show, Too Busy For Love, paintings, red, AGCC, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Angels Gate

I’ve gone and uploaded medium resolution versions of all of the punk flyers that I have on file from when I curated History of San Pedro Punk.  I was doing some archiving, making sure that all of my stuff was in one place, and I figured it was pretty easy to just upload them all to Flickr, as well.  Each one is titled and dated as best as is possible.  There’s a pretty good chronology of 25 years of punk activity there.  There are flyers designed by Raymond Pettibon, Scott Aicher, Aaron White, Chet Zar, Craig Ibarra, Victor Gastelum, Brad Frost and a host of unknowns.

Here’s the link to the whole set.  Enjoy.

Every one of these flyers is either from a show that took place in San Pedro, or a show involving a Pedro based band outside of Pedro.  The earliest one is probably this Reactionaries, Suburban Lawns and Alley Cats flyer, and the newest one might be this Toys That Kill flyer from a show at The Smell (warning - Flash site).  There are also some other fun things in there, like a scan of a News-Pilot article on the 1984 San Pedro High School controversy surrounding Pat Wilder’s mohawk (Page 1, Page 2), and George Hurley’s fIREHOSE baseball card/tour schedule (Side 1, Side 2).

I was lucky that when I was getting ready for the exhibition I had a really great intern who did a decent job scanning most of these files, as well as meticulously color matching original flyers to the duplicates that we used in the exhibition.  So Celina, big thanks for the scanning and all the copying.  And big thanks to Craig Ibarra for being the source of so many of the flyers - he designed a ton of the flyers in this set.

I may have a backup of many of the flyers not uploaded, so if I turn that up, I’ll make a date with the scanner and bake up some more. 

Oh, and for those in LA Saturday night, there’s a show at LA Conga in Pedro - it never stops, here punk is alive and well.  Underground Railroad to Candyland, 400 Blows, Saccharine Trust, Dios Malos and Mike Watt + The Missingmen.  465 West 7th Street, San Pedro, CA 90731 - 18 and up $5.00.  It’s also the release party for The Rise and The Fall Issue 11 (put out by the untiring Craig Ibarra).

at top: possibly my favourite flyer from the whole set.  A Scott Aicher drawn flyer for DOS, one of my favourite bands of all time, a bass duo of just Minuteman Mike Watt and Kira Roessler of Black Flag.  I just love the big beaming smiles and the corny drawings as letters.  Scott has a real eye for attention to detail that comes through in every flyer he’s drawn over the years.

Technorati Tags: punk, punk rock, flyers, punk flyers, San Pedro, History of San Pedro Punk, Chet Zar, Aaron White, Scott Aicher, Victor Gastelum, Raymond Pettibon, fIREHOSE, Reactionaries, Toys that Kill, La Conga, San Pedro, punk history, art, flyer art

I’m cross-posting this from the AGCC blog. I’m going to bed tonight an especially happy little curator, looking very much forward to two shows that I’m obscenely proud of.

We finished hanging Benicia Gantner & Kim Schoenstadt today, and I’m in a deep state of curatorial satisfaction.  When you bring together two artists, who don’t know one another, who live in different cities, on the premise that there’s the potential for a real and meaningful conversation between their work, you entertain a potential for failure, or less catastrophically, disappointment.  Even more so when the key works in the exhibition are new and site specific.  You literally don’t know what you’re going to get.  So entering the gallery this morning, and seeing Benicia’s completed vinyl wall drawings, a wave of pleasure passed over me.  It works.  Everything just looks so good together.

Seeing Benicia and Kim’s works together, I’m unable to stop finding commonalities and meaningful contrasts.  Kim’s work is starkly archiectural, composed of shapes and elements either wholly man-made or mediated by human action. Even the plants are mediated and controlled, the flora of landscaping, divorced from any wild natures. Her whole contribution to the exhibition a room-scale, site-specific work (seen below), which surrounds and focuses the viewer.

In contrast, Benicia’s contribution to the exhibition is a pair of site-specific vinyl on wall pieces and 13 vinyl on panel pieces. They explode with the chaos of nature, biomorphic shapes roiling and flowing together, the horizon lines and the composition of landscape suggests the fantasy of worldbuilding.  There is a sense of out-of-control growth and expansion in her works, of a world unmediated by the ordering of human action that Kim’s work so bluntly portrays.

I could go on, and I probably will later, but I’m really excited to see the viewer reaction when the show is opened to the public tomorrow (Opening at 2PM, Saturday, November 17).  Also opening is Printmaker in Residence: Dirk Hagner.  Dirk’s woodcut portraits are masterful, and I feel that their focus on figure is an excellent paring to Benicia and Kim’s work.

Above - Restoration Selections (East, West, South), by Kim Schoenstadt.

Above - Hyperblossom.1, by Benicia Gantner.

Again, I’m on the move, but I wanted to make mention here that I have two openings at Angels Gate on Saturday at 2 PM.

Benicia Gantner & Kim Schoenstadt is coming along in an awesome way.  Kim’s work (seen above, in progress) is finished and everyone’s talking about it.  I’m really glad that I finally got to work with her.  Benicia arrived at the gallery yesterday, and the work is laid out and ready to be hung tomorrow.  Benicia started working on her vinyl-based wall drawings, and I know that tomorrow morning, when I return to my office at the Center, I’m going to be blown away by what is emerging.  Provided I can get everything hung and done in time, I’m going to be one happy curator.

Printmaker in Residence: Dirk Hagner is the first exhibition in our Downstairs Gallery, focusing on one of our new printmaking residencies.  I fell in love with Dirk’s woodcut portraits the minute he brought them into my office, and I had to have him work at the Center.  These are great big woodcuts, and Dirk has a hand and a talent that imbues the linework with real feeling, capturing the nature of the subject.  To see what I mean, check out the link to Dirk’s website.  He really has a talent for capturing the intensity of his subjects.

Technorati Tags: AGCC, Angels Gate, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Dirk Hagner, Kim Schoenstadt, Benicia Gantner, art, art opening, art exhibtion, installation, site specific, printmaking, woodcut, Cesar Chavez

I’m cross-posting this from the AGCC blog - I’m really, really pleased to be showing both Benicia Gantner and Kim Schoenstadt.  It’s gonna be a great show, that I’m installing at the same time that I’m installing Edith’s show.  $20 bucks says I relapse into my espresso habit before the end of next week.

Yesterday the interesting (as in non-spackling and painting) work began for our upcoming show, Benicia Gantner & Kim Schoenstadt, began.  Kim, fresh from installing at the MCA in Chicago, made her way over to Angels Gate to draw the outlines for her wall pieces for the show.  Her contribution to the show is a single piece, consisting of three site-specific wall paintings/drawings, each using the same series of source images.  Enough with the jabber, on to the photos.

Above - The overlays in action.  That’s Kim’s giant, shadowy hand in the upper corner.

Above - Kim working that tool of tools, the overhead projector.  I think that our grade school experiences give some of us artists a fetish for these things.

Technorati Tags: Kim Schoenstadt, projection, overlays, Benicia Gantner & Kim Schoenstadt, MCA, Angels Gate, AGCC, Gallery A, installation art, art installation, artist