Commonwealth and Council: Adriana Ciudad, Veroniqu d’ Entremont and Guiyoung Hwang
July 14 – August 4, 2012
Reception: Saturday, July 14, 8 – 11 PM
Location: 3006 W 7th St #220 Los Angeles CA 90005
Open Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 noon – 6 PM
Commonwealth & Council presents three concurrent solo exhibitions by Adriana Ciudad, Véronique d’Entremont, and Guiyoung Hwang.
2012 DAAD Grantee, Adriana Ciudad, concludes her residency at CW&C with the exhibition, Cloudbusting. In this new installation and a group of drawings, the artist explores the expansion of painting to three dimensional form. The work of Adriana Ciudad explores urban space in relation to the unconscious mind. She uses in her installations, drawings and paintings, the human figure; juxtaposed with geometrical forms, symbols, and masks. She develops a multidimensional map of human experience.
Ciudad’s intention is to paint human beings in the city, as the iconic representation of a post cosmopolitan scene. No longer modern or postmodern, but advanced and contemporary, as she adds different layers of experience that are challenging reality. At the same time these layers displayed by Ciudad’s particular pictorial approximation to space – radical as in street art, sophisticated as fine drawing – captures new elements for painting, demystifying with her presence as a young painter the so called “End of painting.”
Adriana Ciudad’s new drawings and installation work is an aesthetic response of painting as a current medium in the context of contemporary art practices. Her work reshapes reality and perception through the performative aspects of her painting installations. The approach of the artist is contemporary also in theme, as the sites represented are iconic spaces where young people hang out. Ciudad likes to paint parties. It doesn’t matter if it is from the electronic music scene in germany or the peruvian folk dancing scene. A nihilistic space, but also a time to let go and embody the real self.
She is attracted most to urban pop centers where she is living as an artist. For example Hollywood Strip, Los Angeles, Alexanderplatz, Berlin, and Barranco, Lima. But Ciudad’s gaze goes beyond the great urban spaces, looking also for the marginal and massive folk events like the Candelaria Carnival in Puno, south of Peru, or the everyday life of the people of Iquitos, in the Amazon Jungle also in Peru. For the artist (who is half peruvian, half german) narratives of place and displacement are actualized through her own cosmopolitan experience as an artist in Peru, Berlin and now in Los Angeles.
[Adriana Ciudad’s text and exhibition curated by San Francisco Art Institute’s Fulbright Fellow, Carlos Garcia Montero (Lima, 1978).]
Adriana Ciudad (Lima, 1980) obtained her MFA in painting and her Fine Arts Degree at the University of Arts (UdK) in Berlin, where she studied with Valerie Favré and Wolfgang Petrick. Her work has been featured in many international shows and conferences, and she has collaborated with artists, curators musicians and filmmakers. Other accomplishments include scholarships and grants from the DAAD Germany and the Dorothea Konwiarz Sitifung Foundation.
Adriana Ciudad would like to thank Andrea Arce and Camilo Salazar for their collaboration with this exhibition.
In Mark the Unmarked, Guiyoung Hwang researches graffiti and graffiti removal program throughout Southern California. Equipped with a reflective vest and a paint roller, the artist “tags” around Los Angeles with marks that mirror the painted over minimalist afterimages by the Office of Community Beautification (OCB). The doubling of these marks through mimicry of OCB’s tactics of graffiti removal, highlights the ambiguous and socially constructed differentiation between vandalism and art.
Guiyoung Hwang was born in 1983 in Masan, South Korea and received her MFA from CalArts in 2012. Hwang’s practice consists of fieldwork (research) and performative interventions in urban landscape. Recording her activities through photographs, dialogical documents and videos, Hwang uses various forms of mimicry and erasure to address plasticity of subjectivity in-between the sectors of private and public in contemporary cityscape. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Seoul.
Exploring transitional phenomenon and Object relations theory, Véronique d’Entremont’s been through fire, is an object produced though a series of actions, some violent and some tender (i.e., binding, incinerating, cushioning and supporting). These actions conflate the physical necessities of the object with emotional needs. What remains visible in been through fire is an indexical trace of its former objecthood.
Veronique d’Entremont received her MFA from UCLA in 2012 and is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant. d’Entremont explores and invents alternative processes for working with materials, particularly those with the potentials for physical transformations, as allegories for social and psychological phenomena.
Commonwealth & Council
3006 W 7th St #220
Los Angeles CA 90005
213.703.9077
www.commonwealthandcouncil.com
