Solo Solo

26 September - 1 November 2008

Private View(s):
Thursday 25 September 18.00-20.00 in LONDON
Saturday 27 September 7-9pm in LOS ANGELES*
*MANDRAKE BAR - 9:30pm / Screening of D.A. Pennebaker’s film, MONTEREY POP - 10pm

CRISP LONDON LOS ANGELES presents Solo Solo: one curator selects one artwork to constitute the entire exhibition. For the third installment of the exhibition series, Jenée Misraje, Hammer Museum, selects Joe Sola’s Male Fashion Models Make Conceptual Art (2005-2008) for London. Natilee Harren, UCLA doctoral student, selects Vincent Ramos’s Motown Took Us There and Motown Brought Us Back (2005-2008) for Los Angeles.

Interviews and texts to accompany both exhibitions:

CLICK HERE for exhibition catalogue/London

CLICK HERE for exhibition catalogue/Los Angeles

Solo Solo (LONDON): Under the gaze of an audience, four shirtless, professional male models will create works of art, following the artist’s simple guidelines to use all of the materials provided and remain on a platform during the course of the opening. The results of the models’ creative output that evening will be left in the space. Recalling the traditional role between male artist and female model, Sola allows for a role reversal, wherein the models are not simply hyper-masculine, erotic subjects, but the actual producers of a new installation.

Joe Sola’s previous projects include solo shows at P/M Gallery in Toronto and Bucket Rider Gallery in Chicago. His work has been included in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2003), Gimme Shelter at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2002), Taking A Bullet at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles (2005), Reckless Behavior at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2006), Dark Mirror: Artists Videos at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008). Sola’s work will be included in the upcoming exhibition Hard Targets at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, concurrent with Solo Solo in London. This exhibition will then grow, adding other artists (Mathew Barney, Paul Pfeiffer, Richard Prince) and traveling to museums for several years through the iCI.

Jenée Misraje is based in Los Angeles and on the curatorial staff at the Hammer Museum as Exhibition Coordinator. Past projects include: The End of the End of the Line at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis with Joseph del Pesco (2003) and Art and The Afterall Effect at Playspace Gallery, San Francisco with Meredith Goldsmith (2004). She has managed numerous land and site-related works, including San Francisco-based New Langton Arts Terrain Terroir and projects by artists Christoph Büchel, Edgar Arceneaux, and Charles Gaines. Recent and forthcoming projects include an exhibition of the work of Erlea Maneros for the Fellows of Contemporary Art’s Curatorial Laboratory project and Reclaiming: Inter-generations with Renée Fox and Kate Harding at 625 Carondelet for Otis College of Art’s Homecoming programme this fall.

LONDON:

Installation view, ground level, September 2008

Installation view (detail), ground level, September 2008

Private View / London, September 2008

Solo Solo (LOS ANGELES): For this version of the installation, Ramos will fill the gallery from floor to ceiling with sandbags. Beginning before the exhibition opens and continuing until the gallery is impenetrable or the artist becomes insurmountably fatigued. Accompanying the installation will be a series of collages, preparatory drawings, and a soundtrack of hundreds of songs remembered by the men who served in Vietnam with Ramos’s uncle, Forrest Lee Ramos, killed in combat on June 19, 1967 before the artist was born. Placed in the bunker-like space of the Los Angeles gallery, Ramos’s sandbag structure also references the important June 1967 issue of Artforum, in which a number of landmark essays on Minimalism appeared, including Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.”

Vincent Ramos lives and works in Venice, California and received an MFA from CalArts in 2007. His work has appeared in Los Angeles at Sixteen:One, 4 F Gallery, and the Mini Wrong Gallery at LA><ART; in New York at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise at Passerby; and in London at the Bart Wells Institute. Earlier iterations of the current project appeared in 2007 at the CalArts Lime Gallery and the CalArts MFA Group Exhibition.

Natilee Harren is a doctoral student in modern and contemporary art history and critical theory at UCLA, working toward a dissertation that will present a new theoretical model for Fluxus. In 2007, she organized DRIP EVENT (for George Brecht), an evening of Fluxus event score performances at PawnShop in Los Angeles. Harren’s writing has appeared in Modern Painters, ArtUS, Athanor, and PART.

LOS ANGELES: