Conduction

August 26, 2017 - October 27, 2017

970 North Broadway, Suite 208, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA) is a non-profit, independent and membership-based organization that supports contemporary art in California. Curators Lab Exhibition Program is supported by FOCA and awards grants to emerging curators for presenting current and relevant group exhibitions in our Chinatown office space.

In Conduction, the artworks exhibited – sculpture, photography, installation, drawing, painting, and video – employ performance as a part of the works’ formation. The artist’s engagement with social space, subjects, place, narrative, and fabricated events is embedded within the art object. While performance art might seem to emphasize the immaterial, the works featured in this exhibition do not reside solely in actions. Rather, they are realized into material forms that can exist independently through implied, recorded, or referenced activities.

Though dispersed across styles, methods, and intentions, these artists find common ground through their use of performative acts in the materialization and realization of the works they produce.

Artists

Deborah Aschheim	Deborah Aschheim invites participants to recall buildings from memory while drawing them like a police sketch artist. Drawings, excerpts from the participants’ interviews, and video recordings are exhibited along with a live performance of the drawing interviews.
Lynne Berman	Lynne Berman takes her Complaint Center boxes wherever she travels and solicits written complaints in plazas, train stations, malls, marketplaces etc…that she later transcribes into drawings.
Phyllis Green	Phyllis Green’s sculptures derive from a line in the Upanishards, “walking with wood on the head,” to approach a guru (teacher) on the first stage towards enlightenment. She crafts devices to assist in the walk that are both objects of contemplation and props for performing.
Delta Lamenta	Delta Lamenta (Lynne Berman and Eve Luckring) performs in public places using writing, drawing, and installation to respond directly to audience complaints. Participants unburden themselves and then participate in a transformational exchange that spans wonder, surprise, and delight.
Rachelle Rojany	Rachelle Rojany’s stack of rectangular slabs relies on the gallery worker to move pieces to the wall each time a visitor enters the space, the act behaving as a ticker-marker.
Julie Shafer	Julie Shafer’s photographs are portraits of landscapes formed over several days of submerging light sensitive paper in the bayous impacted by oil mining, contamination creating the image. Her short stories feature the psychological aspects of encounters that occur in the places she visits.
Alise Spinella	Alise Spinella's paintings are created in a meditative process using her body as an instrument to record sound through gesture. Her performance, in collaboration with sound artist Geneva Skeen, is a duet of live drawing and improvised sonic experience.
Liz Young	Liz Young’s installation, employing excerpts from literary sources that reference landscape and the human condition, uses sculptures as props for a multimedia performance evoking nature’s beauty and accompanying decay and loss.

Curated by

Lynne Berman

Lynne Berman, curator, is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Los Angeles working in drawing, performance and installation. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Orange County Museum of Art, Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Pomona College Museum of Art, Torrance Art Museum, Swiss Cultural Institute in Rome, and Tom Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles and was the recipient of a 2012 COLA award. She has curated and organized exhibitions including Lotus Motel, F.A.R. Bazaar, and Verbarian. Her work has been presented in museums and galleries as well non-traditional sites such as supermarkets, the Los Angeles riverbed, train stations, and public plazas.