Exhibition dates: April 15 – June 3, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 15 | 5:00PM – 7:00PM
The house is on fire.
tabernacle explores mobility, impermanence and collective action in a time of instability. Drawing from wandering domiciles, roaming connections, or places of worship which are adaptable, portable, and responsive to their environment, the included artists, Boz Deseo Garden, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), Andre Keichian and Miller Robinson, are each journey-based, nomadic makers of communal, public ceremonies, and contemplative, solitary rituals.
Like the turtle who carries her home on her own back, this is an unstable exhibition, offering a durational architecture through photography, sculpture, text and performance. tabernacle is as much about interiority as housing, inviting reconsideration of the structures which bind us, how we hold space for others, and the malleability of ideological and material containers.
A catalog accompanying the show will be released on May 27th, alongside a performance by Robinson and a reading by Garden. Other events to be announced soon.
tabernacle is organized by FOCA Curators Lab recipient Matthew Lax.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Boz Deseo Garden (they/them/it/its) is an artist and theorist whose practice works within the semiotic, cinematic, and psychoanalytical impasses articulated by Afropessimist thought. Their writing has been commissioned by Active Cultures, Cassandra Press, and the Hammer Museum. Their first solo exhibition, Does One Write About An Encounter With Nothin, opened at Jargon Projects (Chicago, IL) in August of 2022 and their forthcoming solo exhibition opens at Petrine, Paris (FR) in June of 2023. They are an MFA Candidate in New Genres at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a performance group of people who live and work in Skid Row. Established in 1985, LAPD is the first ongoing arts initiative on Skid Row, a non-profit arts organization that connects lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks, which express the realities, hopes, dreams and rights of people who live and work in L.A.’s Skid Row. LAPD has created projects with communities throughout the US and abroad.
Andre Keichian (he, his) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across photography, video and sculptural installations. Keichian’s work exists at the intersection of image, sound and movement conjuring fluid identities.His work has shown both nationally and internationally at spaces such as the Metropolitan Cultural Center (Ecuador), The Craft Contemporary Museum (Los Angeles), Zuckerman Museum of Art (Georgia), El Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (Buenos Aires), Museum of Contemporary Art Atlanta, and Anthology Film Archives (New York), among others. Keichian has completed various residencies, including The Echo Park Film Center, at land’s edge, The Camera Obscura and WonderRoot.
Miller Robinson (they/them/it/itself) is a two-spirit, transdisciplinary artist of Karuk, Yurok, and mixed European descent working and residing on unceded Tongva Territory (Los Angeles,CA). Tethered by sensibilities that prioritize collaboration, storytelling and the passage of non-linear timelines, themes of growth, transfiguration, temporality, and care are routine to their practice. Since receiving a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2014 they have exhibited in Los Angeles at the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Heritage Square Museum, with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and at HORSEANDPONY Fine Arts in Berlin amongst others. They are a recipient of the 2022 Los Angeles Artadia Award.
CURATOR BIO:
Matthew Lax is a filmmaker, artist and writer interested in collective work and alternative, nonlinear narratives. His films and video installations have been screened and exhibited at the Viennale (Austria), IHME Contemporary (Helsinki), table (Chicago), MIX New York, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), and Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), among others. Lax’s writing has appeared in print and online publications including MARCH Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, CARLA and ArtPractical. Previous curatorial projects have occurred at Anthology Film Archives with the Filmmaker’s Co-op and Human Resources Los Angeles.
