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The Useful and the Decorative
July 14 - September 2, 2017
Featuring work by:
Don Edler, Ryan Fenchel, Gabrielle Garland, Alexandra Hedison, Garry Knox Bennett, Myrton Purkiss and John Zane Zappas
SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 4:00PM
Artist Walkthrough with
Don Edler
Ryan Fenchel
& John Zane Zappas
Please join us for a walkthrough with three of the artists included in The Useful and the Decorative.
Don Edler
Don Edler was born in 1988 in Bremen, Germany. Edler works predominantly in sculpture and video. His work deals with the semiotic relationships between images, objects and their evolving meaning relative to contemporary language and history. Edler received his MFA from New York University and his BFA from the University of Florida, Gainesville. Edler recently mounted his first solo museum exhibition at the San Diego Art Institute and has shown works with Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles and BBQLA, Los Angeles. He is the founder of ELEVATOR MONDAYS a social exhibition space built inside a converted freight elevator in his studio. Edler lives and works in Los Angeles.
Ryan Fenchel
Prior to moving to Los Angeles in 2011, Ryan Fenchel lived all his life in the Midwest. Growing up in Chicago, he moved to Kansas City for college. In 2005 he attended Northwestern University's Art Theory & Practice program. At Northwestern, Fenchel made work in a variety of mediums focusing on occult/ancient cultures and their parallels with modern cultures (hip hop and Nintendo). As the work evolved, the contemporary cultural elements faded into art historical references coupled with the occult themes. In 2005, Fenchel began taking annual trips to Japan. These trips - and a continued interest in the occult - have formed the aesthetics of Fenchel's visual decision making. Over the years works have moved from visually dark collage and drawings using ink and charcoal to bold colorful paintings using chalk pastels and oil sticks.
John Zane Zappas
John Zane Zappas was born in Torrance, CA in 1985, he currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Zappas makes practical sculptures that exist in the fuzzy terrain between Ikea, your favorite rock, and a Shaker chair. With sections cast, carved from found wood or charred to an intense carbon black, the hooks, stools and ashtrays are accommodating in their suggested functionality and resolute in their visual form. His current oil stick drawings offer another vantage point - aimed at a plurality of spatial and extra-linguistic readings, the black line serves as a lyrical record of a discrete bodily impulse. Zappas received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2012 and has attended residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. His work has been exhibited at BBQLA, Interface (Oakland), hotel-art.us, Vacancy (Los Angeles), Arturo Bandini (Los Angeles), Bb (Baltimore), Grin (Providence), City Limits (Oakland), Primetime (Brooklyn), and Good Weather (Little Rock).