In Former Times

Installations In Former Times exhibition announcement In Former Times Press Release

In Former Times

July 12, 2012

7-10pm

PØST - KAMIKAZE

1904 East Seventh Place

Los Angeles, CA 900212

In Former Times

You woke up at 5:15 am.

You said you loved me.

You built an empire.

You designed clothes for miners.

You made a work out of felt.

You were the head of the family.

You were printed on a page to illustrate a story about global warming.

We said Neanderthal when we meant stupid.

We thought we were the most advanced.

We believed that we lived in the Garden.

We needed you to be happy.

We wrote that knowledge was power.

We fought to be recognized in the grand historical narrative.

I would have cried myself to sleep.

I would not have voted for you.

I thought you were a God and kissed your golden lips after kneeling at your altar.

I trained your tendrils to cover the iron bars of her gate.

I saw you sitting on a dusty shop window in Vienna.

We thought we knew one another.

In Former Times brings together the work of four artists who invoke the past either through the use of materials or by referring to history. Kaucyila Brooke shows a selection from her recent body of work “After Morandi and after GLH”, which emulates the vase paintings of Giorgio Morandi and pays homage to GLH the initials of the artist’s father who had recently passed away. Showcasing vases from the artist’s collection the series recalls public and private moments of an “after“, that essential latency of all photography. Young Chung offers de-categorized rearrangements of Robert Mapplethorpe’s decorum edited and reproduced in his exhibition catalog published by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. Chung’s composite cutouts of Mapplethorpe’s bodies of flowers, nudes, and black and white portraits, pay tribute to the late artist’s re-synthesis of classical forms inflected with codes of difference. Margaret Honda will include “Frontal Views of Four Circumferential Volumes Clad in Color-aid Papers (actual size)”, a new series of black and white photographs of paper sculptures, and “Model for Carved Built-up Shelf”, a foam mock-up for a bronze sculpture. Each photograph is a monochromatic, single-sided view of a polychromed solid, a reduced aspect of the subject as it already exists. The foam mock-up is an object that will dissipate during the production of its soon-to-be successor. Johannes Schweiger will put a site specific arrangement of film, textile and prints of the project “industrial permanence: basic tissues 2, white line, fake”, recently shown at the MUMOK Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, on display.

Kaucyila Brooke is an artist based in Los Angeles and a member of the faculty at CalArts. Her recent retrospective at the Badischer Kunstverein in Germany was entitled "Do You Want Me To Draw You A Diagram?" and was the first comprehensive show of her work in Europe. Young Chung is an artist, independent curator, and exhibition coordinator at Commonwealth & Council, an artist-run space situated in Koreatown. Chung received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA from University of California, Irvine. Margaret Honda has exhibited her work at CA2M, Madrid as part of Picnic Sessions; the Drawing Center, New York; Estacion Tijuana, Mexico; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; LACMA; MOCA; and as part of the Resonance Open, broadcast from Raven Row, London.

Johannes Schweiger continuously examines particular “surfaces” and explores their materiality, their characteristics and configuration and transfers them into specific contexts. Thereby the central question is how public, social and political space manifests itself in different materialities. Johannes Schweiger is currently taking a 6 month residency at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture Los Angeles.