Ten to Watch

BY LEILANI MARIE LABONG

ten

TO WATCH

Our Panelists Franklin Sirmans, Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, LACMA

We asked the top art curators in the state to help us pick the 10 California artists who are on the rise.

Jens Hoffmann, Director, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts Rebecca Morse, Assocciate Curator, MOCA, Los Angeles Jill Dawsey, Associate Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Eli Ridgway, Owner, Eli Ridgway Gallery

TONY BYRD

Craig Nelson, Director of Fine Art Painting, Academy of Art University

For a gallery of works from the artists, go to californiahomedesign.com/10toWatchArt

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LARGER THAN LIFE Matt Lipps, San Francisco

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SOUTHERN CROSS

TONY BYRD

Nikki Pressley, Los Angeles

AUBRIE PICK

Artist Matt Lipps’ edgy photosculptural remixes originate in an analogy first articulated by the late French literary theorist Roland Barthes. “Basically, every photograph is a moment in time to which we can never return,” explains Lipps, 36, who is also an assistant art professor at San Francisco State University. “This helps me understand what it means to encounter and be with a photograph.” Arguably, Lipps’ theatrical mash-ups of stand-up cutouts, made from images gathered from old magazines and books (“I dislocate parts and figures from an original context, and bring them into play with parts of other photographs,” he explains), actually challenge this notion of death by snapshot. The dioramas, which explore everything from art history (“HORIZON/S” series) to sexuality and identity issues (“70s”), comprise forgotten images that have been resurrected into three-dimensional contexts, complete with dramatic lighting. The mind bender continues: For the final product, the artist photographs the scenes, returning the tableaux to their flat, but newly meaningful, existence. Lipps will be featured in an exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery next month.

As a freelance designer, South Carolina native Nikki Pressley, 29, naturally integrates typography into her art, which explores the history, memory and language of her cultural surroundings. The Los Angeles resident’s piece for the 2010 California Biennial, Word, is a double-sided work on paper that embodies the plights of West African slaves who were brought to South Carolina centuries ago. On one side of the piece is a graphite depiction of a New Testament passage that’s been translated into the Gullah dialect, spoken in the coastal South—this perspective represents Christianity, which was adopted by many slaves once they arrived in America. A West African nature fable, embossed on the opposite face, symbolizes the slaves’ devotion to their indigenous roots. The result is as much a culture clash as it is a fusion. A group show that will exhibit Word is in the works for later this spring at the California African American Museum in LA. “The piece represents a space of tormented consciousness and linguistic complexity,” says Pressley.

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CHAOS THEORY Will Rogan, Albany “Art is like a game in which you get to make up all the rules as you go,” says Will Rogan, 2002 recipient of SFMOMA’s prestigious Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award (SECA). This inspired rubric stems from the East Bay resident’s pastime of choice, skateboarding. “It’s about trying to make sense of, and navigate, a fixed landscape,” says Rogan, 36. His 2001 video piece, One Thing I Can Tell You Is You’ve Got to Be Free, examines this notion by capturing 20 serendipitous moments—a flying paper airplane gets lodged in a keyhole, a ball bounces into a coffee cup—in an effort to remind viewers that strokes of luck aren’t random at all, but rather part of the natural order of things. Rogan, who has works in the permanent collections at SFMOMA and the Berkeley Art Museum, premieres his solo show at Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium, this month.

URBAN LEGEND Hadas Tal, San Francisco

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AUBRIE PICK

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San Francisco–based painter Hadas Tal’s signature impressionism is inspirited through the physicality of her canvases, which are layered thick with paint, enlivened with bold brushwork and energized with rich color. Her hazy compositions belie her sharp focus on the ebullient qualities of her subject matter (such seemingly ordinary components of the urban landscape as corner-store flowers, buildings in SF’s Chinatown and high-heel shoes). “I like to crop images at odd angles and then zoom in on the excitement,” says Tal, 36, whose first solo show will transpire at Academy of Art University’s Atelier gallery in September.

Her “Architectonics” series, for example, peculiarly captures the distinctive character cast upon building facades by graffiti, fire escapes and windows. Says Craig Nelson, director of fine art painting at the SF Academy of Art (Tal’s alma mater), “Hadas has her finger on the pulse of the urban landscape. Her work reflects our current situation as only an artist can.”

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LONE RANGER Sanya Kantarovsky, Los Angeles Moments of solitude. Quiet anxiety. Los Angeles artist Sanya Kantarovsky, 30, deftly evokes these complex internal landscapes through familiar motifs: cartoony, faceless figures and simple geometric forms make frequent appearances on his melancholy canvases. By using such accessible visual language, Kantarovsky, who just wrapped his solo show, “Blue Notebook No. 10,” at the Marc Foxx Gallery in LA, extends an invitation to the viewer to transpose their own vibrant human experience onto the muted blues and grays of his lonely vignettes. In Untitled, 2010, a man is slumped over a desk in exhaustion or boredom; in Untitled, 2011, a woman stands spiritless under a showerhead. And just like that, personal validation ensues—these private moments are universal, after all. As Kantarovsky, a graduate of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, says, “The work that the viewer performs is an integral part of the art itself.”

LA CONFIDENTIAL Zoe Crosher, Los Angeles

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TONY BYRD

TONY BYRD

“Los Angeles satisfies almost every interest I have,” says photographer Zoe Crosher, 36, recipient of LACMA’s 2011 Art Here & Now Award. “It’s a city mediated through windows and films and images.

It’s in constant motion without any real center.”

This sensitivity to such movement might originate from the artist’s transcontinental upbringing: After all, as the daughter of a Cold War–era diplomat, Crosher called Frankfurt, Moscow and Athens home within the span of a decade. Her signature work, Out the Window (LAX), explores LA’s transitory nature as seen through the windows of motel rooms surrounding Los Angeles International Airport. Each of the series’ 31 photographs documents an arriving plane—icons of adventure—juxtaposed against the generic interiors of temporary lodgings. “LA is a place where people go to forget, to let go of the past, to redefine themselves,” says Crosher, who will inaugurate the new Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Hollywood with an exhibition next month. “I could disappear into the Valley and become a deathmetal yogini who hula hoops. The constraints here are not social at all.”

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BIG PICTURE Carter Mull, Los Angeles The complex work of Los Angeles installation artist Carter Mull examines, he says, “the ways in which the media shape our understanding of the world.” The 34-year-old Georgia native’s works have, at times, taken the form of photographic spillages, whereby the artist strews thousands of images depicting, say, stills from an iPhone 4 commercial upon a gallery floor. As the prints are shuffled underfoot by wary exhibition-goers, this debris field of old-format photographs—an animated sculpture in its own right—makes a dramatic statement about the rise of technology, the parallel surge in disposable media and the subsequent demise of print. The tension is heightened with pictures of bygone newspaper spreads and an image of an archaic printing press hanging on the wall. Mull’s works are in the permanent collections at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, MOCA and the Whitney Museum. This spring, he is participating in group shows in Houston and Philadelphia.

VIVID DREAM

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When it comes to inspiration, interdisciplinary artist Sarah Cain, 33, makes sure all her bases are covered. “In my practice, I think about trust, belief, risk, failure, doubt, love, fragility as strength, the ephemeral and the synthesis of extreme opposites,” says the Los Angeles resident, who began creating (mostly undiscovered) art in abandoned buildings.

Perhaps these beginnings are what contributed to her once-fervent belief that “a museum setting deadens the soul of a piece.” Nevertheless, her large-scale work Hello Darkness My Old Friend, a vibrant abstraction rendered in spray paint, bells and seedpods, hangs in SFMOMA—the very establishment that awarded her the SECA prize in 2006. At the work’s center is a thwarted attempt to create a classic spiral; the pursuit itself is a testament to Cain’s artistic conflict. “Sometimes I will use a bad idea as a starting point,” says the New York native, whose electrifying oeuvre is celebrated in a forthcoming monograph published by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division. “Then I work through it until I achieve a serious painting.”

TONY BYRD

Sarah Cain, Los Angeles

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PITCH PERFECT Zarouhie Abdalian, Oakland Having Been Held Under the Sway, a sitespecific installation for the 2011 Istanbul Biennial by Oakland artist Zarouhie Abdalian, brings the classic pairing of cause and effect to life with a kind of sonic experiment.

Bass shakers embedded in the walls of the exhibit space emit infrasonic test tones, causing vibrations that gently stir a plumb bob hanging on one of the walls. “My work flirts with invisibility,” says Abdalian, 29, who will be participating in group shows at the Kundindustrie Museum in Norway and San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts later this year. Take heed, grassroots movers and shakers, small-town politicos and 99 percenters worldwide: Abdalian’s MO speaks to the value of infinitesimal shifts and their potential to modify perceptions, if only for an instant. In the biennial’s exhibition catalog, the New Orleans native notes, “A successful work might act a bit like a speed bump: It may not change your path, but it registers, and for a moment, you move differently.”

BREAKING THE MOLD

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AUBRIE PICK

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Matthew Palladino, San Francisco Resulting from his growing frustration with the limitations of working on paper, San Franciso artist Matthew Palladino, 26, who started his career using ink and brush, is currently venturing off the page. “I just got tired of the illusion of painting,” says Palladino. “I wanted to see the objects I painted in person, not just their representations.” His recent solo show at SF’s Eli Ridgway Gallery, “Sweet Relief,” featured candycolored enamel casts made from chocolate molds of nude figures, fruits and everyday objects. Interestingly, Palladino doesn’t claim these handpainted sculptural reliefs—a humorous intersection of handmade and commercial art—to be more meaningful than their flat counterparts. After all, despite his imaginative use of candy molds, the pieces are not edible, and, quite frankly, they still hang on walls, like his works on paper. So then, how does the artist distinguish this new three-dimensional endeavor? “The work takes up space and changes as you move around it,” says Palladino, whose art is featured in the public collection at the Whitney Museum. “It’s best experienced in person.”

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