The Greenleaf Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work from Los Angeles-based artist Xana Kudrjavcev-DeMilner. Kudrjavcev-DeMilner earned her BA from Swarthmore College and her MFA from Yale University, and she has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at venues including ACME, Los Angeles, ICA Philadelphia, Kunst-Werke Berlin and Nosadella.due, Bologna.

 

Exhibition Dates:

The Greenleaf Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work from Wyoming based artist Diana Baumbach. Baumbach earned her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Recently, she has had solo exhibitions at Dynamo Expo in the Netherlands and at Penn State University. Baumbach is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming.

Artist Statement:
My work explores the intersection between art, design and everyday life.

I focus on the formal arrangement of shapes, patterns and colors using a combination of printmaking, painting and various hand-skills. Most of my work employs a limited color palette, almost exclusively on a paper substrate, and takes the form of books, paper sculptures and two dimensional works.

I am inspired by the formal and emotional qualities of commonplace objects and ephemera as well as the “high design” of luxury goods. My recent work is about recontextualizing functional design. I allow the shapes and patterns of household items such as paper towels, napkins, printed fabrics and furniture to inform the aesthetic of my own work. By laboring over the construction of my own “disposable” goods, I take them out of the realm of use and put the on display for study and appreciation.

I find comfort in repetitive processes, such as piercing, stuffing, weaving or folding, that involve a basic action which becomes automatic to the body over time. Once I understand the simple mechanics of a process, subtle variations come to life. I’ve also found that monotonous processes allow me the ability to start and stop. Because of this, my studio work travels home with me to be worked on while also participating in day-to-day domestic activities, not unlike quilting or knitting.

My use of patterns allows me to highlight the imperfections and variations inherent in all things handmade. There is a tension between the precision with which I can craft an object and the expectations that the viewer has about how my work is constructed. Often, I heighten the appearance of mechanical reproduction in my work through adherence to a grid and emphasis on craft. As such, I’m alluding to the dominance of mass production by making the viewer aware more conscious of the hand.

  

The Whittier College Greenleaf Gallery is pleased to present Any of These (or Others Like These), a solo exhibition of artwork by Greg J. Hayes. Hayes is a Los Angeles based artist who studied for a year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before receiving his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2010. In recent years, he has exhibited work in in Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego and Troy, NY, and images from his current body of work will be on display in the GLAMFA exhibition at Cal State Long Beach through mid-September. This Fall, Hayes will be an artist-in-residence at the Cultural Center at Eagle Hill in Massachusetts.

Artist’s Statement:
My practice is based on the idea that art making is a way of thinking. The process is a space for contemplation outside of and in addition to the thoughts necessary to complete the act. At the core of this practice is an insistent investigation of time and experience through the unique conditions of photography.

Any of These (or Others Like These) involves the reorganization of photography’s hierarchy by using the depth and duration of my attention instead of light and movement as guides to exposure, thus prioritizing film’s capability as a recorder of time over that of a depicter of space. Made at various sites on large-format color negative film, these photographs are traditionally called time exposures – the duration of each determined by how long I linger.

The potential for making a photograph necessarily exists at all times and places; the locations where the photographs begin are important only in their non-specificity. See Also – the body of work from which Any of These draws – builds on the idea that not only is a photograph a way of thinking, but a negative is also a container for time. In making this work, I am clearing personal spaces in an otherwise cluttered social terrain – short stops within a moving system. The prints produced are the final stages of photographs, their quality and reproducibility independent of their roles.

In conjunction with this image work, I have been developing a text piece that shares its name with the greater body of work, and theorizes a photographic ontology. The contents of this booklet challenge ways of knowing and reading a photograph, and impel a reconsideration of time spent. Its current form is that of a proposal, encouraging readers to ask themselves, “what can(‘t) be seen in a photograph?” Together, the photographs and the text engage questions about the implications of idleness while maintaining an emphasis on photographic inquiry and the conditions of perception.
PICTURE GALLERY

Website: http://www.dannyjauregui.com/baths1/index.html

The Whittier College Greenleaf Gallery is pleased to present There Goes the Neighborhood, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Danny Jauregui. Currently as Assistant Professor at Whittier College, Jauregui earned his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, his MFA from the University of California, San Diego and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has shown his work widely and currently has a solo exhibition at Bowdoin Museum in Brunswick, Maine and has work in Phantom Sightings, a traveling exhibition now on view at El Museo del Barrio in New York city.

Artist Statement:
In the years directly before the AIDS crisis, urban centers exploded with large populations of politicized gay men engaged in radical forms of open sexuality. In 1979, the year I was born, the AIDS crisis had not yet reached it’s full devastation and the largely gay and Latino neighborhood of Silver Lake—an artist’s enclave adjacent to Downtown Los Angeles—boasted over 10 exclusively gay bathhouses. The sexual revolution of the 1960’s contributed to the slow (and on going) liberation of gay men to openly (some what) express their same-sex gender choice. Prior to this ‘revolution’, closeted gay men met in clandestine spaces, fearful for their life given the open hostility that the culture in general, and the authorities specifically, thrust onto their same-sex desire. During this era of forbidden desire, bathhouses became popular meeting grounds for gay men, and even after the progress of the sexual and cultural revolution of the 1960’s, bathhouses became the safest spaces for gay men to openly express their sexual desires.

In his book, “Beyond Shame: Reclaiming The Abandoned History Of Radical Gay Sexuality” Patrick Moore chronicles the history of bath houses and sex clubs, aligning it with the history of the radical left, feminism, and the counter-cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s. Speaking about the ‘radical’ aspect of sex clubs and bath houses, Moore writes: “In the 1970’s, gay men initiated an astonishing experiment in radically restructuring existing relationships, concepts of beauty, and the use of sex as a revolutionary tool.”

AIDS of course, changed all of that. By 1981 AIDS would become a full-blown epidemic that was shrouded in mystery and misinformation. Major cities shut down legal bathhouses and an entire generation of gay men fell victim to the disease. We will never know what would have become of their ‘experimentation’. All we are left with is a gap in the lineage of elder gay men.

Driving down Hyperion Blvd in Silver Lake must be a very different experience than it was when the street was lined with bathhouses. Although the bathhouses no longer exist, the buildings in which they were housed still remain. One of the most popular baths of the time, Mac’s Baths, is now the campaign office of Equality California, one of the biggest pro-gay marriage advocacy groups in the state. This curious fact strikes me as poignant and emblematic of the state of queer history. In the shadow and aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, and in an attempt to gain acceptance, many gay men have shunned the radical in favor of the traditional. In Beyond Shame Moore writes: “Because of a lack of continuity between generations and a disavowal of our sexual history, the gay community has arrived at its present state: disassociated assimilation that excludes all except those leading the most traditional of lives”

Like the history they housed, these buildings became ‘disguised ruins’ of a controversial past. A carefully erected façade of gentrification erases their former function, cleansing them from a scandalous past. Now a present-day volunteer works toward approving gay marriage in the same spot where 30 years ago a man gave a blowjob to another man without any knowledge of how the two acts are linked. The ruins of this era are there; only they are shrouded in shame. Ruins are historically used as markers of history and memorials of the past, yet the ruins of this radicalized past have been systematically white-washed leaving a ghost of a shell in their place.

In my new series of work titled “There Goes The Neighborhood”, I make paintings of bathhouses in ruin. Moldy, disheveled and abandoned, the paintings are memorials to the absence of memorials—indexes of the traumatic erasure inflicted on the radical gay sexuality of the past. They are paintings of what I imagine those spaces to look like, had they not been disguised and hidden from sight.
  

DATES: January 21-February 20, 2009

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, January 24th, 4-6pm

GALLERY TALK: Thursday, February 19th, 4pm.

Greenleaf Gallery
Whittier College (located in Mendenhall)
13406 Philadelphia St
Whittier, CA 90603
Gallery Hours: M-F, 10am-5pm

Julia Latané presents a solo exhibition of objects and drawings.

"I will never"

"This is a show about hitting the wall. What do I do now?!? It¹s about making work for 20 years and looking back and wondering ³why that?² It¹s about the academic process, trial and error, learning how to edit, learning how to let go, changing your rules, jumping off the cliff, committing artistic suicide, the blank slate, starting over. It¹s a show of pretty objects."

PICTURE GALLERY

Greenleaf Gallery
Whittier College (located in Mendenhall)
13406 Philadelphia St
Whittier, CA 90603
Gallery Hours: M-F, 10am-5pm

IMAGE GALLERY

Dear Faculty: Please welcome visiting artists Megan and Murray McMillan to Whittier College, as they are staying on campus while they install their exhibition, "The Listening Array," in Greenleaf Gallery.

The McMIllan's will be giving an artist lecture at 7:15pm at Johnson Faculty House this Wednesday, February 27, and an opening reception for the exhibition will take place on Thursday, February 28. I am including information below on their exhibition and I think the show will be interesting to a broad range of faculty and students. Please take a moment to visit the gallery if you have a chance, and all are welcome to the artist lecture and opening reception. Thank you, Ali Smith, Gallery Director


Greenleaf Gallery at Whittier College is pleased to present the upcoming exhibition by Megan and Murray McMIllan, "The Listening Array." As a husband and wife artist-partnership, Megan and Murray McMillan collaborate to create videos, photographs and installations that incorporate elements of sculpture and performance. Each finished work contains fabricated structures and costumed performers and is designed with both highly crafted elements, such as walls engineered to move, and spontaneous elements, such as unrehearsed choreography.

The Listening Array has two distinct manifestations: a site-specific installation in the Greenleaf Galleries at Whittier College and the video that is incorporated in the installation. The video primarily consists of a dinner party scene surrounded by a nimbus of golden tubes. Stationed at each tube is a "worker" listening in on the repartee at the table.

Inspired by the social politics of the Reagan-era Cold War, issues of class and the notion of noblesse oblige — the concept of benevolent, honorable behavior that is considered to be the responsibility of persons of high birth or rank — The Listening Array is a study in the small personal interactions that influence the larger world in more impactful ways.


SPECIAL EVENTS:

Reception for the artists: Thursday, February 28, 7-9pm

Artist Lecture: Wednesday, February 27, 7:15pm in Johnson Faculty House