3/28/10

Darin Klein & Friends Present: Suzanne Wright + Community Gardening and Home Pickling

New work

Work in progress

Galactic Gloryhole

Sketches, drawings and collages

Jen Smith

Julie Burleigh

The crowd

March 27
Community Gardening and Home Pickling
With Julie Burleigh + Jen Smith

Julie Burleigh is an artist, mini (not micro) farmer and community organizer in Los Angeles. She started Raymond Avenue Community Garden in 2008. Tonight, Julie provided information about her community garden and her vegetable gardening business. She demonstrated potting technique for tomatoes, basil and cayenne peppers. For those not sure if they have a green thumb, Julie offered tips on how to make sure they flourish. She even had her own seedlings and homemade hand salve and lip balm for sale.

Jen Smith is an artist who grew up eating industrial food. When she was a teenager, she endeavored to make a homemade pie, something she could not remember ever having eaten before. A month later, she swept the local county fair with her peach pie! She has been curious about food, how it is grown, the politics of its production and how it is prepared and eaten ever since. For this event, Jen answered questions about pickling, preserving, fermenting and also demonstrated how to make sauerkraut. She is interested in how food might intersect with contemporary art practices and the mundane but important practice of being a person. Many of her pickled and canned goods were sampled by our eager audience, and jars of homemade goods were purchased.

3/19/10

Darin Klein & Friends Present: Suzanne Wright

The Whole Future, 48x40". Colored pencil on paper, 2008

Darin Klein & Friends return to Amy Adler’s Echo Park studio with artist Suzanne Wright. During her month-long residency, Suzanne will be using Amy’s studio as her own. Displaying sculptures and works on paper in various states of completion, Suzanne will grant visitors access to her creative process as she works on the drawing Cockpit as well as her new Galactic Glory Hole series.

Suzanne’s large-scale drawings rendered in rainbow hues often critique cultural standards with their placement of the female body in positions that question power and control. She states that “Manmade structures simulate and fuse with the body. The women in the work dominate these industrial structures as they incorporate them into their own bodies, simultaneously being corrupted by them.”

Meanwhile, her intricate geometric sculptures made from balsa wood and cut photographs could be seen as futuristic teleportation devices. Of Double Transmission (from the Transtar series), Suzanne offers us this: “There is a sense of potential, a process beginning or perhaps a separation nearing completion. Two entities in a liminal state. The lines of communication are severed, but at the ready to re-engage.” These ideas are presented through the abstraction of ubiquitous images such as religious iconography and electrical towers.

Social engagement and political action have long been aspects of Suzanne’s life and work. Hosting community-driven get-togethers while educating and learning from friends and strangers remain integral parts of this ongoing project which temporarily re-purposes Amy’s studio to give other artists a platform for the expression of their own ideas. We invite you to attend our scheduled series of programs at the studio featuring artists and peers using vocabularies complementary to Suzanne’s.


Suzanne Wright

Suzanne Wright received a BFA in sculpture from Cooper Union in 1990, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004 and is currently completing her MFA at the University of California, San Diego. She has had solo exhibitions at Monya Rowe, Stefan Stux, DeChiara-Stewart, and White Columns, all in New York City; and Church and Maple Gallery in Burlington, VT. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally.

Amy Adler
Amy Adler currently lives and works in Los Angeles and is Associate Professor of Visual Art at the University of California San Diego.
amyadler.com

Darin Klein
Collaborating with an ever-expanding network of friends, Darin Klein curates and organizes exhibitions and arts programming, simultaneously producing, collecting and promoting artists’ publications and independent media. Darin is the Programs Coordinator at the Hammer Museum, where he also curated his first museum exhibition, Hammer Projects: Christopher Russell (January – April 2009).
darinklein.net

3/14/10

Darin Klein & Friends Present: Kate Barclay + Closing Party/ASAP Lecture

Liftoff, 52x80". Colored pencil, marker, photos on paper, 2009

Christopher Russell

Lily Simonson

Closing Party/ASAP Lecture attendees

March 13
Closing Party + ASAP Lecture:
A Complete Art History in About an Hour
with
Christopher Russell
* & Lily Simonson

We closed Kate's exhibition with a great night which included Easter snacks, a little Remy Martin (hey Matty and Audra!), fantastic presentations by Christopher and Lily, and a great crowd of friends both old and new. It was a wonderful month filled with exciting programs, Kate's beautiful work, visits from two important curators, and the sale of two of Kate's pieces! Thanks to everyone who came out to support us and to all of the program participants. It's so exciting to be involved and engaged with all of you. Of course, a BIG thanks to Amy for providing the space to make it all happen.

After School Arts Program (ASAP) provides innovative and experimental arts programming for artists, curators, historians and critics interested in continuing their education in the visual arts. ASAP is a not-for-profit community service offering lectures, salons, workshops, critiques, exhibitions, film screenings and publications.
www.asap-la.blogspot.com
*Special thanks to Ohio University

3/7/10

Darin Klein & Friends Present: Kate Barclay + Readings by Brent Armendinger & Amina Cain

Buttressed, 51x63" (detail). Colored Pencil, pen on paper, 2009

Amina Cain

Brent Armendinger

March 6
Readings by Brent Armendinger + Amina Cain

Brent Armendinger is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Undetectable (New Michigan Press, 2009) and Archipelago (Noemi Press, 2009). He won first prize in poetry in the 2009 Chroma International Queer Writing Competition, and his poems have been published in many journals. He teaches creative writing at Pitzer College in Claremont. For tonight's reading, Brent read from both chapbooks and played a collaborative poem created from phone messages. To participate, people called 1-877-EAT-POEM, pressed 1 and described a time they fell asleep in an unusual place.

Amina Cain is the author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009), a collection of stories that revolve quietly around human relationality, landscape and emptiness, and A Body That Has Trouble, a newly completed book of fictionesques and their companion prose pieces. She is also a curator (most recently for When Does It or You Begin? Memory as Innovation, a month long festival of writing, performance and video) and a teacher of writing/literature. Her work has appeared in numerous publications. Tonight, Amina read The Meaning of Your Body (which is included in Box of Books, Vol. II) as well as a passage from I Go To Some Hollow. www.aminacain.com