Los Angeles Art Association proudly presents 4 solo exhibitions by artists Tanner Goldbeck, Keiko Inoh, Rachel Kaster and Robert Nelson. The reception will take place on Saturday October 20, 2018, 6 - 9pm at Gallery 825 and the show runs through November 30, 2018.
Robert Nelson
Robert Nelson's hyper-real/surreal works are concerned with dichotomies: innocence/corruption, the infinite/the finite, past/future, good/evil. His works are bombastic examples of an artist who is at ease layering wide areas of flat color with illustrative drawing that shows off his technical skills and knowledge of the history of art. In the works in this solo show, Dialogs with the Future he juxtaposes images culled from different sources to explore the relationship between the world today and an imagined future. Using elements from art history and popular culture, he fuses the serious with the humorous creating evocative, challenging and sometimes disturbing works. Nelson's world view is presented as a series of fragments that the viewer can connect in their mind, arriving at their own conclusions. His artworks are catalysts for thought about how the past influenced the present, and how the present can challenge and hopefully change the future.
Tanner Goldbeck
Thrift stores and art galleries have always been a part of artist Tanner Goldbeck's identity. Goldbeck is interested in questioning our perceptions of value and worth on a social scale. If you strip them of their formalities and look at their basic operations, they do have a few functions in common. Objects are on display for purchase, discounts are offered, sales occur and customers are encouraged to examine the items. A lifelong cause and effect relationship combined into one, semi-metaphoric social experiment. Initially inspired by Claes Oldenburg's 1961 store in lower Manhattan, Goldbeck now presents the exhibition All Unattended Children Will Be Sold. Goldbeck wants to superimpose two behaviorally opposite social structures on top of one another and see what unfolds. Each visitor must review at least some portion of their own behavioral practices upon entering the room.
Keiko Inoh
Keiko Inoh's newest iteration of her art practice, Shadow is an installation comprising adventurous projection of sculptural constructions. This projection becomes like a negative of a photograph, and the shadow projected on the wall becomes a "picture". The audience can witness a camera-less "photograph". The turntable ("lazy Susan") on which this sculpture rests rotates by hand power. The audience can enjoy the shadow and sculpture of the continuous city at their own speed. The image "Shadow" was drawn from the novelist Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In his story, this city is an imaginary city that Marco Polo told Kublai Khan about in a fantasy encounter. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and designs, cities and the dead, trading cities, hidden cities and invisible cities. Inoh views the shadow as a metaphor for vague information and something invisible.
Rachel Kaster
Well-known for her sculptural work in glass and steel, in more recent work, Rachel Kaster has explored our changing relationship to memory, and more specifically emotional attachments, or the private memories in which we become emotionally invested. Using dolls, children's toys, domestic décor accessories and the trinkets that might be found on charm bracelets, the original fetishes of memory and emotional attachments, Kaster fashioned her bricolage into the super sized simulacra of actual charm 'bracelets' to be hung against a wall or support, or in any manner of suspension between walls, floors and ceilings. For her current show Anamnesis, Kaster is constructing an installation of suspended pendants, image transparencies, small photographs or snapshots, and heirlooms in a kind of charm bracelet-fetish necklace chandelier to fill an entire gallery - a web of memory moving between shadowy blur and crystalline projection to be recast and reconstructed between the moment of perception and the viewer's imagination.