Opening Reception: Saturday, October 21st, 2017 6 – 9 p.m.
Exhibition Dates: October 21st – November 11th, 2017
Hours: Thursday – Saturday, 1 – 7 p.m.,
Sunday – Wednesday, by appointment, call (626) 201-1174
SANTA MONICA, CA. – Location, location, location! declares the value of a property be determined by its site rather than its condition. This exhibition uses this old real estate adage metaphorically to explore how geographic areas gain or lose value through representation. Property values are both monetary and cultural. Shifts can occur by block or whole geographic region. But these shifts rarely reflect the people, the history or the natural characteristics of the landscape. The artists in this show are attempting to look at some of these factors in a literal, figurative and semiotic way and make work that questions our perceptions of space.
About The ShowRoom
The ShowRoom is a four-month residency project. It is a studio, installation, performance & exhibition space, taking place in a retail space on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. It’s proximity to luxury and design shops, Montana Avenue and Bergamot Station – now in redevelopment – provide an opportunity for dialog about commodity, materialism, the flux of Southern California real estate and the burgeoning business of art. Its purpose is to foster exchanges between artists who work in diverse media and themes and to find mutual collectivity around these and other related topics.
About the artists and their works
Anita Enriquez – It was done as a way to acknowledge that my attempt to romanticize a place and history that I have some knowledge of, that has influenced my life and that is problematic by today’s sociopolitical standards would forever elude me. The performance was plagued by the sound of chainsaws, my inability to navigate a wedding dress in a muddy river and my general awkwardness over being filmed. I was very happy with the results.
Kate Lain – The concept of nature is a slippery one. With the Field Notes series, I explore its complexity, contradictions, and constructedness as I look for it in the landscape of Los Angeles.
http://www.katemakesfilms.com
Patrick McGuan – is a dislocated Midwesterner working through the ways language and ideology are grafted onto bodies and landscapes and concerned with the ghosts in the margins and failures of the graft. Patrick loves words and dessert but doesn’t trust himself with either.
http://www.patrickfrancismcguan.com
Phil Peters – This work ties into recent thoughts of buildings as bound to geology, of site and city and locatedness, of our work and the marks we make in relationship to shifting scales of time.
http://www.philipbpeters.com
Christine Zuercher – QSL means, “Do you confirm receipt of my transmission?” DX, a common abbreviation for shortwave radio means “distance”. To broadcast means to scatter seeds or, in the case of radio, to disseminate information. This and other language used in shortwave technology is rooted in the idea of location and distance. My QSL card collection consists of artifacts of shortwave radio transmissions, the postcards shortwave operators send to one another. In a way each card is a map or the pointing to an unknown place or conversation from the past that would disappear without the card, similar to the vanishing of shortwave spy codes and transmissions.
http://www.christinezuercher.com
Image credit: Christine Zuercher, QSL Card Collection #1, Found QSL Card, Images Transferred with SuperSauce, Cyanotype, Gum Bichromate, 4″x6″, 2015-2016.
