CHARLENE LIU: If It Were a Slow Echo

November 7th, 2009


Charlene Liu: If It Were A Slow Echo
November 7 – December 19, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday November 7, 6-8PM

Taylor De Cordoba is proud to present If It Were A Slow Echo, the gallery’s second exhibition of works on paper by Charlene Liu. The exhibition will run from November 7 – December 19, 2009 with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, November 7th from 6 – 8PM.

In her new works on paper, Charlene Liu continues her interest in the natural landscape, abstracting directly from overlooked and diminutive moments of growth and decay. Many of the works allude to the vanitas of Dutch and Renaissance still-life paintings. The show’s title, If It Were a Slow Echo, recalls the transitory moments of sensory experience and the repetition of motifs that slowly weaves together patterns, lines, and color to the brink of chaotic excess. Combining collaged prints and traditional painting techniques, Liu layers, stains, and composes her paintings; interminably dissolving the transition between figure and ground. It’s an unpredictable and slow reveal with the effect of a quiet, amnesiac sense of disorientation.

In this way Liu’s work rocks back and forth between stasis and activity, order and entropy, becoming and receding. Her color palette operates similarly; in several works on paper, a subdued pastel palette resembles the color of an injury – a bruise or an infection, more than the onslaught of spring. Polka dotted hole punches appear as barnacles or parasites, traversing the picture plane at an exponential rate, bubbling and swelling in tandem with twisted brambles.

Born in Taiwan in 1975, Liu earned her MFA at Columbia University in 2003. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland (2008), Taylor De Cordoba in Los Angeles (2007 and 2009), Virgil de Voldère in New York (2006), and Andrea Rosen Gallery, also in New York (2003). Liu is an assistant Professor at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

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FROHAWK TWO FEATHERS: THE Magazine

June 19th, 2009

Reproduction of Frohawk Two Feathers, “Tabac et Banane”, 2009, acrylic, ink, and tea on paper.

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JEANA SOHN: Sleep Sleep

May 16th, 2009

Jeana Sohn:  Sleep Sleep
May 16 – June 27, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday May 16, 6-8PM

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Sleep Sleep, a new series of paintings on panel and an installation by Los Angeles-based artist Jeana Sohn. The exhibition will run from May 16 through June 27, 2009.  The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, May 16 from 6-8PM.

Drawing upon mythologies and the vastness of nature, Jeana Sohn paints peaceful scenes that are filled with anxiety. While aiming to express her connection to nature in these paintings, she widens the conversation to the relationship between humans and the natural world in general. Her images are undeniably gorgeous – a pretty, fashionable young girl (resembling a well dressed paper doll) floating amidst vividly colored roses is a recurring image and an appealing one. Yet, the characters Sohn imagines seem more lost than found, more frightened and overwhelmed than peaceful. A girl trying to untangle herself from a seemingly never-ending pile of rope exemplifies this.

It is exactly this tension that makes takes Sohn’s work from the level of appealing to utterly fascinating. And here, the little girl lost theme will be more disarming than ever as Sohn moves away from her traditional 2-D style and creates a life-size paper mache sculpture of a six-year-old girl.

Jeana Sohn graduated from Cal Arts in 2004. Her artwork has been exhibited in various exhibitions around the country and included in numerous publications. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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The Architect’s Newspaper

April 11th, 2009

“Melissa Manfull: Tesseracts Review” by Danielle Rago. “Los Angeles-based artist Melissa Manfull creates an alternate reality of built form through intricate ink and graphite on paper compositions…With their oddball energy, these drawings sometimes recall the Dadaist montages of Hannah Hoch or Kurt Schwitters. But their obsessive details give Manfull’s finely drawn structures – Eiffel Towers twisting into the sky, and space frames that sprawl to the horizon – an architectonic style all her own.”

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TIMOTHY HULL: Justified And Ancient: (What Time Is Love?)

April 4th, 2009

Timothy Hull: Justified and Ancient (What Time is Love?)

April 4th, 2009 – May 9th, 2009

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Justified and Ancient: (What Time is Love?) a solo show by New York-based artist Timothy Hull. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday April 4 from 6 – 8PM.

For his second solo show with the gallery, Hull shifts his focus from the themes relating to the Russian mystic Gurdjeiff to the topic of Egypt as cultural obsession.  Hull’s interest in Egypt stems from the ways in which Egyptian motifs, mysteries and history have been appropriated, quantified and qualified by westerners since the Victorian age.

Hull presents a variety of media in this new installation composed of discrete objects: graphite drawings incorporating collage; hyper-detailed blue ink drawings depicting Egyptian landscape scenes; improbable travel posters; a wall installation featuring clocks, primary and secondary source material; and a soundtrack of Egyptian contemporary dance music that accompanies a video of a Nile cruise disco masquerade party, taken on his April 2008 research trip to Egypt. Here, he questions the signifiers and conceptual indicators that revolve around traditional “Egypt” images, orientalism and the aura of Egyptian tourism.

Timothy Hull lives and works in New York City. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Brown Project Space in Milan, Museum 52 in New York, The Morris Museum of Art in New Jersey, and Freight+Volume, Klaus Von Nichtssagend and Bellwether, all in New York. Hull has been featured in Artforum.com, The Huffington Post, LA Weekly, Flash Art, NY Arts Magazine and the Los Angeles Times.

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Frieze Magazine

April 1st, 2009

Sasha Bezzubov & Jessica Sucher Review by Christy Lange. “These intimate, unapologetically beautiful photos of Western spiritual tourists don’t aim for conceptual objectivity or distance. Instead, they’re drenched in an ethereal, almost otherworldly light…Undeniably, the images in The Searchers are transporting; they make it hard not to want to visit. Looking at them, I even wonder if something like spiritual transcendence can exist.”

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Angeleno Magazine

March 1st, 2009

“Roll Call” by Nairi Najarian. “No Smashbox? No problem. L.A. line’s are going off-site this season. Culver City’s Taylor De Cordoba has become a regular showcasing venue, curating a presentation each season for the past few years (previous designers include local hotties Jesse Kamm and Wren’s Melissa Coker). This Spring the venue is hosting the fall 2009 collection of VIVIER…”

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MELISSA MANFULL: Tesseracts

February 21st, 2009

Melissa Manfull: Tesseracts

February 21 – March 28, 2009

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Tesseracts, a new series of drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Melissa Manfull. The exhibition will run from February 21 – March 28, 2009.  The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday February 21 from 6pm-8pm.

In this new group of unframed ink on paper pieces, Melissa Manfull creates impossible worlds and structures. Much like science fiction writer Charles Howard, who coined the word “Tesseract” (the four-dimensional analog of the cube) in the late 19th century, Manfull is interested in a reality beyond what we can see and understand in a 3-dimensional world.

Drawing inspiration from science fiction, gothic architecture and mineralogy, Manfull explores the conceptual and visual analogies between naturally occurring structures and those made by humans. Visually, her drawings of towers, arches and organic bursts are arrestingly beautiful and overwhelming in their obsessive detail. Thousands of tiny lines compose the architecture she imaginatively creates.

At once delicate and bold, the work straddles our notions of temporal reality. Are we looking at an existing metropolis, a futuristic utopia or a flashback to Victorian England?  Manfull is indeed influenced by Gothic architecture and pulls her muted palette of pinks, moss greens, blues and grays from Victorian interiors and textiles.

Melissa Manfull received her MFA from Concordia University Montreal in Canada and has exhibited her artwork at The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, High Energy Constructs in Los Angeles, and Bourget Gallery in Montreal, among others.  She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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RYAN CALLIS: Are You Ready to Testify?

January 10th, 2009

Ryan Callis: Are You Ready to Testify

January 10 – February 14, 2009

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Are You Ready to Testify, a new series of paintings by Southern California-based artist Ryan Callis. The exhibition will run from January 10 through February 14, 2009. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday January 10 from 6pm-8pm.

The exhibition consists of paintings that operate conversationally, as phrases and sentences in a larger dialogue. To create the paintings’ architectural structures, Callis uses a system that codes phrases and words into geometric forms without visually making use of text. While the completed paintings do not directly reflect the original texts, every gesture, shape and concept organically flows from this unique coded system. A palette of vibrant (nearly acidic) blues, greens, yellows and pinks creates elegant passages of paint flows and color gradations.

The conception for this series of work was influenced largely by Nam June Paik’s Fluxus film, Zen For Film (1962-1964), the 1996 Dischord Records release of the self proclaimed “gospel yeah, yeah” sound of the Make-Up’s debut album, Destination: Love, Live at Cold Rice, and David Hockney’s book That’s the Way I See Things.

This is the artist’s second solo show at Taylor De Cordoba. His work has been featured in Artweek and the OC Weekly. Ryan Callis was recently included in Christopher Knight’s article for the Los Angeles Times, “45 Under 45.” He received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2007.

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Frieze Magazine January 04, 2009

January 4th, 2009

“Report from LA Returns” by Christy Lange. “By far my favorite show was at Taylor de Cordoba, a refreshingly earnest photographic collaboration between Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher called “The Searchers”. These medium-format images of Western tourists in the spiritual meditation and yoga centers of India transcend the medium and their potentially banal subject matter. They could be on the scale of Andreas Gursky’s or Thomas Ruff’s work, but these photographs show that images don’t have to be blown up to huge dimensions to be monumental…”

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