Big City Forum #12

Ginger Wolfe-Suarez

Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe, Open House

Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe, Tumbleweed

Big City Forum invites you to a conversation about shifting concepts of place, memory, and identity.

Thursday, February 25, 2010
6 - 8 pm

LAXART
2640 S. La Cienega Blvd
LA CA 90034

Featuring:
Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe
Ginger Wolfe-Suarez

moderated by:
Amy Pederson

Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe has a practice that includes sculpture, drawing, installation, and experimentations in residential architecture. His work is rooted in a rigorous framework of art and architecture. Suarez-Wolfe attended SCI-Arc before receiving his MFA in Sculpture at UCLA in 2000. His work has been exhibited at ACE Gallery in Los Angeles and New York, Blum & Poe Gallery, Luckman Gallery of Fine Arts at California State University at Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, High Desert Test Sites, and Artist Curated Projects (forthcoming in July 2009). He is a recipient of the Emilio Sanchez Award in Art and Architecture as well as a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. From 2005-2008, with Ginger Wolfe-Suarez, he co-edited a publication on conceptual art entitled InterReview Journal, which is now archived at Harvard Fine Arts Library. Suarez-Wolfe has taught in the art and architecture departments at the University of Southern California, Woodbury University, and currently at the University of California at Berkeley. His work has been included in various journals and books on both art and architecture, most recently SPACECRAFT: Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts published by Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin.

Ginger Wolfe-Suarez is an emerging sculptor, writer, and theorist whose work has used a combination of sculpture, ephemeral events, text, and performance to negotiate shifting concepts of memory- both historical, personal, imagined, and desired. The resulting installations convey mnemeticaly-situated relationships between unfixed memory and place- between experience and site. Materials have recently included wood, paint, latex, light, paper, and mirror to generate a cognizant and experiential path of the viewer's body throughout the work. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley, and her work has recently been exhibited at Artist Curated Projects (Los Angeles), Silverman Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mills College Art Museum, High Desert Test Sites, and a number of peripheral but equally important sites such as the sidewalk in-front of her house, and a neighbor’s doorway. Wolfe-Suarez’s writings have been published in various books, catalogues, and journals internationally, and she is currently collaborating with Cara Baldwin on WRITING IS ACTION, a book on emerging art criticism. From 2002-2008 Wolfe-Suarez was also a co-founder and Editor of InterReview Journal. During that time she was responsible for publishing writings and artist projects by Mary Kelly, Michael Asher, Suzanne Lacy, and Daniel Joseph Martinez, among others.

Dr. Amy Pederson received her Ph.D. in Modern & Contemporary Art History from UCLA and is currently Assistant Professor and Departmental Coordinator at Woodbury University in Burbank, CA. Her doctoral thesis entailed a joint investigation of midcentury modernist painting and criticism, and Golden Age superhero comics from the same period. Her interests include critical theory and contemporary Latin American art and popular culture, as well as zombies. Pederson is also a co-curator for the 2009/10 MexiCali Biennial investigating bi-national exchanges and alternative exhibition practices not associated with traditional biennials.


LAXART is Los Angeles' leading independent non-profit contemporary art space, producing experimental exhibitions, publications and public art initiatives with emerging and mid-career local, national, and international artists.

Founded in 2005 to support the production of new work by contemporary artists, architects and designers, LAXART occupies a critical space in the cultural landscape of LA between the larger institutional and commercial sectors.

Big City Forum #11

Kim Stringfellow, Abandoned Trailer, Bombay Beach

Rebeca Mendez, Weatherscape #15

Big City Forum invites you to a round table conversation about our relationship to nature, issues of perception, land use and the built environment.

Saturday, Jan. 30th, 2010
4 - 6 pm

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 837-0191

Featuring:
Rebeca Mendez
Kim Stringfellow

Rebeca Méndez is a professor at UCLA, Design | Media Arts who works in photography and video art installations to explore issues of perception, specifically our relationship to technologically mediated nature. Méndez’s works are included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Design Museum, NY, and Denver Art Museum, among many others.

Rebeca Méndez was born and raised in Mexico, D. F., received her BFA and MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and is professor at UCLA in the Design | Media Arts department, Los Angeles. She has exhibited widely in museums and galleries internationally. Recent gallery shows include The Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, curated by Christiane Paul of the Whitney Museum, Minotti, Los Angeles, Haaz Gallery, Istanbul, AndLab Art, Los Angeles, Alyce de Roulette Williamson Gallery, Pasadena, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, Los Angeles. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions including, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brandstater Gallery, Riverside, California and the Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach. Méndez has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the ARCO Madrid, Spain, XBiennial in Cuenca, Ecuador, Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, Freitag Historical Museum in Hanover, Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon, Portugal, the Muséo José Luis Cuevas, México D. F. and Pompidou Centre, Paris. Méndez lectures internationally and has been reviewed extensively by renowned publications worldwide such as The Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine, Metropolis, I.D. Magazine, (US), Idea Magazine (Tokyo, Japan), Ronda Revista (Santiago, Chile), Plazm (US), ENE-O (Mexico, D. F.), Items (Amsterdam), and 34 Magazine (Istanbul, Turkey). Her work is represented in private and museum collections including Enrique Norten Collection, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Denver Art Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Méndez has received extensive national and international recognition including two Platinum Awards and two Gold Awards from Graphis, two nominations for the National Design Award (Smithsonian), and in 2008, she was awarded an art residency at the Gunnar Gunnarson, Skriduklaustur in Iceland.

Kim Stringfellow is an artist and educator residing in Los Angeles, California. She teaches multimedia and photography courses at San Diego State University as an associate professor in the School of Art, Design, and Art History. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.

Her professional practice and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, audio, video, installation, and locative media. Her work investigates repercussions of human development within the western United States evolving out of a rigorously researched area of interest focused on a particular subject, community or region to discuss complex, interrelated issues of the chosen site. Within her research, she attempts to expose human values and political agendas that form our collective understanding of these places. Ultimately, her projects are designed to create awareness, educate, and create a rich dialogue in relation to the subject at hand.

Stringfellow’s projects have been commissioned and funded by leading organizations including the California Council for the Humanities, Creative Work Fund, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Seattle Arts Commission. Awards include Best-Art Related Website at the 1999 SXSW Interactive Festival. Her work has been exhibited at the International Center for Photography (ICP), the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, SIGGRAPH, the Rachel Carson Institute, and San Francisco Camerawork. Internationally, she has exhibited at ISEA’04 in Tallinn, Estonia and at the José Martí National Library in Havana, Cuba in 2002. During the spring of 2000, she attended the Civitella Ranieri Center Residency Program in Umbria, Italy through a grant from the Atlantic Center of the Arts. Her photographs are included in the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami, Florida and the Nevada Museum of Art. Publications include New York Times, SF Camerawork Quarterly, Sculpture, Photo Metro, Leonardo, and Artweek. Her first book, Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905–2005 was published by the Center for American Places (CAP) in 2005. The Web site for Greetings from the Salton Sea was featured in Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video in New York City in 2006/07. Invisible-5, a collaborative audio project completed in spring 2006, funded by the Creative Work Fund was featured on NPR’s California Report on October 13th, 2006 and was included in justspace(s) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in fall 2007. Her second book project with CAP, Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938–2008, was published in 2009. The California Council for the Humanities awarded Stringfellow a California Story Fund production grant in 2008 to develop and produce the Jackrabbit Homestead audio tour.