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.