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NEWAGERIOT
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COUNTRY CLUB / LOS ANGELES NEWAGERIOT Kamrooz Aram’s lush paintings evoke video game landscapes, religious iconography and military imagery in equal measure. The environments created by Manuel Ocampo are collisions of religious and secular imagery. Both artists remain elusive in their specific sources and conclusions. They are locations caught between becoming and disappearing, somehow temporal even though the paint remains fixed on the surface. Beth Campbell explores a similarly transitory terrain in her ongoing series of mobiles that simultaneously function as drawings in space and psychogeographic maps, intensely personal and universal. These works are silhouetted against Jack Goldstein's (1957-2003) untitled work on canvas that seems to chart some type of phenomenon, a static rendering of a fleeting moment removed from its context. The painting, from 1985/86, is situated in the middle of a time when Goldstein transitioned from experimental/conceptual filmmaking into painting instances of spectacle – lightning fields, astral and volcanic events. The effect of the work is to transport us to the center of an undefined yet momentous phenomenon. Bob Flanagan (1952-1996), an artist, poet, performer, writer, and musician, suffered from cystic fibrosis for the majority of his life. Cystic fibrosis is a disease that typically kills before adulthood. Flanagan attributed his ability to manage the pain and prolong his life by adhering to his credo "fight pain with pain." Working with his partner and dominatrix, Sheree Rose, Flanagan explored ritualized pain as a means to absorb the punishment of the disease and to find a space that could bring a measure of peace. NEWAGERIOT will feature a wall comprised of children's alphabet blocks repeatedly spelling "CF" and "SM," and others featuring drawings of butt plugs, whips, chains, scalpels, syringes and dominatrix gear, the objects of Flanagan's trangressions and transcendence. This piece was originally exhibited in his landmark exhibition Visiting Hours in 1993 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Larry Mantello's recent collages, composed primarily from temporary tattoos, borrow liberally from popular and low culture. A dizzying arrangement of cartoon characters and garish logos and text alongside graphic scabs and wounds play out as bizarre before-and-after images of a culture dealing in childish, escapist fantasy – where the artificial/virtual is valued over the real/concrete. Also trading in escapist tendency, video artist Shana Moulton has developed an exaggerated world of New Age products and self-help remedies. In a poignant series of misadventures, the comically hapless protagonist seeks and finds ecstatic enlightenment and all of the consequences that brings. Jen Liu's vision of a New Age looks back to medieval devices and constructs to build a world in which the battles between nature and technology, resistance and state power, nostalgia and modernity are illustrated in her video The Brethren of the Stone: Iron Man. Sleep (Todd Pavlisko & Max Schubert) describe themselves as Country Club is a project-based gallery serving as a catalyst for artists to explore new ideas and ambitious projects placed in thematic context with recent developments in contemporary art. Contact Yaoska Davila or Lizabeth Belli |
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