exhibitions

for immediate release


“WHERE WE LIVE: Outside & In”
May 1st - June 5th, 2004

Works by: Blue McRight, Rebecca Niederlander, Jared Pankin, Elizabeth Pulsinelli, Bill Radawec
opening reception: SATURDAY, MAY 8TH, 2004; 7-11PM

The markers of everyday life-the palm trees and placid, green lawns that adorn the impassive facades of homes which rarely allow glimpses into their interiors-are the subject of Where We Live, a new exhibit at OVERTONES in Venice, California. Each of the artists deals not with the usual quasi-realist or perversely Lynchian aspects of lived environment (although these elements make the occasional appearance). Rather, they enter into an alternate imaginative reverie about the markers themselves.

Blue McRight has created an ongoing series of drawings and installations entitled On the Lawn to investigate notions of the American lawn as an infinite field beyond the picture plane. For the small drawings on view in Where We Live, McRight draws upon personal as well as collective iconography to present the private space of the lawn as a form of public stage, upon which events (ranging from the sinister to the sublime) transpire. The artworks of Blue McRight have been exhibited in group exhibitions at 101 California Gallery, the Transamerica Pyramid Gallery, and the Holland Tunnel Gallery. She participated in the City of West Hollywood "Art on the Outside" program, creating a site-specific sculptural installation entitled Impossible Lawn Chair. In 2003, she completed Luminaries, a site-specific public artwork for the State of California Department of Health Services. She is represented by Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica.

Rebecca Niederlander is interested in the shift in perception required to see the overlooked splendors. In a site-specific installation created especially for Where We Live, Niederlander explores the 19th century concept of "inscape," or the intrinsic particularity of objects around us. She expands the scale of a normally minute substance-moss-by recreating its delicate fronds and flowers in colored construction paper. Niederlander's work has recently been exhibited in The Political Landscape at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Currently, her work appears in a solo show called The Deep End at Solway Jones Gallery, and will soon be on display in a two-person exhibit with artist Dineke van Huizen at Mirta Demare International Visual Art in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Rebecca Niederlander is represented by Solway Jones Gallery in Los Angeles.

A horticultural factoid brought to the attention of artist Jared Pankin served as inspiration for his OVERTONES--PRESS RELEASE

recent series of wall sculptures. Upon hearing that there are more than 300 species of palm trees, Pankin set out to fabricate his own extensive taxonomy of this exotic plant, which has become synonymous with notions of Southern California. He then placed his detailed and highly whimsical, yet realistic palms into what can be characterized as "rough sketches" of the SoCal landscape, made from chunky and unadorned scrap lumber. In these complex compositions, he makes commentary on the imposition of artificiality upon nature at play in plant husbandry as well as the landscape. Pankin's sculpture will be featured in the upcoming group exhibit SouthwestNet: PHX/LA at the Scottsdale Museum of Art. He has also participated in the group shows Unnatural Beauty at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Lateral Landscapes at RAID Projects, and Animal Instinct at Cerritos College. Jared Pankin is represented by Carl Berg Gallery.

Trained as a photographer, Elizabeth Pulsinelli brings the verit•8 of the photographic moment to precise pen and ink drawings of modernist architecture. The spare, mid-century homes she depicts-commissioned by women but designed by men-were stripped bare of the kind of superfluous surface decoration that early modernists disparagingly associated with the feminine. Pulsinelli undermines the purity of these paragons of high modernist austerity, infecting them with a baroque contagion by filling their interstices and shadows with ornamental doodles. The drawings of Eli Pulsinelli have been displayed in solo exhibitions at the Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Working in miniature, Bill Radawec builds dioramas in which the basement wall of his home in Parma, Ohio is the dominant feature. The anachronistically colored and patterned concrete wall, originally painted by his now deceased father, is recreated by the artist in absolute detail. The basement wall serves as a backdrop for increasingly fantastical yet spare vignettes played out by a lilliputian cast of characters, appropriated by Radawec from model train stores. Coupled with this escalating sense of fantasy, Radawec's numerous revisitations to this odd but banal place begin to take on the characteristics of Existentialist literature, in which repetition became for its writers a structural device for exploring the absurdity of life. In 2003, Bill Radawec was featured as a solo artist at the Irvine Fine Art Center. He was also recently included in the 8 Hour Drawings V exhibit in the Penelec Gallery at Allegheny College. His work will be included in an upcoming three-person show at Beaker Gallery in Tampa, Florida. Radawec is represented by Shaheen Contemporary Arts in Cleveland, Ohio.

Kristina Newhouse is the curator of the Joslyn Fine Arts Gallery, a municipal contemporary arts venue in Torrance, California. She has contributed reviews and articles to Art+Text, Artnet, Sculpture, and New Art Examiner. Currently, she is an editor for the Los Angeles-based arts magazine X-Tra.

OVERTONES is a Los Angeles art venue that supports and promotes creative endeavors in all artistic disciplines, with emphasis on the diversity of Los Angeles communities, emerging and mid-career artists, international collaboration and social responsibility. OVERTONES is dedicated to searching outside the confines of established art institutions and presenting work that has the potential to engage a wide range of audiences.

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