PRESS RELEASE Then zoom became drone. An exhibition by Patricia Valencia and Emmett Walsh June 15, 2013 – July 13, 2012 Gallery hours – Wednesday – Saturday 2 – 7pm Tropico de Nopal Gallery 1665 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90026 (213) 481-8112 Conversation with Artists, Thursday, June 27, 2013 at 7:30PM We will be screening Chris Marker’s film San Soleil after the conversation. Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Sans Soleil is his mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan. Sans Soleil, France, 1983, colour, 103 mins. Then zoom became drone. …‘And so the morning turned out clear and frosty. We each chose our own viewing locations, marking out a spot among the crowd that had gathered in the dark, all of us there to witness a slow illumination. A gold illumination creeping across the wall like the gold ink and leaf of decorative arts, church mosaics, lavish bindings, sought minerals; a gilded, plotted path. A streak coaxed and cajoled in year after year for as long as the window frame stands, or the doors swing open.’ Then zoom became drone, a two-person exhibition with Los Angeles-based artists Patricia Valencia and Emmett Walsh, will present a new three channel video installation, a publication, and sculptural works. The exhibition takes its title from a line in Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf’s final novel published in 1941 after her suicide. It is the artists’ first project with Tropico de Nopal Gallery. Serving as the central core of the exhibition, the video installation – titled 12/21/12: Illuminations – documents the sunrise of the 2012 winter solstice projecting a column of light through the interior of a Mission in northern California. The church’s purposeful architectural alignment and presumed motives are investigated through slow, detailed shots of light and shadow playing on the man-made construction. The accompanying publication is hinged upon a written essay that collects together circumstantial histories and notes on celestial alignments that revolve around the annual event of the sun dissecting the building. Themes discussed include the apocalyptic misreading of Maya cosmology, Western enlightenment tactics of religious conversion, the advent of computer-generated imagery alongside experimental film works of light and colour, and the uncovering of both ancient and contemporary attitudes towards mortality. Then zoom became drone will draw together works that deal with light and the abstraction of imagery both mundane and profound, raising questions about the human preoccupation with gathering mineral and spiritual wealth. Patricia Valencia is an artist working in film, video, and installation. She obtained her MFA from Hunter College, New York in 2008, and was accepted into the prestigious Skowhegen School of Painting & Sculpture in 2003. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, and Glasgow, Scotland. Her first solo show, Without End, is currently at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, a result of the 2013 Feitelson Arts Fellowship Award. Upcoming projects include a two-person exhibition with Emmett Walsh at Pøst Gallery, Los Angeles. Emmett Walsh is an artist working in video, sculpture, and writing. He obtained his MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland in 2008, and completed a Triangle Arts residency fellowship in South Africa in 2010. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in England, Scotland, Germany, France, Portugal, Israel, South Africa and the USA. Upcoming projects include a two-person exhibition with Patricia Valencia at Pøst Gallery, Los Angeles, and a group exhibition at MK Gallery in England, both in summer 2013.
34 Replies to “Conversation with artists Patricia V. and Emmett W. + Screening”
Comments are closed.