WOMEN in the CITY

"Women in the City" is an ongoing viral public art exhibition spread throughout the streets of Los Angeles.

Why "Women in the City?" One of the fundamental achievements of the historical feminist movement was... more >

"Women in the City" is an ongoing viral public art exhibition spread throughout the streets of Los Angeles.

Why "Women in the City?" One of the fundamental achievements of the historical feminist movement was the appropriation of the streets: thousands of women were invading the cities of the western world fighting for their rights. Now that those rights have been asserted and women have begun to fully permeate and influence politics, culture and the art system, "Women in the City" can showcase the art of women in empowered position. < less

Based in Los Angeles, Weber is an artist who creates works of fantasy and fiction utilizing... more >

Based in Los Angeles, Weber is an artist who creates works of fantasy and fiction utilizing collage, installation, video, performance, and music. By combining her own mythology of creatures, animals and female characters with costuming on stage sets, she creates narratives of passion, transformation, and discovery. Weber has had solo shows in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, and Stockholm, and has had video screenings and performances throughout the United States and Europe. In 2009 Weber had a show at Marc Jancou Contemporary New York and at Simon Lee Gallery, London where she showed images of her work in collage and sculpture including her most recent film featuring her ventriloquist dolls. She recently had a film and installation retrospective show at Le Magasin - Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France. Marnie Weber is represented by Patrick Painter Inc. in Los Angeles. Her next show will be with West of Rome Public Art at the Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California.

Weber's new film adopts the expressionistic aesthetic of early black and white silent movies. The pure and innocent Gothic heroine, played by Marnie Weber, is depicted in a mystical landscape populated with a menagerie of the grotesque. Weber is one of the few female artists to explore the concept of "horror" in her work.

The exhibition will be open to the public from November 13th through December 20th, where the film will be screened regularly in a gallery on site, along with collages by the artist. This exhibition will mark the last appearance of The Spirit Girls, who will leave their earthly bodies. As a continuation of this project, Weber will debut her new noise band, Fäuxmish, in December 2010, where she will demonstrate "simplicity through noise."

Marnie Weber is an artist and musician living in Los Angeles, known for her imaginative multimedia exhibitions, performances, films and music videos that immerse the viewer into an ethereal world of the uncanny and grotesque. By combining her own mythology of creatures, animals and female characters with costuming and stage sets, Weber infuses dream-like narratives—seemingly unfixed in time—with a sense of the familiar.

Opening Night
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
6:30pm to 10:00pm
Ticketed Special Event

The exhibition is free and open to the public
November 13th – December 20th, 2010
Hours: Saturday through Monday
11:30am to 3:30pm and by appointment < less

Partners

Partners

Mountain View Cemetery & Mausoleum
Jay Brown
Sharon Northrup

Support by California State Summer School for the Arts Foundation and a grant by The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the Sundra Foundation Distinguished Visiting Artist-in-Residence at California Institute of the Arts

Emerging in the early eighties, Bolande pioneered in an intuitive form of conceptualism using... more >

Emerging in the early eighties, Bolande pioneered in an intuitive form of conceptualism using photography, sculpture, drawing, collage, film, and installation. Frequently hailed for her early exploration of the relationship between photography and the object, Bolande's continuing subjects are silences, absence, disappearance, expectation, states of becoming, matters of history and memory.

Acutely aware of transient nature of things, her work is often sited on something in the process of changing, becoming obsolete, or disappearing. Her work calls into question distinctions between event and object, between the real and the imaginary, received and emergent meanings. In the process, palpably physical things are made to seem insubstantial or transitional and ephemeral things made concrete.

West of Rome Public Art continues its Women in the City series with Jennifer Bolande's "Plywood Curtains", a series of site-specific sculptural installations designed to activate the windows of empty storefronts all over the greater Los Angeles area.

Curtains are thresholds into other realms, theatrical, public, and/or private. They can signify both the end and also the beginning of something. Plywood, one of the most prevalent and least expensive building materials, is often used to "board-up" windows and doors in the event of vandalism, fires, flooding, and on closed or vacated properties. Bolande will use vacant storefronts to stage her project, bringing a different kind of attention to spaces that are momentarily empty and neglected. Bolande's "boarded" windows solicit a double-take, deceiving at first glance as a sign of construction or destruction. A second look reveals that they are not rigid at all, but pleated fabric curtains in the image of plywood. Made by photographing sheets of plywood, the image is then printed on fabric at actual scale, and made into curtains. That which at first appeared impenetrable and abject is revealed to be mobile, yielding, even beautiful. The curtains will draw attention and significance through the repetition of encounters viewers have with the work while driving or walking by. store front windows.

The first curtains will go up in July 2010, and will increase in number and change location following the changing real estate landscape. "Plywood Curtains" was born out of West of Rome Public Art's mission of supporting the realization of public art projects in unusual locations throughout Los Angeles, while engaging the public in experiences unique to the city and related to the present. < less

Partners

Partners

Lithographix

Edward Matevosian
CB Richard Ellis

Douglas Chrismas
Ace Gallery

Properties

1

Mr. William Annabi, Property Owner and Lincoln Avenue Project Area Committee Member
236 W. Mountain Street, Suite 201
Pasadena, CA 91103
626.794.0775

2

Land Advisors Organization | California Division
201 South Lake Avenue, Suite 500
Pasadena, California 91101
626.376.9840 | 949.852.8108 Fax

The Land Advisors Organization, California Division covers residential land activity in 40 counties up and down the State of California. ÊNo other brokerage firm in California has the in depth local knowledge of residential land than the Land Advisors Organization.

3

The Icon is a professional photo lab providing traditional and digital imaging services. We offer E-6 processing, C-41 processing, black and white film processing and film developing. Our services include: traditional custom color and black & white printing and proofing, digital capture, RAW file processing, online file management, digital imaging, film scanning, photo retouching, museum- quality fine art digital printing, and archival digital storage services under one roof. We cater to professional photographers, photo hobbyist, artists and creative professionals in Los Angeles and throughout the world.

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Parker Jones

Early in her career, Holzer began to use text to manipulate the language of pop culture. She developed slogans that were... more >

Early in her career, Holzer began to use text to manipulate the language of pop culture. She developed slogans that were appropriated from common colloquialisms. Truisms, a series started in 1977, were constructed deliberately to challenge the viewer to question the blank-faced consumption of stereotypes. Statements such as, "Men are not monogamous by nature," and "Enjoy yourself because you can't change anything anyway" invaded the city in a variety of media, such as posters pasted anonymously within the public sphere, oftentimes alongside works by graffiti legends. Later, she developed texts that were displayed on LED screens and projected onto buildings, transforming the street into a canvas for ideas, and confronting the audience with the status quo.

The Survival Series (started in 1983) is a set of aggressive phrases meant to propel the passive viewer into an act of questioning. Slogans such as, "The beginning of the war will be secret," "The future is stupid," and "Men don't protect you anymore," were printed on stickers that were widely distributed by hand to a common audience meant as a form of propaganda.

In Inflammatory Essays (1979-82), Holzer olzer wrote texts that were influenced by major political figures such as Emma Goldman, Mao Tse-Tung, and Vladimir Lenin. Inflammatory Essays were pasted on walls as posters throughout heavily populated areas of the city.

"Women in the City" conceives of contemporary Los Angeles as a site for the recontextualization of Holzer's political language within the social framework of the city because of its developing areas, its unique sprawl and the diverse cultures that inhabit it. To affect the topographical and social landscape both aesthetically and politically, "Women in the City" has taken into consideration the dense layers of ethnicities that reside within the megalopolis. Inflammatory Essays will be dispersed in both English and Spanish throughout all areas of the city in order to appeal to a prominent Latin American demographic. Posters will be placed in storefronts, alongside advertisement billboards and in pedestrian areas. Truisms occupy citywide LED screens, banners, and marquees. Survival Series are distributed as stickers throughout Los Angeles clubs, shops and will also be inserted into the LA Weekly on February 14. < less

Partners

Partners

Hollywood & Highland Center
Internationalist Marketing/TheBooth.net
LA Weekly
Museum/ of/ Traffic
National Promotions & Advertising
Primary Color
The Roosevelt Hotel
The Standard Hotel, Downtown, LA

Kruger's work emerged in the late 1970s, in an era that developed ideologies now considered postmodern, when... more >

Kruger's work emerged in the late 1970s, in an era that developed ideologies now considered postmodern, when the idea of the author and originality were debated and artists began to appropriate and deconstruct images already in circulation.

Kruger, having initially worked for Condé Nast publications as head designer at Mademoiselle magazine, buttressed a visual language informed by advertising. Reproducing the codes of mass media in an attempt to expose and disable them, she focused on the deconstruction of stereotypes and clichés through the pairing of images with text. For example, the sentence, "Your gaze hits the side of my face" is superimposed over an image of a female portrait head. In so doing, she forces us to question the stereotypes embedded within advertising, most often related to gender.

To further deploy methods of advertising as counter-propaganda, Kruger's work is not only shown in galleries and museums internationally but also appears within the mainstream, in public spaces such as bus stops and billboards. For "Women in the City," the artist has created a new work, Plenty (2008), with texts in a short sequence that deconstructs stereo- types of consumerism, such as spirituality and identity. The video uses seductive, recognizable images under the guise of advertising to address habits typical of Angeleno drivers, commuters, and consumers and to inject a public art piece into a space where it may be confused with advertisement.

Plenty is being screened in three different high-traffic areas citywide. The first is installed on a video billboard on the top tier of LACMA West, visible from Fairfax and 6th Street. The video is also visible on two preexisting electronic billboards on Sunset Blvd in West Hollywood, screened in fragments between actual advertisements. < less

Partners

Partners

Background Images
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Museum/ of/ Traffic
Primary Color

Lawler's most renowned photographic work questions how an artwork becomes historicized, by capturing... more >

Lawler's most renowned photographic work questions how an artwork becomes historicized, by capturing the social framework that surrounds it. She photographs the works of other artists as they are displayed within private collections and museums, re-presenting the work through photography in a way that exposes the institutional context that gives the artwork its value.

Birdcalls, a sound piece from 1972/1981, mocked the inequity between male and female representation in the art market of the time. By recreating the phonetic pronunciation of the names of male artists as sounds that mimicked the cry of birds, Lawler transformed surnames synonymous with success into mating calls.

"Women in the City" restages Birdcalls at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino. The installation, normally shown in galleries or museums, is recontextualized within a natural environment where it is concealed by the institution that frames it. By deliberately displacing the installation within a simulated natural setting controlled by culture (such as a botanical garden), the work throws into question the power an artist retains when set outside of the museum.

A Movie will be shown without the picture, originally presented at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica in 1979, was an appropriation of a feature film. The film was screened as sound only. The intent was to withdraw the archetypal feminine image from the picture in order to suspend the satisfaction of visual pleasure and assert that the general gaze was a male gaze. Now, "Women in the City" rescreens A Movie will be shown without the picture at its original location, at the Aero Theater, on February 14.

By redisplaying it, "Women in the City" throws into question the legacy of Hollywood's feminine icon. What power does a film retain without an image? Will an audience be satisfied with sound alone, which ultimately brings a greater question to the fore: Is the male gaze still a prevalent power in cinema today? Does contemporary film still rely on woman-as-image to arrest the attention of its viewers? < less

Partners

Partners

American Cinematheque
The Huntington LibraryÊArt Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Museum/ of/ Traffic
Primary Color

She emerged onto the New York scene in the early 1980s alongside post-feminism and punk, yet her... more >

She emerged onto the New York scene in the early 1980s alongside post-feminism and punk, yet her language voiced through the medium of photography and self-portraiture was so unique that it defied categorization.

Acting as both auteur and subject in her early Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), Sherman consciously emulated stereotypical roles of women and then reproduced them as excerpts from a film, appropriating the act of looking to transform it into a narrative in which all eyes were on Cindy, but it was Cindy's vision that directed what was to be seen. By casting herself as the object of desire, her work called into question constructs of identity, voyeurism, the role of a woman, and the role of the artist.

Whether using her image as a subject or objects in place of it, Sherman undeniably succeeded in transforming photography of the 21st century into a medium where representation could explore and transgress binaries of gender, sex and power inherent to art of previous generations. Proving mastery over this specific image-language early on allowed her to develop a genre that to this day is all her own.

"Women in the City" installs four images from this series atop billboards scattered citywide to propel art out of the context of the museum and into the public sphere, transforming a once intimate self-portrait as "film still" into an advertisement of the artist as film-legend. Cindy in various poses, as a nameless persona inserted into the history of the "iconville," Los Angeles, to be forever immortalized as post-feminist icon, mistaken for a nameless Hollywood starlet. < less

Partners

Partners

Hollywood & Highland Center
Museum/ of/ Traffic
Primary Color