Paul Adair

February - May, 2009

Sculpture / Installation

My work considers both formal and conceptual concerns as a methodology for continued exploration in medium and representation. My particular interest is in artificial spaces and our perceived experiences. I believe the process of re-making objects and environments and re-presenting them photographically (a depiction of a depiction) complicates the relationship beteween reality and representation, offering both new and separate interpretations and responses.

Paul Adair is an artist based in Brisbane, Australia. He graduated with a BFA(Honours) from the Queensland College of Art in 2005 and is represented by Stills Gallery, Sydney.

David Keating (Australia)

August - November, 2009

Mixed media

His most recent work The Objects produced in Los Angeles involves a series of generic abstractions exhibited side by side that an actor re-arranges into new compositions and uses to perform a series of choreographed movements around the gallery. The movements of the actor are incredibly slow and the formal simplicity of her gestures positions her as more of a intermediate cipher between object and audience reinforcing a skepticism towards traditional conventions of display whilst creating a new dramatized version of it.
David Keating was born Melbourne, Australia. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He has been included in exhibitions including Show me don’t tell me for the Brussels Biennial and Tales from the Travel Journal vol. 1 at the Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, Lithuania.

Matt Hinkley

May - August, 2009

Mixed media

Matt Hinkley while in Los Angeles intends to research many of the recently deceased artists works of Bruce Conner, George Herms, George Wagner, Ed Bereal, and Wallace Berman.

Anthony Johnson

November - February, 2009

Sculpture / Installation

Humour is important in the work of Mr. Johnson and tends to pervade all elements of my practice in some form. It acts as a catalyst for breaking down and questioning the status pretensions of Art, the Object and Artist through humiliation and exposure. A suggestive vulnerability is crucial in the work and ones experience of it for the way it can induce and invert empathy and tension.

Israel

Judith Margolis

February - March, 2009

Painter

In Jewish tradition we rip the garment of the bereaved at the funeral to mark the irreparable rending of grievous loss.

After his death I couldn't bear to dispose of my beloved husband's shirts. I had an intense visceral desire to tear up the shirts and to sew them back together again as something new. And my own clothes and things belonging to our children or from our home. Each fragment was charged with memory and meaning. With each stitch I reassembled what had been torn apart.

The sewn pieces are a story I tell myself of how my life was once colorful and beautiful. And that it could be again.

During the open studio event it happened that few different people of the crowds who came through really connected with this work. They took their time to to look closely at the hand stitched details and sat down and engage with me and each other. Some were moved to tears and one woman even took the trouble to copy down text I had put up as impromptu signage.

Although it appears there is a connection between the small images of a woman sleeping under a quilt and the actual hand sewn fabric, in fact I worked on both for about a year and a half after my husband died with out making the connection consciously. It shocked me when a friend who saw the images in a show said "oh these paintings are like your quilt!" I hadn't consciously been aware of the relationship between my paintings and drawings and the actual quilt I was sewing.

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Malaysia

Margaret Bong

December - February, 2009

Video Artist

Margaret Bong is a Malaysian media artist who has written, produced and directed six short films. Her 2005 Lie Beneath was shown in festivals in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore, and her short documentary Tudtu, The Salt Boy, which focus on one of the Indigenous groups has been shown in South Korea, Italy, Brazil and Lebanon. She is fascinated by recollections provoked by photography, and uses her memories and specific personal experiences as themes in her media projects. During Ms. Bong's residency at 18th Street she further developed Singing Tombstone, her feature directorial debut.

Mexico

Joaquin Segura

April, 2009 - June, 2009

Installation / Intervention

Joaquin Segura’s highly-diverse oeuvre meditates on violence as an omnipresent motif in contemporary life, reflecting as well on the crisis of cultural, social & political institutions. It deals with a need of questioning the existence of hypothetical ethical restraints within artistic practice, broadening the limits of what can be done in the name of art. Through his unpredictable works, Segura aims to reach an art of destabilization, elaborating a poetic of sabotage through random acts of gratuitous violence & provocation which actually talk about impotence, denial & deception, here and now.

Clodualdo "Dindo" Llana

April 2009

Painter / Sculpture

Clodualdo "Dindo" Llana is a painter known for his sociopolitical satires that incorporate local cuisine, political leaders, and Filipino folklore. His work carries a sense of cynicism that is both humorous and tongue in cheek. Llana's work is a clash of pop-culture and neo-social realism.

Yung-Chen (Aaron) Nieh (Taiwan)

September - November, 2009

Mixed media

Aaron Nieh (Yung-chen Nieh) is a graphic artist and art director that has created over 1,000 current graphic art works for Chinese pop music albums, movies, performances and book covers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. In recent years, he was awarded “Best Attention” and “Best Art Designer” several times in the annual report of Elite readers. He was also awarded the “Best Cover Art Award” of the Golden Butterfly Award and the “Best 100 Music Artworks and Director” of the International design book “Musikraghics”. His workshop “Aaron Nieh Workshop” was one of the “50 small studios” which was published by Hesign, an authoritative artistic publishing company in Berlin. He's also a member of TDC (Type Director Club), the well-known international creators’ organization in New York.

USA

Robin Adsit

May, 2009

Painter

I became interested in memory, aging and identity while caring for my mother with Alzheimer’s. My new work depicts figures that merge together and suggest replication and/or connection. The deliberate replication, or connection of figures suggests the flux of identity through aging, time, and our changing memories. I am interested in the role of lived experience on memory and our attempts to recover a moment in the past that is unrecoverable. Therefore, I became fascinated with the research of neuroscientist Gary Lynch at UC Irvine. He is looking at the biochemical mechanisms of memory. He has succeeded in visualizing a neural trace of an actual memory. I have started to include some of this research and the visual data in my paintings. The replication of the figure suggests cloning, which I use to investigate the multiple ways identity can be created, and changed through lived experience, genetics, and our memories.

April Banks (2009 Visions from the New Califonia Artist)

March, 2009

Photo / Installation

April Banks, is one of six visual artists in California to be a recipient of the 2009 Visojns from the New Canilfornia award. Selected from a pool of over 180 visual artists state-wide, the six recipients each receive a one-month residency at one of the participating California programs, and a $4,000 unrestricted stipend. Supported by a partnership grant between The James Irvine Foundation and the Alliance of Artists Communities.

April Banks, is photo/installation artist based in Oakland, CA.

www.aprilbanks.com

Sonya Kelliher Combs (Alaska)

December - March, 2009

Painter / Installation

Sonya Kelliher Combs is of native Alaskan descent (Athabascan/Inupiaq) and lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska. In 2008 she was the first Alaskan artist to be in residence at 18th Street, if not Los Angeles. Her recent work is made with polymer, walrus stomach, paper, and nylon thread. Known for abstractions mediated by the materials she employs, many of them particular to Alaskan native culture her work has been seen nationally and at the Anchorage Museum of Art.