Juan Travieso’s “Entropy” Closes Out June at Thinkspace Projects Culver City

JUAN TRAVIESO
Entropy
June 30, 2018 – July 21, 2018

(Los Angeles, CA) – Thinkspace is pleased to present new works by Cuban-born painter Juan Travieso in Entropy. Currently based out of Miami and New York, Travieso creates visually complex worlds suspended in a state of fracture. Dismantled into seismic shards, these fragments are subject to the disorienting effects of constant spatial interruption. Combining a realist painting technique with surreal juxtapositions, spatial splicing, bright palettes, and geometric abstraction, Travieso conveys the textures of a universe in breach, distorted and split by its endless potential for loss. Fascinated by the extinction of countless endangered species and the often irrevocable influence of human intervention, Travieso presents the reality of a world in transition. His compositions often look like digitized renderings, informed by the awkward, artificial simultaneity of 3-D models, and devolve in moments to pixelated digital facsimiles, reminding us of the unavoidably temporal nature of disappearance.

Travieso was born in Havana, Cuba. He credits his love of color in his work to the scarcity of resources in his home country, a stark contrast to the sheer availability of art supplies and imagery in the US. Inspired by this profusion of access to information and paint colors, the artist has taken on a series dedicated to endangered bird species, capturing them on the cusp of imminent disappearance. In the works, their facets are compartmentalized into geometric patterns and their edges striated to dissolve into quasi-architectural grids. A requiem of sorts for the irremediably compromised state of our biodiversity, Travieso’s paintings capture the cataclysmic energy of its decay and the transience of this biological exhaustion and loss, proposed in stark contrast to the permanent ambitions of the digital age. This re-articulation of environmental damage through the visual and graphic language of digital culture gets at the fundamental contradiction between the organic and the artificial, the finite and the infinite; the natural world is forever at odds with the perpetuity of artificial, manmade technologies.

As an activist and environmentalist, Travieso hopes that his dynamic works will draw attention to the ecological carelessness we’ve abetted and the necessity of our continued vigilance in the preservation of what’s left. This compassion for the vulnerable and voiceless has clear political affinities for Travieso, relating to his personal experiences growing up in Communist Cuba where persecution for perceived dissent was a constant threat and the silencing of censorship unavoidable. Perhaps in keeping with this tendency to combine oppositions like freedom and constraint, Travieso depicts the lawlessness and diversity of nature at odds with the enforced geometry of human constructs.

Wiley Wallace’s “Stay Connected” Closes Out June at Thinkspace Gallery

WILEY WALLACE
Stay Connected
June 30, 2018 – July 21, 2018

(Los Angeles, CA) – Thinkspace is pleased to present Stay Connected, featuring new works by Phoenix-born painter Wiley Wallace. Playful and ambiguous, his luminous and ostensibly radioactive worlds suggest a metaphysical interest in the possibility of alternate realities: the endlessly shapeshifting and protean nature of fantasy at the intersection of the imagined and “real.” Wallace’s paintings combine realistic rendering with elements of the surreal, and near-magical references that include eerily cast light sources bordering on the supernatural. Playful and macabre, his works combine intense thematic contrasts between light and dark to achieve suspense and evasion.

Children are a recurring theme in his compositions, representing a kind of primordial link to something invisible and beyond comprehension, exempt from the rationalizations of the adult. Often using his own children as models, Wallace’s narratives are open-ended, filled with suggestion and partial disclosures rather than forceful assertions or posited certainties. The themes of connection and communication resonate throughout Wallace’s imagery, as the works’ protagonists seem ever in search of fugitive contact. The skeleton is a recurring figure throughout Wallace’s imagery as well, appearing at times as a sinister harbinger of some kind and at others as Halloween costume level kitsch.

Wallace’s pieces convey a kind of sci-fi nostalgia harkening back to a Spielberg-era of extraterrestrial-themed filmmaking. At times their implied innocence and naiveté give way to darker and more dystopian readings, surfacing amidst the neon-hued glow.

Fuco Ueda & Small Works Opening Reception

The opening reception of Fuco Ueda’s “Odd Eye” was a beautiful exhibition to close out the year, as our Small Works Holiday Group show was a visual celebration of some of the talented artists we worked with this year. With holiday parties, shopping, and end of year project(s) wrapping up we are grateful to those who chose to spend their Saturday night with us in Culver City. We are excited for 2017 and all the amazing work we will be able to share with our amazing supporters.

Make sure to come in and see Fuco Ueda’s work now until December 31st. Please note that pieces from the small works show will be available for pickup at the gallery on Friday, December 23rd. And lastly, we will be closed Saturday, December 24th to spend time with our families.

Thank you again for another fantastic year!

Upcoming Exhibition at Thinkspace Gallery – Allison Sommers’s ‘Bruxism’

Allison Sommers Postcard

Allison Sommers
Bruxism

September 17, 2016 – October 8, 2016

(Los Angeles) – Thinkspace is pleased to present Bruxism, a solo exhibition of new works by Brooklyn-based artist Allison Sommers. In her sixth exhibition with the gallery, Sommers presents new mixed-media works that veer increasingly towards an expressionistic abstraction of the figurative. Known for her imaginative and irreverent worlds of creature curiosities and disobedient bodies, Sommers conveys an irrepressible disquiet through an undoing and upended capsizing of skins. Anatomically impressionistic, and at times barbaric, her renderings of bodies and humanoid animals appear in a state of troubling excess, rupturing through the flawed boundaries of their outsides. She presents us with a nightmarish vision of embodiment, reminding us of the body’s impermanence and mortal failure while revealing the uncomfortable beauty of the abhorrent.

Sommers’ vaguely apocalyptic world is aesthetically fraught and anxiety-ridden. Simultaneously gestural and painstakingly contained, a sustained tension emerges between the loose and the drawn, the chaotic and the controlled. Evocative and symbolically open-ended, her imagery evolves through exhaustive sketchbooks and the wrought work of constant mark making. Though familiar, her creatures are at far enough of a remove from the real to evade heavy-handed horror. The surreal proportions of the grotesque keep the imagery on another, more poetically licentious, plane. Seductive and simultaneously pained, Sommers’ world of viscera loosely intermingles violence with calm, the sacred with the profane, and the hideous with the alluring. The brutality of the flesh is an unavoidable precondition of the self, in both its violence and vulnerability, a theme that continues to seep from her work.

Sommers describes her process as one of frenetic distillation, a constant consumption and extraction of experience and influence. Working across a variety of media, she creates installation and sculptural-based works from found materials and altered remnants alongside her two-dimensional pieces. Starting from sketchbook drawings, Sommers builds her paintings through the accretion of marks and materials, layering drawing in various media such as graphite, copier pencil, wax crayon, china marker, magic marker, ballpoint pen and fountain pen, and interspersing these with layers of gouache, her preferred painting medium.

A former history major fascinated by 18th,19th and early 20th, Century historical and cultural themes, Sommers’ work has become decreasingly narrative-based over the years in favor of a more interpretative exploration of its various inheritances. She is interested in what she has called the “scale of grief” in the interwar period, a legacy of existential distress explored by the likes of Francis Bacon, George Grosz, and Otto Dix, all of whom she identifies as influences. Sommers invokes this dissociative experience of the body as a philosophically fractured, psychically incohesive, and ultimately disjointed vessel for the self. Though she dissuades an overly prescribed interpretation of her work, preferring to keep it loosely associative, Sommers’ references and allusions are complex and nuanced.

Among the themes explored by Sommers in Bruxism are the consuming compulsions and wasting momentums of anxiety, the repetitive and forced nature of nostalgia, and the imperfect and unresolved nature of embodiment. In keeping with her preference for references that function as thematic “scaffolding,” her title refers to “bruxing” the term given to the compulsive grinding of a horse’s teeth.

 New Works by Allison Sommers

New Works by Allison Sommers

New Works by Allison Sommers

New Works by Allison Sommers

Interview with Curiot for “Act 1: Warped Passage”

interview with curiot

Thinkspace Gallery is proud to present Curiot’s solo exhibition Act 1: Warped Passages, in the gallery’s main room. In anticipation for the show, we have an exclusive interview with Curiot that is a soundbite into the artist’s mind. Short and sweet; discover the inspiration behind the show, a symbolic day in the studio, and what he wishes was invented.

SH: Last year in an interview with The Hundreds, you go into detail about your California upbringing and wanting to move to Mexico, care to share some of that story with our readers here?
C: Yeah, after high school I wasn’t doing much so I decided to move back to Mexico and ended up studying art.

Curiot New Work

Curiot New Work

SH: You’ve mentioned that you’re outside environment and Mexican culture strongly inspires your work, is your studio a blank slate or do you surround yourself with inspiration within the studio as well?
C: I just go with the flow with whatever interests me at the moment. The work itself takes me down different paths, just try to stay open as possible.

SH: What is the inspiration or narrative behind the current exhibition?
C: The strangeness of life and this question of what is real, are we all just part one highly elaborate simulation? Some little kids project from some super advanced race haha.

Curiot New Work

SH: A handful of your pieces involve mixed media and elements of folk art, like weaving or carpentry, did you collaborate on those pieces or teach yourself the trades?
C: I like to make everything myself but there are some exceptions, like the pieces I’ve made in the past that incorporate knitting, my friend Julieta helped me out with that. I try to learn as many skills as I can so I have full control over the creative process.

SH: What does a day in the studio look like?
C: Like a leaf in a pond

Curiot New Work

SH: Your pieces involve a lot of detail from subtle shifts in tones and to different patterns, is it safe to say your process is almost meditative?
C: Very, it’s what I love the most, the loss of time and the thought process that surges from that state.

SH: Favorite Mexican folktale?
C: Popol Vuh, so good!

Curiot New Work

SH: The beasts in your work possess a god like quality and interaction with the human-like figures in your work, can you elaborate on the dynamic of these creatures to the rest of the world they inhabit? Or outline what their presence symbolizes?
C: Always considered them as creatures from the spirit realm.

SH: Favorite Color?
C: It’s always fluctuating, right now it’s lavender before it was indigo haha

SH: What do you wish was invented? Would it help your artwork, your life, or the world?
C: A real fucking spaceship! None of this rocket bs. Let’s see what’s out there!

Curiot New Work

Please join us this Saturday, May 28th from 6-9pm for the Opening Reception of Act 1: Warped Passage. The show will not only feature a collection of new paintings but two new digital editions and an adventurous installation component, including musical accompaniment from Franz (Pira MD Records).   To catch a sneak peak of what is happening inside the gallery, add us on snapchat at thinkspace_art , as we’ve already shared Curiot shopping through yards and yards of brightly colored fabric. What could he be making?