GROUP LA Press Release
PRESS CONTACT: ERLA DÖGG / INGJALDSDÓTTIR
FURTHER INFO:
ART@GALLERYSKART.COM
TEL (310) 998-8899
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
GROUPLA 2008 LAUNCHES
An Intimate View of LA
A Digital PHOTO Installation
At MINARC / GALLERY SKARTS
April 4TH through May 17TH 2009
MOPLA PREVIEW RECEPTION: April 4th (7:00pm – 10:00pm)
OPENING GALA: April 11TH 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Hosted by Maker’s Mark
MINARC / GALLERY SKART
2324 Michigan Ave,
Santa Monica, CA
90404
THURSDAY MARCH 26, 2009, Santa Monica – GROUPLA 2008, a consortium of 30 Los Angeles-based documentary artist-photographers will launch An Intimate View of Los Angeles, the first in a series of site-specific digital exhibition installations, under the direction of Helen K. Garber and in collaboration with Bergamot Station-adjacent MINARC/GALLERY SKART.
Each participating photographer has marked their territory – by documenting the neighborhood in which they have chosen to reside, work or play to produce a narrative portrait – all of which have been formatted for a simultaneous looping, modular digital display, to deliver thirty unique, up-to-the-minute perspectives. Project Director Garber describes the overriding goal as “a means to unite the energy field of LA’s creative community.”
The artists of GROUPLA 2008 include Geoffrey Baris, Larry Brownstein, Rose-Lynn Fisher, Lisa Folino, Helen K. Garber, Shelley A. Gazin, Monica Gazzo, Ken Haber, Robert Hale, David Healey, Mark Indig, Judy Lawne, Nancy-Louise Jones, Marina de Leon, Donald Loze, Meg Madison, Jim McHugh, David Meltzer, Ted Meyer, Rosalyn Miles, Tom Paiva, Stuart Rapeport, Leslie Rosenthal, Hamesh Shahani, Kiet Thai, Rae Threat and Lillian Elaine Wilson.
Representing disparate socio-economic values and culturally diverse world-views, they merge with surprising equanimity as images collide in a digital time-capsule. The group will continue and expand as it documents the L.A. social landscape and invites other cities to exhibit at designated sites around the city and the country.
“We didn’t realize what a pivotal year in history 2008 would turn out to be when we started last January. The incredible change in the world’s economy gives the project immediate poignancy,” comments Garber who envisions the project as an evolving and traveling compendium as additional photographers and their cities come on board.
The corpus of photographic work is intended not only to provide a lay-of-the-land experience for viewers, but, to articulate a new view of primal territory as urban hoods bounded and uniquely characterized by historic trajectory and socio-cultural and economic influences are illuminated to assuage our discomfort with one another. The evidence of architecture, artifact, local personality, ethnicity, the unpredictable and the otherwise invisible intersect in counterpoint to zip-coded alienation.
Individually and collectively, the photographers of GROUPLA 2008 and beyond will embrace, update and preserve both the private and populist experience of our topographic and ethnographically defined era through art and information archiving.
HIGHLIGHTS:
The work of GROUPLA 2008 will be complemented by A Night View Collaboration, a 360 degree, 40 foot long panorama of the entire city of Los Angeles as seen from the downtown helipad of the US Bank Tower as created by artist Helen K. Garber to illustrate the vastness of Los Angeles’ terrain. Originally commissioned for the 2006 International Biennale of Architecture in Venice, Italy, Garber later invited locally renowned graffiti writers to use the panoramic print as a surface to ceremoniously tag the entire city of Los Angeles in one swoop, as a parallel to urban blight in all of its manifestations (telephone poles, wires, etc). Garber initially conceived the project to promote the importance of art education in public schools as a force against all forms of urban pollution. Contributing graffiti writers will be on hand at the opening celebrations.
GROUPLA 2008’s An intimate View of Los Angeles will also be a featured exhibition event at the forthcoming Month of Photography L.A [MOPLA], which will present dynamic programming, exhibitions and events designed to engage and stimulate the photography community in April 2009.
GROUPLA 2008’s An Intimate View of Los Angeles will travel for the NY Photo Festival, May 2010.
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