Exhibition Review III: Monster Drawing Rally 2009, The Outpost for Contemporary Art

This past Sunday, community members of North East Los Angeles ventured to the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts to witness artists producing their crafts. An exhibition whose proceeds supported the Outpost for Contemporary Art, a non-profit devoted to cross-cultural exchange and local artist collaborations by developing artistic projects that stimulate social interaction and emphasize process, the Monster Drawing Rally featured a live drawing event consisting of four, one-hour shifts with 25 contemporary Los Angeles artists creating work simultaneously each hour. As the artworks were completed, they were displayed on the gallery walls for viewing and purchase. Far from a traditional gallery show, the spectators watched 100 artists draw, paint, collage, and silkscreen in rapid succession in a sort of controlled artistic chaos that was invigorating and fascinating to view.

Walking in between clusters of slightly intoxicated guests to the circle of tables where the artists produced their works under the curious eyes of spectators, I was quickly drawn to the paintings of a young artist, Jessica Minckley. A recent Otis College graduate whose work has been shown at LA Louver in Venice as well as Carl Berg Gallery where she held her first solo exhibition, I watched as Minckley dipped her brush in vibrant watercolors to paint text and drawings over torn pages from an antique book. Describing her work as recontextualized found objects that are “sentimentally charged” with spiritual or psychological suggestions, her works appear deeply personal and intimate, as if the viewer is allowed to peek into Minckley’s thoughts and ponderings on old words written on a yellowed page. An example of such work is a piece titled “Without Representation,” in which Minckley draws swirling, delicate lines that come to create a circle on an old book page displaying the words of an Arab proverb: “Happy who has seen the most water in life.” The blue lines appear as a musing on the proverb, their flowing quality seeming to move like water, and their circular shape indicating some type of constant, ongoing eternity. The work appears peaceful and somewhat mysterious, as it is up to the viewer to ultimately make sense of the combination of Minckley’s drawing mixed with the previous words on the page. A seemingly hermetic process that depends on her own inner perceptions, interests, and vocabulary inspired or conjured by the text on the book page, Minckley’s work displays quietude and introspection.

Jessica Minckley, Without Representation.

Leaving Minckley’s table in a surreal, pensive state, I floated towards the table featuring artist Brian Bress, whom I found hunched over a stack of magazines, feverishly cutting away. An artist that works in many mediums including photography and video (which he described as “mindless dabblings”), Bress’s comment and collages reminded me of surrealist works by Max Ernst in which he would unconsciously mix and match images of old etchings and mass culture advertisements to create bizarre works that leave the viewer to wander through their absurd complexities without ever really finding a clear meaning through the cuts and clippings. In Bress’s collage, “D.B.,” a portrait of a woman is covered in long, cut up images of flowers, vines, and tree branches to create a biological veil that covers her face. Bress also places more vine-like, crawling collage pieces at the bottom of the work, which stand stiffly as menacing knifes. Rather than a candid image of a beautiful woman, Bress’s interference complicates and disrupts the original photograph, displacing its original signification with added, disjointed collage pieces. While the original intent of the image of the woman is still intact, it is complicated through Bress’s manipulation. As the viewer attempts to negotiate between the woman and the tangle of vines and bark in front of her, the images, while distinct, must be read through each other, thus confusing the relationship of either image to its signifier. Bress’s collages strike me as similar to a surrealist or post-modern exploration into found images and their intentions, and the frustration or anxiety of the viewer when s/he cannot read the collage in any given way.

Max Ernst, Untitled.

Brian Bress, D.B.

Lastly, I would like to describe the work of an artist I stumbled upon before exiting the Monster Drawing Rally. Stuck in the corner table next to a plethora of large sound equipment, Sarajo Frieden sat with her drawing pencils spayed out on the table, creating tiny geometric shapes which she then connect together with embroidery thread. In Frieden’s work is the element of the handicraft, as she frequently implements sewing and needlework into her canvases. As she noted in her artist statement displayed at the Monster Drawing Rally, the location of her Los Angles studio, situated between Little Armenia and Koreatown, acts as “a host of disparate vocabularies from the worlds of fine, folk, and decorative art,” the influence of which can be seen in her folktale, narrative works. In her work, “Landscape 1,” Frieden depicts a fairytale vista in which multi-colored cloud forms emit rays of intricate, embroidered patterns. Geometric mountains and hills sprout from the ground while other indeterminate, yet seemingly fitting abstracted shapes float calmly throughout the piece. The cacophony of color, shape, and line draw attention to the simple landscape as one that is not realistic, but created through the hand of an artist who experiences different languages, cultures, and histories on a daily basis. Watching Frieden work was almost as mystifying as one of her drawings, as she held most all of her pencils in one hand, and appeared to scribble rapidly, as a child would, onto paper to make her artwork. Her dreamlike creation, along with the works of Minckley and Bress, cemented my afternoon as a transportation into the minds of other human beings, and their consequent views of the surrounding world.

Sarajo Frieden, Landscape I.