Visiting Artists Fall 2009

September 9: GLAMFA Panel Discussion

The Greater Los Angeles Master of Fine Arts exhibition (GLAMFA), organized by the Fine Arts Roundtable of California State University, Long Beach, is one of the largest student­­-conceived and student-organized art events in Southern California history. Now in its fifth year, GLAMFA is devoted to generating and maintaining an active dialogue amongst MFA degree candidates and recent graduates throughout Southern California. For this panel discussion, participants will discuss a range of topics including their individual practices, the history of GLAMFA and the MFA survey exhibition, the state of the MFA institution, the place of theory in art-making, the place of materiality in art-making, and what it means to be emerging into the contemporary art scene today. The discussion will be moderated by CSULB MA candidate and GLAMFA organizer Megan Hoetger. Panelists will include UCSD MFA candidates Micha Cárdenas and Elle Mehrmand; UCR MFA candidate Cameron Crone; CSULB MFA candidates Bryan Allen Moore and Kelly Nye; CSULB graduate and GLAMFA co-founder Jean Robison; recent UCLA graduate Eben Goff; recent CalArts graduate Joanne Mitchell; and recent UCI graduate Andrew Printer.

September 16: Steve Roden

Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. Roden's working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self-invented systems into scores, which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound composition. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions and left turns. Roden has had numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally at such venues as Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Studio La Citta Gallery, Verona, Italy; Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum Of Contemporary Art, EMST Athens. Roden received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1989 and his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 1986.

September 23: George Baker

George Baker is Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, where he has taught modern and contemporary art and theory since 2003. A New York and Paris-based critic for Artforum magazine throughout the 1990s, he also works as an editor of the journal October and its publishing imprint October Books. Baker received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is a graduate of the art history program at Yale University and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has received, amongst others, an Andrew Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, CASVA and Whiting Foundation fellowships, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute. Professor Baker is the author, most recently, of The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT Press, 2007), among other books. He has published essays on a variety of postmodern and contemporary artists including Robert Smithson, Robert Whitman, Anthony McCall, Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller, Tom Burr, Rachel Harrison, and Knut Åsdam.

September 30: Patti Oleon

“The rooms spoke to me about the passing of time, and that this moment is a moment frozen; I could be standing in the space where someone else stood, where someone else was once alive. I felt as if I were standing on a straight line in space with different points along it; time as a dimension, and this was one infinitesimal speck along that corridor. The frozen quality of the space was a frightening marker of passing time.”

Patti Oleon is a nationally recognized artist whose success began as soon as she finished art school. Immediately after graduate school at UCLA, she received a Fulbright/DAAD Fellowship grant to study in Germany. She has also been the recipient of several other grants including the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant, the Ford Foundation Grant, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Oleon's work has been exhibited at numerous venues including ACME. Los Angeles, Angles Gallery in Santa Monica, Modernism, Inc. in San Francisco, Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles, Kidder Smith in Boston, and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Oleon received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978.

October 7: Brian Bress

“Somewhere along the line we’re supposed to figure out that one medium can’t do another’s chores. For instance, a written artist statement can’t stand in for a performative song and dance number. And yet the attempt, however clumsily made or especially if it’s clumsily made, can be better than if everything played its assigned role, spoke its own language, did what it was best at doing.”

Brian Bress is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work includes collages, photographs, videos, and paintings. In addition to an upcoming show at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles, Bress has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Against The Grain (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2008), California Video: Artists and Histories (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), LA Weekly Biennial 2006, Supersonic 2006, and GLAMFA 2006. Bress’s video work has been screened at festivals throughout the world. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006 and his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1998.

October 14: Mark Allen

“How can sculpture and performance affect the viewer in a deep, personal way? How can the viewer be moved from a passive position to a state of engagement and communal experience? I've been working with these concerns since I started graduate school, and my practice has transformed from studio artist to include collaborator, facilitator, and producer as I investigate these questions... My current role as curator/facilitator/producer at Machine Project has allowed me to expand the scale and approach to these ideas. Working directly and collaboratively with gallery artists such as Jessica Hutchins, Brody Condon, David Burns, and Matias Viegener, I facilitate and produce ongoing investigations in these questions. Under my direction, Machine functions as a research laboratory-investigating performance, sculpture and installation as lived experience for the viewer.”

Mark Allen is best known as the founder and director of Machine Project, a groundbreaking and critically lauded experimental art space in Echo Park. Since 2004, Machine Project has organized innovative workshops, screenings, concerts, lectures, parties, and exhibitions of installation and performance-based art. In 2008, Machine Project was invited to orchestrate A Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA, 10 hours of site-specific events and performances at the museum. In 2009, they will be the resident artists at the Hammer Museum. Allen received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1999 and his BFA from Skidmore College in 1993.

October 21: Jenny Schmid

“My work humorously looks at charged situations, from gender and desire, to politics and idealism. I am deeply influenced by the history of printmaking and medieval engraving in particular, including the artists Martin Schongauer, Breughel the Younger, and Ishrael Van Meckenhem. Their work has a connection to contemporary comics (which I also love) but the irony and social commentary is more difficult to unpack and appealingly problematic.”

Jenny Schmid is an assistant professor of printmaking at the University of Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including a recent solo show at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, and published by Cannonball Press, White Wings Press, Egress Press, and Slugfest Printmaking. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the Fulbright grant to study in Slovakia, and her prints can be found in the collections of The Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; and Spencer Art Museum, University of Kansas, among others. Schmid received her MFA from the University of Michigan in 1996.

November 4: Anna Sew Hoy

“I want to present too many physical details, to create an overload of image and texture... The detritus of modern life is organized into something dynamic, energetic, moody, and turbulent. I work by smashing, slapping, and cobbling things together by collage. Any object or material may be used... I have an eye toward the awkward, the asymmetrical, and the irregular, and the will to bring these forms into a disharmonic beauty.”

Anna Sew Hoy’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Electric Mud (Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, 2009), California Biennial 2008 (Orange County Museum of Art), Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists (Hammer Museum, 2007), and One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (Asia Society and Museum, New York, 2006). She has also had solo exhibitions at LAXART and Peres Projects, Los Angeles. Sew Hoy received her MFA from Hunter College, New York, in 2001 and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1998.

November 18: Lara Schnitger

“Sculpture was always something very exciting for me. I wanted to get it off the pedestal; let it walk, talk, move around; play with the space. I always like to see things get made in new ways. I feel myself more a sculptor than an object-maker. I definitely deal with gravity and space and materials.”

Born in the Netherlands, Lara Schnitger has studied at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague; Academy of Visual Art, Prague; de Ateliers, Amsterdam; and Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan. She has had solo shows at Anton Kern Gallery, New York, and the Project Room of the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Her work was also featured in the noted group exhibition THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles (Hammer Museum, 2005). Schnitger lives and works in Los Angeles.