Author Archives: rosebud

Closing Night

The Lovers photo by Mei Xian Qiu

Long Hall Gallery in Plummer Park
7377 Santa Monica Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90046

Round Hole Square Peg, will have its closing night reception on St. Patrick’s Day, Saturday, March 17, from 6-9 PM, at the Long Hall Gallery, in the center of  West Hollywood’s Plummer Park.  A portion of all closing night sales will benefit AIDS/LifeCycle which  helps fund medical care, testing and AIDS prevention services in Los Angeles’ LGBT Center.

Round Hole Square Peg  is a juried, international photography competition – an ongoing quest to discover original visual archetypes for our changing society. This is the third edition of the show, which stages every two years.

In a recent edition of Huffington Post, pop culture journalist, Lisa Derrick states, “Round Hole Square Peg focuses primarily on portraiture, exploring new sexual modalities that redefine the essence/s of what a man or a woman can be. Expect to be challenged and moved by the images.”

What is Queer photography? Is it masculine? Is it feminine? Is it non-binary or genderfluid? Jurors Laura Aguilar, Paul Bridgewater, Zackary Drucker, Bert Green, Robert Summers, and Phil Tarley evaluated over 500 images from 9 countries to select the fifty artist-photographers presented. An expanded Wall of Fame of top LGBTQ photographic artists, curated by Phil Tarley,  makes this an immense and important show with  59 artists showing 69 photographs. Tarley, the founder of Round Hole Square Peg says:

Queer artists have a perspective to contribute to society that is wholly our own. We have developed a unique view of self-worth, self-image, beauty, and love, and we want to share it with the world.  In 2018, Dark Trumpian clouds are forming, threatening to rollback hard-won civil rights.  Having a strong presence in front of a large audience helps the Queer community defy and resist negative stereotypes.  

Photo art sales will be handled by artist-television-drag personality, Sham Ibrahim. Mixmaster DJ Paul V.  will be spinning for the night. Refreshments will be served. Admission is free. Closing night will also include a cycling display from one of the riders from AIDS/LifeCycle, dressed in his riding St Patrick’s Day green.

Gallery hours: Friday, Saturday, Sunday 1-5 pm and by appointment email:roundholesquarepeg3@gmail.com
See the live video feed from opening night and other compelling news items on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Roundholesquarepeg/
Sponsored by City of West Hollywood WeHo Arts Program,
 Tom of Finland Foundation, West Hollywood Lifestyle and Fabrik Magazines.
Link

stARTup Fair Panel: Staying Alive: Side hustles and how they make the artist’s life viable


the Kinney
737 Washington Blvd
Venice, CA 90292

Please go to Links section of the website to view video.

Thanks you Megan and fellow panelists for an enjoyable afternoon!

Moderator: Megan Frances Abrahams? is a Los Angeles based painter, writer and art critic. The editor of Fabrik Magazine, Megan is also an artist member of the Los Angeles Art Association / Gallery 825. She paints between editorial deadlines.

Other Panelists:

Rob Grad is a visual artist, musician and co-owner of a marketing and design agency. His mixed media work has been featured in galleries internationally. One of his commissioned works hangs in the San Francisco Airport. His music has been featured in film and television. Grad was also a TEDx speaker in Culver City, CA.

F. Scott Hess is a Los Angeles based American painter and conceptual artist whose work is represented in international public collections. Hess is an Associate Professor with the MFA & BFA programs at Laguna College of Art + Design.

Brendan Lott is an artist who investigates the formal qualities of painting and photography. He’s always had an eclectic practice not tied to specific medium or materials.? Currently, chance, choice and color are his primary inspiration?s?. Brendan is the former owner of a corner newsstand.

Round Hole Square Peg

Round Hole Square Peg at Long Gallery

Saturday, February 3 from 6-9PM,  Round Hole Square Peg LGBTQ Photo Show  opens at the Long Hall Gallery in Plummer Park,  7377 Santa Monica Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90046.   This show is one of the biggest queer photographic group exhibitions ever staged.   DJ Paul V from Dragstrip 66 will be spinning. Admission is free. Refreshments by Locali.  International drag queen-TV personality, Sham Ibrahim, will be selling photo art raffle tickets to benefit the Trevor Project, a national organization devoted to suicide prevention for at-risk LGBTQ young people. The exhibition will run until March 17, 2018 .

Gallery hours are Friday,Saturday and Sunday 2-5 pm and by appointment 


M.A.S. Attack

GALLERY ONE:

THE FINAL MAS ATTACK

NOVEMBER 12, 5 – 9 PM

LET’S SEE THE MAS OFF WITH A BANG AND A FUN CHANCE FOR SOME NEW FRIENDS TO BE MET AND TO HANG WITH OUR OLD ONES

WEHOVILLE Article

WEHOVILLE ARTICLE

New WeHo Park Mural Suggests Make Love, Not War
Mon, Nov 07, 2016

By Staff
From the “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom” series by Mei Xian Qiu.
“Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom; 8990,” a mural by Los Angeles-based artist Mei Xian Qiu, has just been installed in West Hollywood Park. Presented by the City of West Hollywood through WeHo Arts, the large format piece [9 x 9 feet] is located on the ground floor of the five-story parking structure adjacent to West Hollywood Park and West Hollywood Library. It will remain on view through July 2017.

The image is from a series of photographs that imagines a mock Chinese invasion of the United States. Hidden political dangers are suggested, but rather than being urgently addressed, are put aside momentarily, subsumed to the romance of the Chinese cultural revolution-era’s notion of “the beautiful idea.”

While employing familiar symbolism and historical dystopianism, the work also explores the quest for an inner utopia, a theme common to Xian Qiu’s body of work. As well, the piece references the past yet boldly faces the future – affirmatively critical, specifically with respect to globalism, the identity of the self, the social landscape, post-colonialism and that of the larger national body politic.

 

Mei Xian Qiu
“I thought about if soldiers were countries – what would they do?” said Mei Xian Qiu. “Get into bed with each other, court each other, as governments do? It deals with the issue of identity as something that we create, and how others perceive that in a cultural sense. Especially as urban people, we’ve become so removed from any type of indigenous existence. It leads me to recreate my own fantasy of cultural identity.”

The title plays off Mao Zedong’s quote “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Taken from classical Chinese poetry, this line originated in a 1956 speech in which the then chairman of the Peoples’ Republic of China Communist Party seemingly launched a movement supporting liberalization and freedom.

Mao used the slogan to proclaim a great society where free speech and debate would flourish – as a result, artists, academics, and intellectuals came out of hiding and there was a brief flowering of culture. As the campaign gathered pace, intellectuals began to criticize censorship, the Soviet economic model and human rights abuses. Mao had underestimated the amount of dissent and in 1957 altered his speech to say that intellectual freedom was only valid when it contributed to strengthening communism, sending anyone who contradicted into labor camps.

Throughout Mei Xian Qiu’s “Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom” series, the models are Pan Asian and American artists and academics specializing in Chinese culture, the very sorts of people at risk in a Hundred Flowers Movement. The costumes include discarded U.S. military uniforms, cheongsams constructed for the photographs and Chinese mock ups taken from a Beijing photography studio, specializing in outfits for foreign tourists to re-enact Cultural Revolution propaganda imagery.

Mei Xian Qiu’s own story clearly informs her work. She was born in the town of Pekalongan, on the island of Java, Indonesia, to a third generation Chinese minority family – when it was illegal to be Chinese in Java. Her village had no cars, just horse-drawn carts and bicycles.

At birth, her parents gave her multiple names – Chinese, American and Indonesian – in preparation for societal collapse and variant potential futures. In the aftermath of their homeland’s Chinese and Communist genocide, the family emigrated from Java to the United States. During her childhood, she was moved back and forth several times between the two countries as her parents weighed what they perceived as the amorality of life in the West against the uncertainty of life in Java.

Partially as a result of a growing sense of restlessness, her father joined the U.S. Air Force and the family lived throughout the country, sometimes staying in one place for just a month at a time. The artist has also been based in Europe, China, and Indonesia as an adult (www.meixianqiu.com).

 

8990