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Identity Exhibition. Gallery Nine5. NYC

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Identity
in collaboration with the Women’s Caucus for Art

In a world dominated by pop culture, society and the media – how is identity defined?

In collaboration with gallery nine5, Karen Gutfreund, Exhibitions Director of the Women’s Caucus for Art, is pleased to announce an international exhibition of 25 works from 21 female artists.

Identity seeks to expose the extremism of a consumer culture dominated by Western notions of beauty and the pursuit of idealized feminine perfection by exploring themes of power, representation and objectification. Female artists, in particular, face the challenge of identifying themselves amidst a society determined to do it for them. The artists featured in Identity attempt to manipulate the boundaries of authority and dominance and explore deeper themes of control. The viewer is challenged to confront his or her own gaze on the body and reflect on the psychological aspects of the female persona. Drawing from a feminist perspective, the selected works aim to define gender and identity through the artist’s terms, whether through accepting or rejecting society’s view, and voicing their individual definitions of the powerful feminine.

Twenty-five works for Identity are showcased in the gallery, with an additional 81 works online. Jurors Anne Swartz and Elena Maria Buszek say of the show’s selection process, “Our respective scholarship on feminist art and activism centers on the image of woman as she evolves, as she looks both outward and inward. Popular culture and stereotypes are evident, alongside meditations on art history, and how visual culture in the broadest sense shapes our identities. Sex, sexuality, and the self-portrait sometimes show up in conjunction or separately.”

The artists in the exhibition at gallery nine5 are Shonagh Adelman, Chan & Mann, Sally Edelstein, Claire Joyce, Lauren Kalman, Beth Lakamp, Jessica Lichtenstein, Jessica Maria Manley, Meghan Mantia and Leone Reeves, Sarah Maple, Ellen Deitell Newman, Samantha Persons, Mei Xian QIu, Jennifer Reeder, Phyllis Rosser, Sonal Shah, Erin Sparler, Joanne Ungar, Cristina Velazquez, and Meghan Willis.

24 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012 • T 212 965 9995 • F 212 965 9997 • www.gallerynine5.com

Trans Angeles. 4.2014.

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Trans Angeles, a crossover experimentation from Southern California – curated by Peter Frank. Opening April 12, 2014 at the Wilhelm Morgner Haus Kunstmuseum in Soest, Germany.

Featuring Fatemeh Burnes, Cosimo Cavallaro, Gisela Colón, Gronk, KuBO, Maya Mercer, Kirk Pedersen, Mei Xian Qui, Katsuhisa Sakai, John White, Jae Hwa Yoo, Zadik Zadikian. Los Angeles has become recognized as a world hub of artistic activity. Long a center of art practice and education – more important on the American scene than any other center besides New York – L.A. secured its place in world art over the past two decades, and now produces young art stars and “re-discovered” veteran experimentalists widely respected in the international discourse.

One of the characteristics of the Los Angeles art scene making it so internationally vital is the willingness of its artists to experiment – indeed, to maintain a tradition of experimentation and unorthodox practice that goes back at least a half-century. And one of the most significant factors here is the easy transition Los Angeles-area artists make between concepts, disciplines, even styles. We in the art world have come to accept that artistic production is distinguished by sensibility rather than by style or even discipline; but in L.A. interdisciplinary practice is almost presumed, collegiality spills over readily into collaboration, and a single artist’s oeuvre can so often comprise artworks that are parallel or even hybrid. Similarly, the lives of the artists themselves are fluid and multi-layered. Many come from other places, and many others go back and forth between them. Many transit between identities and life conditions. Many make their living far from the studio but bring into the studio what they learn on the outside.

“Trans-Angeles” thus demonstrates the inner as well as outer “globality” of the southern California artist. He or she can practice, or build on practices, associated with Los Angeles. She or he can also reflect the peculiarities of the climate, the terrain, or even the local industries (Hollywood not least). But in his or her metamorphic notions of artistic practice, all this becomes part of something bigger, a sense of the world – not just L.A. itself – as a site of transformation, translation, and even transcendence.

SOLO SHOW. KOPEIKIN GALLERY. CULVER CITY – LOS ANGELES

Thin Gallery Logo
Mei Xian Qiu
“Qilin”
reception with the artist

Saturday March 1st, from six to eight
 
 March 1 – April 19, 2014
Kopeikin Gallery presents Mei Xian Qiu’s first exhibition with the Gallery, titled “Qilin” after the Chinese mythical creature, which is itself a combination of the four most sacred beasts in Chinese mythology. It is a creature of innate hybridism and duality, representing simultaneously and truth. Qilins signal the passage of the wise, and is the compass to the West. The exhibition opens with a reception for the artist on Saturday, March first from 6:00 – 8:00 and continues through Saturday, April 19th.
Mei Xian Qiu grew up in Java as a third generation Chinese Diasporic minority during a time when being Chinese was unlawful. Her family immigrated to the U.S. where she has been a student and artist her entire life. Qiu visited China several times seeking out her families past, only to learn that the Country was eagerly shedding its past in order to embrace modernity. She has therefore reconstructed and self invented the unknown, creating fantastical notions of culture by dissecting essential archetypes, revelatory and iconic.This type of flexible self view and easy piercings of notions of the impermeable interior self, are in keeping with the new contemporary landscape of commonplace transience and growing global monoculture.
 
Qiu’s photographs use familiar symbolism and historical dystopianism.  Never forgetful of the past, this body of work engages the constitution of the future, affirmatively critical, specifically with respect to globalism, the identity of the self and self view, the social landscape, post-colonialism, and that of the larger national body politic. 

Qilin is an extension and includes imagery from Qiu’s series “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom,” which portrayed a Chinese takeover of the United States. In the earlier series, hidden political dangers are suggested that must be addressed urgently, but are put aside momentarily, subservient to the romance of “the beautiful ideal.” The models for the imagery are Pan Asian American artists, and academics specializing in Chinese culture, the same group persecuted in China’s “Hundred Flowers Movement.” The costumes are discarded U.S. military uniforms, cheongsams constructed for the photographs, and Chinese mock ups taken from a Beijing photography studio, specializing in getups for foreign tourists to re-enact Cultural Revolution Propaganda imagery.
Kopeikin Gallery 
2766 S La Cienega Blvd (at Washington) 
Los Angeles, California 90034
310-559-0800
info@kopeikingallery.com
www.kopeikingallery.com
Tues – Sat 11:00 – 5:00
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Photo LA 2013