The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) - 30 May, iPad drawing printed on four sheets of paper, mounted on four sheets of Dibond, 96 x 72 in. (244 x 183 cm) framed, Edition of 10
David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring | From photographic collages to facsimile drawings, and offset printing with a copier machine to renderings made on a computer, David Hockney has enjoyed a lifelong fascination with using new technology to make pictures. Earlier experimentations were limited to the confines in which the machines were housed. Landscapes were sketched en plein air, and translated onto a computer screen upon return to the studio. This process changed in 2010 when Hockney acquired his first iPad. The portable device, together with a drawing application (or app), provided Hockney with the accessibility to draw at his leisure in any location, without the need of additional materials and supplies. With this newfound tool, all color and mark making effects imaginable were at his fingertips, and quite literally so. The iPad and app enabled the artist to create his subjects with the touch of his index finger and without restriction. "It's all drawing," said Hockney. "It's a new medium for drawing, the iPad, it's like an endless sheet of paper."
Driving L.A. | Driving L.A., a group exhibition of photographs by sixteen artists represented by Craig Krull Gallery will, of course, include pictures made while driving, but it will also explore our lifestyles and built environments as they have taken shape on the streets of L.A. in the form of billboards, dingbats, car washes, drive-ins, freeways and maps-to-the-stars'-homes. But the driving culture of L.A. also includes those stationary cars on Hollywood studio sound stages with a film of passing scenery running behind them. It also includes an imagined L.A., as exemplified by Tim Bradley's staged photo of a model he created of an El Camino with the giant framework of a church under construction on its bed. It is a haunting combination of our peripatetic lives and our often bizarre history of cults and pop-up religions.
Genevieve Chua: Cicadas Cicadas | A site-specific installation that draws from the unique life cycle of periodical cicadas to explore larger notions of potentiality and the idea of a grand escape.
Chua's multimedia practice explores the fear of the unknown, focusing in particular on projections of things that remain unseen. Through an unfurling narrative, the artist constructs alternate realities, which present open-ended questions. In Cicadas Cicadas, Chua uses paintings, objects and sound to create a figuration of the insect and its environment. After disappearing underground for years, cicadas are driven to emerge in great force, and it is this dormancy and eventual uprising that manifests in Chua's installation.
Jess Black: Timely Disorder | Defying convention through his process, Black creates paintings based upon a singular feeling in any given moment - unapologetic, and without regard to what is commonplace or deemed "popular" in the contemporary market today. This organic process yields vastly non-uniform segments of work - idiosyncratic and bold in composition - which could easily appear as if they were created by different artists altogether. In the same way that our contemporary lives are constantly being uploaded, updated, reworked, and re-experienced, so too, does the artist and his work go through an uncertain process from conception to construction - until final culmination.
Lisa Adams: In the Land of Entropic Beauty | The world of Lisa Adams is set in an environ that straddles the imaginary and apocalyptic, replete with thwarted nature and human-built forms constructed from unlikely sources. In the Land of Entropic Beauty expands the artists' vocabulary of imagery and of paint treatments, presenting a version of "beauty" that is conjured from an interior place, referencing the familiar so that the subjects retain a semblance of familiarity, yet are bolstered in mystery and uncertainty.
With an undercurrent of melancholy built upon a dichotomous palette of bright colors and black, the artist feels a palpable sense of a world going wrong in the hands of humans. In The Land of Entropic Beauty no one seems to be bothered by the decay and steady decline into obscurity.
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