FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PRESS RELEASE
February 21, 2001
Inaugural Exhibition: Part I, March 10 – April 16, 2001
Opening reception for the artists, Saturday evening 7 – 10 pm
gallery2211 is a new contemporary art gallery in downtown Los Angeles located at 2211 North Broadway (between Avenue 22 and Avenue 24).
Gallery Hours: Thursday through Monday, 11 am – 6 pm, and by appointment. gallery2211 is owned and operated by Michael Solway and Angela Jones.
Inaugural Exhibition: Part I is a group exhibition of artists based in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Hartford, CT. Elizabeth Bryant, Gomez Bueno, Patrick Nickell, Alan Rath, and Peter Waite. The gallery will open to the public on Saturday March 10. Opening reception for the artists will be from 7 -10 pm. Exhibition continues through April 16, 2001.
Inaugural Exhibition: Part I consists of new works in painting, sculpture, photo based installation, digital robotic sculpture, works on paper, and a new custom designed sound system created by Alan Rath.
Peter Waite and Elizabeth Bryant document actual locations of architecture and landscape as either acrylic paintings on aluminum or as photographic based installation. Peter Waite uses specific sites of urban or rural landscape to construct various meanings often using the juxtaposition of painting to painting. Each of Waite’s chosen sites are void of human figure with the details of each image painted from his memory. In the painting, LA Roof a single plastic patio chair divides the foreground space of a roof top wall and a single potted houseplant. Industrial buildings with daytime Los Angeles haze horizontally separate the picture’s landscape into an image of abstraction.
Elizabeth Bryant places the viewer into multiple exterior worlds at once. In the work Katusura Tea Garden/Autumn Brook, Bryant suspends in the gallery a two sided photograph with silhouetted cut out openings of a traditional Japanese tea garden on an offset printed commercial photo of an idyllic autumn brook scene. The stenciled forms of the Katusura Garden dance with the gallery’s actual windows to the street. Each layer transcends the other to a place of calm as the Japanese garden was intended.
Patrick Nickell’s drawings and sculpture fuse together Baroque style with landscape architecture and botanical design. The sculpture A Place for Daydreams seems to float in the gallery with pistachio painted wood edges, both architectural model and as greenhouse sculpture. The untitled drawings each reference possible botanical life within Nickell’s structures.
Gomez Bueno produces conceptually intriguing paintings that originate from design, surf culture and fueled by the sounds of hardcore and flamenco music.
Bueno’s paintings have a hyper realized retinal immediacy that causes the viewer to act accordingly. In Gomezphonics in Stereo, the paintings are sold as diptych works. The paintings become a tromp l’oeil wall of sound.
For the last ten years, artist Alan Rath has been producing sculpture using digital robotic systems, hand built and engineered in his studio in Oakland.California Landscape, a new digital robotic work consisting of a complex system of computers, software and motors, will move about the gallery on twenty feet of track. Rath has also designed and fabricated for gallery2211 a new custom audio amplifier and speaker system. Rath’s custom-made PA system represents new audio design hand crafted for personal consumption.