Harmony Reverberates Optimism
Opens Friday September 10, 2010 6:30-9:30pm

September 10 to October 29

Curated by Ronald Lopez

Featuring works by Azadeh Tajpour, Kristin Ross Lauterbach & Christina Lee Storm, Lea Redmond, Ofunne Obiamiwe, and SaeRi Cho Dobson

"Harmony Reverberates Optimism" is in-conjunction with the "The Purpose of Being" project at LMU's Thomas P. Kelly Student Gallery (A BCLA Bellarmine Forum event)

For its one year anniversary exhibition, JAUS is pleased to present Harmony Reverberates Optimism curated by Ronald Lopez featuring works by Azadeh Tajpour, Kristin Ross Lauterbach & Christina Lee Storm, Lea Redmond, Ofunne Obiamiwe, and SaeRi Cho Dobson.

In October 2003, Beral Madra, founder of the 1st Istanbul Biennial, wrote regarding the 8th installment curated by Dan Cameron, entitled "Poetic Justice". With its optimistic implications, Mrs. Madra stated that “poetic justice touches the harmony between the aesthetics of the art work and the spiritual needs… harmony reverberates optimism.”

Inspired by this phrase, “harmony reverberates optimism”, Ronald Lopez organizes this current exhibition which celebrates women and their efforts to create social change through their art form. He states, “My desire was for art that not only provokes dialogue but pushes boundaries; art that is active and penetrates society in such a way that it promotes itself fiercely and unapologetically. The works I have decided to showcase are created by women who - in the same fashion as Beral Madra, Molly Murphy MacGregor, Mary Ruthsdotter and Maria Cuevas - aggressively engage society. In each piece the line between art and social activism is blurred and the two are married in such a way that they become a powerfully provocative force.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ofunne Obiamiwe presents her latest project, "Status of Women", an interactive project inspired by Facebook celebrating ten contemporary women and their roles in their respective fields. Obiamiwe presents a video of a constructed forum, ten Facebook like profile pages, and an interactive component which enables viewers to comment on a “wall”, in this case a black book, all revolving around these ten women.

Lea Redmond, with her "Changing Clothes: Care Instructions/Tag Exchange", raises long-lasting social awareness in each viewer. In her effort to “map” clothing labels, Redmond literally requires participants to cut out their own clothing tags and pin them to a map, specifically to the geographic region where the clothing article was made. In so doing, a new awareness is created of the relationship between the clothing’s origin and place of purchase. Redmond implements a minimal approach in creating a socially conscious community that pays more attention to its ecology and the societal mechanisms which exist between the “haves” and the “have-nots”.

SaeRi Cho Dobson, with her installation "7 Deadly Seams", exposes an all too familiar industry to us, the dry cleaning business. What is presented - via typography eloquently printed onto garments covered with slick plastic and hung on typical dry cleaning hangers - are horror stories of a rapidly-growing epidemic of immigrants being ‘taken to the cleaners’ by their customers. With its title, the piece immediately recants Dante’s Inferno with a modern twist. The elegantly seductive design operates in beguiling contrast to some of the most atrocious stories. If studied closely, one cannot leave the piece without feeling sick.

Kristin Ross Lauterbach and Christina Lee Storm's latest video art project, "Flesh", explores how U.S. citizens participate in the proliferation of human trafficking in the United States and around the world. The 12-minute video follows three survivors from slavery to freedom. Kristin approaches her work with great conviction as she pulls open the curtain to let us see a world to which we may have otherwise been blind. With an astute and unflinching eye, and music video like editing, the viewer is taken on a journey from a candy-coated world into the underbelly of a dark and desolate reality.

Azadeh Tajpour employs a subtle approach yet devastating approach in confronting mortality in Iraq. The "Iraqi Body Count" installation, at first glance may appear to be a dark room filled with rubbish, thousands of random strips of paper. Upon further inspection, however, one realizes that each strip has a name, a gender, an age and/or a job description. These words describe those that have been killed during the occupation of foreign enterprises upon Iraqi soil. Tajpur’s piece urges not only an intellectual, but more so a psychological, emotional and physiological response from the visitor regarding the accumulation of data spread across the floor and strategically placed on the gallery wall.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Ronald Lopez is an artist and curator with a devotion to emerging art, social justice, and alternative explorations. He specializes in creative access and traverses through social networks. Lopez has produced provocative art for more than a decade and has helped to implement city art programs in Los Angeles and Istanbul, Turkey.

While in Istanbul, Lopez founded and developed the Aden Art Center (March 2002), a national, non-profit creative center for young and emerging artists. The Center featured an international program that included an artist-in-residence program and an exchange component for festivals.

Highlights from his curatorial practice include "And That’s How it Ended?" / "The Divorce Show" (2007) at McNish Gallery, Oxnard, CA; "Does Religion Kill?" (2006) at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA, also showcased as a parallel exhibition during the 9th Istanbul Biennial in (2005); and "Behind These Walls" (2006) at Self-Help Graphics, Los Angeles, CA.

Lopez has also participated in public art forums at the Arts Initiative Symposium in Yokohama, Japan; Alliance for Artists Communities' annual conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and at the Res Artis' annual conference at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.

Lopez is a recipient this year of a NAMAC Fellowship. He presently serves as the Program Coordinator at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California.
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confes(s)ion(e)s

6 Artists Working In Tijuana

Featuring Works By: Mely Barragán, Miguel Fernández, Hugo Lugo, Mayra Huerta, Daniel Ruanova, Shinpei Takeda

Opens Friday July 23 6:30-9:30p.m.

Curated by Marcela Quiroz

"Sharing a secret isn’t knowing it or breaking its promise, it is sharing something ignored: nothing known, nothing that can be determined." ~J. DERRIDA

In one of her least know essays, Spanish philosopher, María Zambrano makes an intriguing commentary regarding artistic practice. Discarding the useless attempt at paraphrasing her words – having the absolute need to have the author’s unadulterated voice read/heard - I transcribe the passage that will guide this brief reflection: “A confession searches for, not a virtual time, but a real one; thus, not daring to settle for a virtual temporality, it stands still precisely at that place where the real time is to take place. This is the time that can’t be transcribed; a time that cannot be captured, it is the unity of life that no longer needs to be expressed. That is why all art possesses some deviated form of confession, sharing, at times, the same objectives as confession, recreating itself as it unfolds, and detains and spends time as if it were a supreme human luxury.”

Let us walk by Zambrano’s side for a moment, and consider her reflections as a pretext for examining the confessions that—already encapsulated—pervade in the works which comprise this exhibition. Let’s talk about that temporality which escapes completely from discursive approaches; a temporality waiting as a promised threshold to be wandered in the somewhat uncanny spatiality the work of art appears to offer. For, according to Zambrano, a confession does not exist in language, rather it happens actively while it inhabits and engenders the act of speech. This is why those who speak and those who hear a confession participate in the complicity that beholds this uncertain temporality that exists in anticipation of the continuity of time. As if the time that hadn’t (still) been spoken from which a confession is nurtured had carried within itself enough beheld strength—existing as a (de)historicized wound—to be able to situate the confessed secret in a spatiality of infinite potential.

Assuming the validity of this active present that Zambrano claims in relation to a confession, the realization of an irreducible subject could be found in its temporality. This fractured subject in its shattered condition gives of itself completely, and negates the relinquishment of being. For life needs to express itself beyond reason and imposed orders. With all its urgency, it is important to understand that a confession does not participate in an impulsive manner that places itself at risk. Any confession takes place within the realm of defeat. Therefore, the word which names it connotes the silence of that which has been (until now) kept unsaid; that which now runs away from itself. This is the reason why he who confesses has the possibility of constructing a recreation of time rescued from a past that (until then) hadn’t really belonged to him, a past that had been ‘other’.

The works in this exhibition wander the proximities of this confessed temporality searching to find that unity of life which would no longer need for words. In each of them exists something that has been already spoken, so the work of art becomes a means of perpetual disclosure of its needs. They interact in this almost-present temporal space, sharing with others who listen and receive its fragility. In spite of their ‘non-confessable’ nature, these works openly and nakedly share with the viewer textures that reveal themselves in their material renderings. Based on the assumption that there exists a ruptured yet undisclosed reality, a reality which remains obscured at the verge of confession, this exhibition confesses itself by reuniting works through the boundaries of this hidden reality—sharing in its (still) silenced origin the same small distance that exists between its (in)visible layers. Having found among the artists selected a common resonance in the urge to transform the irreducible category of that which calls itself “the truth” into a genre in crisis that needs to confess its downfalls and failures; this curatorial proposal acknowledges life when its present reality is distant even from the possibility of recognizing its own contours.

marcela quiroz luna

curator
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NICE & FUBAR

featuring: Cacahuates Japoneses, Martin Durazo, Susanne Melanie Berry, Joaquin Segura, Christopher Tallon, and Sarah Theden

Closing Reception Sunday June 27 from 12 to 4pm

Opens Friday May 14 from 6:30 to 9:30 May 14 to June 27, 2010

FU-BAR: F****d Up Beyond All Recognition

JAUS is very pleased to announce the group exhibition NICE & FUBAR featuring works by artists Cacahuates Japoneses, Susanne Melanie Berry, Martin Durazo, Joaquin Segura, Christopher Tallon and Sarah Theden with works ranging from video, installation, sculpture, and photography.

The idea for the current exhibition came from my own desire to see works that deal with themes of transgression and cynicism in the context of a group show. The exhibition unites works that take on both abstract and literal approaches in the reflection of the more tragic and negative aspects of present day social realities without judgment or didacticism.

In contemplating what purpose an artist run space serves; not only in opposition to commercial galleries and museums, but also in contrast to more institutional spaces and non-profits; it is my belief that the primordial function is to provide a venue and forum for the artist and his/her friends to showcase their work and generate dialogue.

The other, perhaps more important, purpose of an artist run space is to serve as a laboratory of sorts that allow artists, even more established ones, to explore new ideas which would not necessarily be possible in a commercial gallery, museum or institutional space. I am a great admirer of the current trend towards collaboration, social responsibility, and sustainability in recent artistic practice, but I also am a firm believer that visual art is, perhaps, the last bastion for incurably individualistic, at times self destructive, non-team players. It is the career choice where people like us can do the least amount of damage to ourselves, the environment, and those around us. An artist run space is a place where artists can make work which might be “f****d up beyond all recognition” directed at a limited and marginal audience without the pervasive and unmanageable repercussions that other channels of distribution such as film, television, internet and print media have. At its best, an artist run space allows artists like me and some of my colleagues to take risks, even unwarranted ones, explore yet to be validated ideas, and still get away with it.

NICE and FUBAR is declaration and plea towards all socially responsible artists and curators, “We love what you’re doing! Keep up the good work. Now can you please leave a little room for us?”
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Mother of Hedone
Opens March 12, 2010 7-10pm

Maril 12 to April 25

Group exhibition of works on paper featuring:

Marcos Castro, Shiri Mordechay, Ruby Osorio, and Davide Zucco

JAUS is very pleased to present Mother of Hedone, a group exhibition featuring work by Marcos Castro (Mexico City), Shiri Mordechay (Tel Aviv/Los Angeles/New York), and Ruby Osorio (Los Angeles), and Davide Zucco (Belluno, IT/New York). The four artists create arresting and hallucinatory images that seamlessly integrate draftsmanship with expressive abandon, utilizing predominantly the most unforgiving of materials: ink and watercolor on paper. These four artists, who come from disparate physical communities, share an uncannily overlapping visual vocabulary that nevertheless yields distinct and highly personal results. Their work navigates the realms of the unconscious and mythology without falling prey to nostalgia or mere repetition of Surrealism’s tropes and motifs.

The title of the exhibition is a reference to Greco-Roman mythology, more specifically the story of Psyche, mother of Hedone (Latin: Volupta) and wife of Eros (Latin: Cupid/Amor). Psyche, as the name suggests, was the personification of the human soul who was also an incredibly beautiful, mortal woman. Her beauty was such that people believed she was Aphrodite (Latin: Venus) in the flesh. This aroused the ire of the goddess, sending her son Eros to make her fall in love with a brute. He instead falls in love with Psyche, and later she with him, causing a string of terrible events culminating in Aphrodite making her take on a series of nearly impossible and treacherous tasks. The gods, including Zeus, favor Psyche, and she completes these tasks with their assistance. Psyche and Eros are ultimately allowed to wed, she is transformed into a goddess, and their daughter Hedone is born, the embodiment of pleasure and lust.

This story, as well as the current exhibition is meant to be an allegory of the human psyche and transcendence, that one must fall from grace in order to find it. These ideas run through the course of the history of storytelling whether it is the story of Psyche, Pinocchio or Siddhartha. Although none of the artists reference specifically the story of Psyche, throughout the works exhibited, images that conjure pain, horror and suffering coexist with others that invoke sensuality, desire and pleasure, heightening the arousal of multiple emotions at a single glance. In the wrong hands, such lofty attempts might result in works that appear sophomoric and passé. These artists, however, not only succeed at creating highly accomplished and relevant work, they excel at it.

Marcos Castro: Born and raised in Mexico City, Marcos Castro studied fine art at The National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking “La Esmeralda”. Castro's drawings replete with images of nature, violence and death poetically, and at times cynically, blur the line between story, event and manifestation as a method of transmitting his hallucinatory narratives.

He has shown individually at Luis Adelantado (Valencia, Spain) and Proyectos Monclova (Mexico City), and collectively at Museo Carrillo Gil, Casa del Lago and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.

Shiri Mordechay: Shiri Mordechay gives us a topsy-turvy world of mundane and mad images in sprawling paintings that curl onto the floor, snake around corners, and spill into space. We see nipple rings on giant breasts, bloody roadkill, spider webs, and Gothic mansions. It’s Charles Adams meets Edgar Allen Poe meets Animal Planet. Mordechay never allows us to look at any one thing; chaos and tumult reign. One thing leads to the next in this perpetual image-imagination flow. It makes stream of consciousness into a torrent of unconsciousness.- Jerry Saltz

Born in Israel and raised in Nigeria, Mordechay now received her BFA at SFAI (San Francisco Art Institute), and her MFA at SVA (School of Visual Art). She also studied fine arts at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv. She has exhibited individually at Plane Space (New York) and Pigman gallery (San Francisco). In addition to a number of group exhibitions, Mordechay was included in Carpetbag + Cozyspace at Healing Arts Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) curated by Kristin Calabrese, Phantasmania at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), and Imposible world at Mole Vanvitelliana (Ancona, Italy) curated by Daniele Ugolini.

Ruby Osorio: Born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, Ruby Osorio received a BA in Sociology at UCLA and studied art at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. In her detailed drawings/paintings, Osorio explores identity, transformation and the boundaries between the fictional and the mundane. With the female heroine as a central character, Osorio mines a wide range of literary and cultural references, and subtly deconstructs the conventional or traditional attributes projected onto women.

Exhibitions include solo shows at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis and Laguna Art Museum, and group shows at Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City and the Japanese American Museum, Los Angeles. In 2007, Christopher Knight for Los Angeles Times placed her #1 in a list of “45 painters under 45”.

Davide Zucco: Davide Zucco was born in 1981 in Belluno, Italy. His work deals with the conflict where opposing forces meet such as good and evil, life and death, light and shade, wonderful and terrifying. His work can be seen as a translation of universal concepts such as the harmony of nature and the struggle between good and evil into allegories. The figures are often metamorphic, they signify a tragicomic personal mythology inspired from popular culture and nature.

Solo exhibitions include EvilDevil at Perugi Artecontemporanea (Padova, Italy), and No Tears at Mogadishni gallery (Aarhus, Denmark). He has also exhibited at AMT gallery (Milan, Italy), Katzen Arts Center (Washington D.C.) and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (San Marino Republic).
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LUBE
Group exhibition curated by Martin Durazo

featuring:

Samantha Magowan

Tameka Norris

Kiki Seror

Opens January 15, 2010

January 15 to February 28

background image taken from Kiki Seror, "Pleasure Victim" 2009 (video still)

JAUS is very pleased to presents LUBE, a three woman exhibition curated by artist Martin Durazo featuring work by Samantha Magowan, Tameka Norris and Kiki Seror. One of the main objectives for this exhibition is to create a forum for the exploration and discussion of ideas related to objectification, the gaze, and ownership of inherent sexuality. The works exhibited were selected as a challenge to the conservatism in the Los Angeles visual art community in recent years. Oddly enough these pressures to play safe come from both the left as well as the right. This dilemma often finds artists hesitant to create provocative work for fear of transgressing the politically correct. Creating an all female exhibition palliates the “explicit” without the historical weight of “bad boy” artists or the male voyeur. This opportunity for fresh dialogue opens the discussion to men and women alike. The title suggests an antidotal spin for an uptight society of artists, curators, and critics in need of moral and emotional lubrication. The result is one possible model for the artist to regain the freedom to create, explore, and discover at will.

Samantha Magowan's installations bombard the viewer with a tornado of shiny colorful objects that frame her stylistically polished photos. The content of Magowan's photos often includes the artist's and other alluring bodies in water, powder and nature, creating sumptuously suggestive tableaus that speak to a different kind of truth: one where cliché and tropes are subsumed by beauty, disorder and pleasure.

Tameka Norris' conceptual photographic and video practice draws from a desire to critique the fame and celebrity associated with women in hip hop music who are portrayed as sexually available and promiscuous. Norris' electrifying hyper-exaggerations lived though a strong yet vulnerable persona spring forth with an unbridled exuberance.

Kiki Seror strives to create complex visual works driven by a graphic and unabashed sensibility that dares to trespass into realms of inquiry typically represented through a male perspective; to challenge viewers' preconceptions about gender, sexuality, desire, and the body.

About the Curator: Martin Durazo is an artist whose exploration of coded manipulation within consumer culture is presented as satire of systematic healing through consumption of material objects and entertainment. As a curator the theme of the “other” is often the focus for Durazo. Recent curatorial efforts include PLUSH at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, Panopti(con) at Bank Gallery, and Systems of Interiors and Exteriors for Better Living at Pitzer College. From 1995 to 2003 Durazo co-founded and directed Miller Durazo Contemporary Artists Projects in Los Angeles.

* A special thanks to I-20 gallery who represents Kiki Seror.
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Anibal Catalan
MORPHO Outdoor Mural Project

Public Unveiling Friday January 15, 2010

A Morpho butterfly may be one of over 80 species of the genus Morpho. Found mostly in South America as well as Mexico, many Morpho butterflies are colored in metallic, shimmering shades of blue and green. These colors are not a result of pigmentation but are an example of iridescence: the microscopic scales covering the Morpho's wings reflect incidental light repeatedly at successive layers.

The mural project for JAUS will be produced predominantly in gray scale colors using different layers as an optical form of representation of change and modification in the virtual spaces rendered on the wall.

The title Morpho, meaning changed or modified will be used as a metaphor for the project.

Anibal Catalan is an artist living and working in Mexico City. He received his BFA at The National School of Painting Sculpture and Printmaking "La Esmeralda" and also completed coursework in architecture at University of Anahuac. Recent exhibitions include the 1st Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the 2nd MexiCali Biennial, XIV Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial, and VIII Monterrey FEMSA Biennial.
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Filophile
Featuring: Aaron Dadacay, Charmaine Felix-Meyer, W. Don Flores, Christine Morla, Gina Osterloh, Chris Sicat

Opens Friday, November 6, 2009 7pm to 10pm

November 6 to December 20

Note: A portion of any sales of artwork from Filophile will be donated to Typhoon Ondoy relief efforts in the Philippines. If you’d like to help please contact: http://www.cdrc-phil.org/ or www.rockedphilippines.org

JAUS is very pleased to present Filophile, an exhibition featuring the work of 6 Filipino artists from Southern California. As an artist and curator of non-American descent, I sometimes approach group exhibitions based on nationality or ethnicity with a little skepticism generated by my own resistance towards an artist and her/his work being reduced solely to national or regional origin, or being perceived as such. However, I also recognize the influence and significance such exhibitions can have in exposing the public to the cultural production of a region, nationality or specific cross section of the artistic community at large. It is with this small measure of ambivalence combined with a great deal of enthusiasm that I have selected the work by the current group of artists.

The initial motivations behind this second exhibition at JAUS were simple. As I considered the artists I have been in contact with, I recognized that some of the most interesting and promising works were being produced by Filipinos or Americans of Filipino descent.

Painter Christine Morla and sculptor Chris Sicat, artists whom I have known for nearly a decade, have been making recently what I consider the best work of their careers. Morla (CGU MFA/LMU BFA) continues to adopt the weaving techniques taught to her from her father, but now creates all over abstractions that recall blizzard-like fractal landscapes using paper and candy wrappers. Sicat (New York Academy of Arts MFA/Otis Parsons BFA) has recently begun exhibiting sculpture which consists of trunks, branches and planks of wood that are completely covered in graphite, functioning simultaneously as drawings on wood. He humorously dubs these objects, “Tag-a-logs”.

I have been following the work of Charmaine Felix-Meyer for the last few years, although I have not had the opportunity to work with her until now. Felix-Meyer (Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA/SFAI BFA) examines identity through a process of negation and de-negation using drywall as materia prima. In what will be her first exhibition in Los Angeles she will present a room construction that blurs the line between drawing and sculpture, pictorial space and dimensional space.

Aaron Dadacay is a former student at Oxnard College who is now attending the BFA program at UCLA, and W. Don Flores is a current student at the Santa Monica College Art Mentor Program. The two have been among my most auspicious pupils whose efforts I am certain will be further recognized in years to come. Dadacay’s, work which often explores the body in relation to human trafficking, ranges from painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. The piece on display consists of wood crates sitting on a shipping palette which emit the audio of a conversation among children, providing a poignant and uncanny experience for the unsuspecting visitor. W. Don Flores (Ateneo de Manila University, B.S. in Psychology) manipulates images found on Google Earth, and paints abstracted mental maps which collide personal history, memory and geography in the global era. Flores equally draws from anime, digital weather maps, and packaging material as a source of formal and thematic inspiration.

I have been introduced to Gina Osterloh (UCI MFA/De Paul University BA) more recently, and her multifaceted constructed photography seemed the perfect fit for my vision for this exhibition. In her images replete with cut pieces of colored paper and a lone figure, Osterloh uses the idea of camouflage to convey the disintegration, or perhaps integration of the body into its environment.

I do not wish to pretend that these artists are in constant dialog with one another or that they are somehow influenced by each others’ work. They are not. Whether the fact that they have come to my attention was caused by some historical and contextual imperative, my own personal biases, or just plain luck, I will not venture to hypothesize. Nevertheless, this exhibition is meant to examine the affects, if any, of geography (Southern California) and nationality (Filipino/Filipino American) in relation to cultural production, and moreover to deconstruct notions thereof.

It is worth noting that Filipino Americans comprise the second largest Asian American population in America next to Chinese Americans, and the United States has the largest Filipino population outside of the Philippines. Furthermore, Southern California is home to the largest number of Filipinos and Filipino Americans in the US, comprising a quarter of the entire demographic. In spite of these statistics, there exists a clear lack of representation in the local and national media of Filipinos and Filipino Americans.

In visual art of the past decade, their have been only a few major American exhibitions focusing on contemporary Filipino or Filipino American artists; some notable shows have been Galleon Trade: Bay Area Now Edition at YBCA (2008), Manila Envelope at the UC Berkley Worth Ryder Gallery (2006), The Emerging Artist as American Filipino (2006) at the Contemporary Museum Honolulu, and the traveling exhibition At Home and Abroad which (1998-199) which showed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. None of these exhibitions was ever held in Southern California.

And although this general lack of representation is lamentable, this very scarcity of preconception and stereotype might also serve as an opportunity for a young Filipino American artist. For as much as YBA and Superflat did for Britain and Japan’s visibility on the cultural terrain, such movements can often be a mild nuisance, if not, a stifling obstacle to an emerging artist who is trying to establish him/herself as an individual. Perhaps a young Filipino American artist is freer to navigate his/her conceptual, aesthetic, social and political preoccupations without being overly burdened by historical precedent.

For the aforementioned reasons, I feel it is worth examining, albeit on a limited and personal scope, the work of these 6 artists right here and right now.

Finally, the title of the show Filophile, appropriates words such as Anglophile or Francophile, now referencing Filipinos and Filipino culture. It is a self consciously celebratory and arguably problematic title, because it appears to privilege Filipinos and their work to those of others. My overarching mission as a curator is not to promote exclusively the work produced by Filipinos, Filipino Americans or any one group of people, but the fact is, for this current exhibition I do. I named the show Filophile, because I like these artists and the work they make. For me, it’s not a problem.

* Thanks to Nakhon Premium Beer for providing beverages for the opening.

* Another special thanks to Francois Ghebaly from Chung King Project, Los Angeles who represents artist Gina Osterloh.
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ON THE SHOULDERS OF DAVIDS

September 11 to October 24, 2009

Opening Friday September 11, 7pm to 10pm

FEATURING:

Slanguage, Yoshua Okon, Artemio, Max Presneill, Clayton Campbell, Martin Durazo, Kavin Buck, Hugo Hopping, Carla Herrera-Prats, Shingo Francis, Chris Sicat, HK Zamani, Matthew Furmanski, Monica Furmanski, Asher Hartman, Lara Bank, Miguel Cordera, Aniba Catalan, Alejandro Almanza, Helena Fernández-Cavada, Jose Luis Cortes, Ronald Lopez, Kelly Coats, Nasan Tur, Oliver Hess, Jenna Didier, Fernando Rascon, Rocio Infestas, Tatiana Musi, Paul Benavidez. Rene Hayashi Canales, Chris Tallon, Helen Geisler, Luis Ituarte, and Ichiro Irie

JAUS is very pleased to present its inaugural exhibition, On The Shoulders Of Davids, a group show organized by Ichiro Irie featuring the works of over 30 artists who run or have run their own artist run spaces.

Based on the assumption that art thrives in economically challenged times, JAUS opens its doors to the public with an exhibition that celebrates artist run culture and the DIY ethos. The title of the show is a reference to the story of “David and Goliath”; that JAUS stands not on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of artists who are/were willing to take on the big bad world with the means available to them. This exhibition pays homage to those artist/directors who have run spaces in various parts of the world such as La Panaderia and Yautepec from Mexico City, Casa del Tunel from Tijuana, LEAC from Chihuhua, Raumpool from Frankfurt, Aden from Istanbul, 643 Project Space and Upfront Gallery from Ventura, Slanguage from Wilmington, and Raid Projects, POST, the Hatch, the Latch, ESL, Crazyspace, Sea and Space, Materials & Applications, Miller Durazo and South La Brea Gallery from Los Angeles.
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