Entertaining the dead

Tonight we went to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to watch "American Werewolf in London" at the summer movie nights thrown by Cenespia. I would highly recommend this activity to anyone living in the LA area. It's a great way to spend $10, and have a picnic (food and even alcohol are encouraged) in a cemetery of all places! I've been living here for over 4 years and this is actually the first time that the stars have aligned and I've been able to make it to a showing, which has been hard since it's only held during the summer on Saturday nights. I am definitely going to try to make an effort to go more often next year though (since there's only 2 more weeks left in this years season!). In case your curious, the movies are projected onto a building wall where there is a big grassy field that everyone lays their blankets on and FILLS up to the brim! Not to go all goth on you guys or anything but I would really like to go through the cemetery during the day sometime and snap some pictures since tonight was too dark (these images are snagged from google). There was a lot of interesting tombstones, etc there that I think would be great inspiration for something down the line.

MODART: group show

So this weekend was the opening of the Modart group show at Thinkspace. Below are a few fav pieces:
Me and my friend caught off guard as we were taking our own shots. I am so horribly unphotogenic. I guess some people have it, and some people don't.

Drawing#2 by Kukula

Close up of bunny in Dream Compass, by Kukula. I think all of the pieces she showed have been circulated around already several times, but I still enjoy her subject matter and always enjoy seeing her work up close.

Not only can I not find the titles and artist of these two pieces anywhere, but I forgot to take note of who they were by too. So unfortunately I don't know :( Please feel free to let me know if you do though! I enjoyed the three-dimensional aspect of these pieces. The artist had several up throughout the gallery.

Gangster Bird, by Chris Bourke. Me and my friends all got a laugh out of this one. So true, so true.

Salt by El Gato Chimney

Martirium, by El Gato chimney

Detail from Trust, by El Gato Chimney

Detail from Martirium, by El Gato chimney. Probably liked El Gato Chimney's work the best in the show. It was the most "surreal" of all the pieces, and I enjoyed the use of bright colors, and his subtle references to what appears to be sewing (as seen in my detail shots) The pincushion balloon man is especially entertaining.

Overall the mood of the pieces in the show weren't really my taste of art. A lot of them had a very generic, mainstream feel to them. I'm sure that there were tons of people there enjoying it, but I really had to pick and choose to find favorites out of the show. I need more subject matter in my pieces, and less squiggly lines. Which I feel this show was really lacking, and that's not saying that it doesn't take talent to make squiggly lines into art, or that there isn't a market for an entire wall of "ironic" youtube sketches, but it's just not my cup of tea, for the most part. Click on my link above to see more of what I mean. I am super excited to go to the Blab show sometime in the near future though. Definitely more my cup of tea. And I'm also looking forward to Luke Chueh's show at gallery 1988 next month.

Year of the WolfBat

Something I've decided I want to do with this blog, to give it my personal touch is to infuse it more with my love of art. I want to do this through showing you all some of the gallery shows that I have the pleasure of going to and writing up short reviews on the artists and their collections. I hope that this will be well received, and that I'll be able to work at mixing it in with my other passion posted here, fashion. Other then the Monster exhibit that I posted last week, this will be a bit more of an official start of the project, hope you all enjoy, and feel free to give me feedback!

New York based artist Dennis McNett has a traveling show called "Year of the Wolfbat" and last night it made its LA stop at Thinkspace gallery. I had the pleasure of getting to the first of 2 nights it will displayed, and took a few pictures of my favorites to post here.

One thing that I always really enjoy about being in the Silverlake area of LA (where Thinkspace is located) is that artists tend to infuse what's going on in the gallery, onto the streets. Which is why the first image is actually one of my favorites, it gives the art that grittiness it seems to want to command from its audience.

I enjoyed how a lot of the larger pieces were painted on screens, and the unique take on paper mache masks. At the show my boyfriend mentioned to me how the United States doesn't really celebrate many masked holidays (besides Mardi Gras, which is typically celebrated more heavily in New Orleans then anywhere else) like some cultures do, and we both thought that was kind of a sad realization.

Besides creating all of this art Dennis McNett also teaches screenprinting at Pratt Institute. There was a heavy influence of this in the back room, which was filled to the brim with his print work, including some prints of the skate deck art his done in the past. Though the exhibit comes down at 4 pm today, I recommend that if you are a fan of this work you check out his website, where he has lots of images for viewing.