8/11/23
Appearance in Cultured Magazine
Interior Designer Charlie Ferrer Has a Bone to Pick With Millennial Home Decor
Cultured
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8/10/23
Points for Clouds, Dreams Aroused
A multi-media exhibition celebrating Siggraph’s 50th Anniversary Conference in Los Angeles.
Opening Reception:
Thursday, August 10th
5pm - 12pm
Projekt Blank
SIGGRAPH 2023
Artificial Intelligence Los Angeles
Future Factory
417 E. 15th St.
Los Angeles, CA
90016
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5/20/23
Blindspot
Lazy Eye Gallery
Lazy Eye Gallery is pleased to present Blindspot, an exhibition of three new paintings by Jed Ochmanek. An opening reception will be held on May 20th, 2023 from 4pm to 6pm. The show will remain on view by appointment through June 16th.
The industrial, high gloss surfaces of the works in Blindspot present a storm of hyper-indexical, frenetic detail. Achieved through undiluted, wet-into-wet applications of oil-based enamel on aluminum, these black-and-white works revel in an intense immediacy. Their velocity runs counter to the contemplative repose of Ochmanek’s layered poured paintings, meditative video installations, and luminous light-and-space sculptures. Ultimately, however, the new paintings' gestural turbulence recedes into the inky depths of the image via the self-leveling qualities of their lacquer coatings. Submerged grids, blotted out mono-prints, and scrambled passages of static are flayed with creosote branches, fragments of which can be seen entombed in oil.
Single, central “zips” of aluminum channel material, the same used to construct the strainers, are bolted through punctures in the sheet metal supports. Floating off the painting’s surface, their decisive geometry holds the work’s organic flow in a state of balanced tension. As spatial constructs, these channels heighten a relation between painting and architecture that undergirds Ochmanek's practice. These recent black-and-white works represent an ongoing exploration of the themes first introduced in his 2009 exhibition Daylight Paintings at Young Art: the interaction between grid and post-painterly, incidental mark-making, infinite variation through a strict economy of means, and a persistent focus on the phenomenology of acute opticality.
Lazy Eye Gallery
57275 Canterbury St.
Yucca Valley, CA 92284
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9/11/20
Appearance on Remodelista
in the home of Clément and Sara Pascal
Remodelista
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12/22/19
Solstice Sounding: Dusk Till Dawn
w/ Seth Olinsky
Jed Ochmanek Studio is pleased to announce a new collaborative video and performance environment with composer Seth Olinsky, produced for Solstice Sounding: Dusk Till Dawn, part of the larger regional programming initiative Darkness Sounding, organized by Wild Up.
from the Los Angeles Times:
"Wild Up... is wildly up to its usual reinvention — innovation being too tame a word for this extraordinary collective — with a Darkness Sounding series. Wild Up’s message is that the shortening of days calls for special fanfares, and on Thursday night the group began by stunningly drumming down the sun and strategically bagpiping up the full moon in the Joshua Tree desert. This was the first of 11 concerts through Jan. 19 of “mindful music during the darkest days of the year"... The most elaborate will be Solstice Sounding: Dusk Till Dawn, drones played by virtuoso musicians at Human Resources Los Angeles in Chinatown, from 4:30 p.m. Saturday until sunrise Sunday, the longest night of the year."
Event Time:
4:30pm - Dawn
Performance Time:
1:00am - 2:00am
Human Resources Los Angeles
410 Cottage Home St.
Los Angeles, CA
Seth Olinsky
Wild Up
Los Angeles Times
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10/19/19
Dropping A Pin in Time: A 20th Anniversary Concert Series
Merz is pleased to present 5 international concert appearances to coincide with the 20th anniversary of his debut album. Released on Epic Records, Merz's self-titled ‘99 debut drew wide critical acclaim by synthesizing the energy of the thriving London electronica scene with the folk inflections which would characterize his music in the years to come. The album catalyzed a host of remixes from some of the day's most prominent figures in electronic music including Francois Kervorkian, MJ Cole, Bomb The Bass, State of Bengal, Stereo MCs, Mouse On Mars, Alex Metric, and Trouble Men.
This concert series will find Merz transmuting his back catalogue into a new array of ambient compositions. Serving to mark a point in time, these performances will also pull from Merz's recent musical developments, including this year's collaborative album ‘Dreams of Sleep and Wakes of Sound’. Conceived with American experimental musicians Laraaji and Shahzad Ismaily, DOSAWOS was hailed by The Guardian as "a sonic battle between the profane and sacred, between industrial squalor and holy minimalism."
For this series of performances, visual artist Jed Ochmanek has "remixed" his video work for Merz & Laraaji's 2018 'Monastic Gig,’ resulting in a kaleidoscopic atmosphere of overlapping chromatic events. This promises to be a special series of performances, as much drawing from the last 20 years of musical exploration as pointing to the next 20 and beyond.
Dates:
10/26/19
FURSTWURLD
Joshua Tree, CA
11/1/19
Perpetual Dune Festival
Wonder Valley, CA
11/14/19
Coaxial Arts
Los Angeles, CA
11/21/19
Saint Ghetto Festival
Dampfzentrale Bern
Bern, Switzerland
11/26/19
Bush Hall
London, UK
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9/1/19
"Dreams of Sleep and Wakes of Sound" Record Release & Listening Party
A screening of the feature-length video work A Monastic Gig, as well as the music video for Rent a New Place, Everything Could Change, will coincide with a record release and listening party for Laraaji, Merz, and Shahzad Ismaily's new double album Dreams of Sleep and Wakes of Sound.
Event Time:
9/1/19
7pm
FURSTWURLD
8528 Desert Shadows Rd.
Joshua Tree, California
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6/28/19
"Dreams of Sleep and Wakes of Sound" Double LP Available for Purchase, Steam and Download
"Dreams of Sleep and Wakes of Sound," the new collaborative album by Laraaji, Merz, and Shahzad Ismaily, is out today from Dampfzentrale Bern on double vinyl and download. Gatefold artwork by Jed Ochmanek and graphic design by Maison Standard.
From The Guardian's "Contemporary Music Album of the Month" 4/5 star review:
"The album unfolds like a film soundtrack, complete with dramatic drones and suspended chords that take an age to resolve. The central tension is between Merz’s guitar (a rough assemblage of Duane Eddy twangs and Black Sabbath growls) and Laraaji’s “cosmic zither” (an electrified autoharp which he bows, plucks and strums). It is a sonic battle between the profane and sacred, between industrial squalor and holy minimalism. Playing in between the gaps is Ismaily, on an assortment of other instruments, which often blur into each other to create a seamless mesh of sounds."
Stream and Purchase:
Dampfzentrale Bandcamp
Merzandise
Spotify
Reviews:
The Guardian
The Vinyl Factory
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4/30/19
Laraaji : Merz - "Rent A New Place, Everything Could Change" Video Premier
Jed Ochmanek's official video for Laraaji and Merz's beautiful track "Rent A New Place, Everything Could Change," from their forthcoming album with Shahzad Ismaily "Dreams of Sleep and Wakes of Sound," premiers today on self-titledmag.com.
self-titled mag.com
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6/13/18
A Monastic Gig
w/ Merz and Laraaji
“This singular concert engineers an atmosphere similar to recitals in churches: calm, sublimity, respect, humility, however here free of old-world religiousness and iconography. A concert-ceremony is the idea behind A Monastic Gig.”- Merz
A Monastic Gig is a site-specific collaboration between acclaimed musicians Laraaji and Merz, and visual artist Jed Ochmanek, for the performing arts venue Dampfzentrale Bern in Bern, Switzerland. When Merz was appointed as associated artist to Dampfzentrale, he immediately had an idea for a concert-ceremony to take place in the former power plant’s voluminous performance hall. As a multi-instrumentalist, Merz’s keen attention to detail and inflection serves in his solo work to bring together disparate musical traditions to disarmingly personal affect within the structure of carefully crafted songwriting. For A Monastic Gig, this sensibility was applied to the selection of participants, tone, and context. After a year of rumination, the concept cohered as a musical, visual, and environmental collaboration.
There’s hardly a musician more perfectly suited to Merz’s vision than New York-based zither player, singer and keyboardist Laraaji. Perhaps best known for his seminal album Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980), produced by Brian Eno, Laraaji has remained a driving force in the genres of experimental, new-age, and ambient music for four decades. His gorgeously open instrumentation, often in the form of electrified zither, is matched by a generosity of presence as performer and guide in ceremonies such as his Laughter Meditation Workshops.
Merz also called upon Joshua Tree-based artist Jed Ochmanek to design the environment. Known primarily for his abstract works, which expand the horizons of color-field painting, Ochmanek worked with Merz to direct the physical parameters of the event in terms of stage, seating, and lighting, as well as created a video projection to accompany and inform the musical collaboration. The hour and twenty-minute video work consists of chromatically shifting, layered shots of slowly cascading paint and solvent. When projected in the performance hall, it will offer an immersive, hypnotic experience of tonality and particulate motion in accompaniment to the musical score.
Event Time:
June 13th, 2018, 9pm
Dampfzentrale Bern
Marzilistrasse 47, 3005
Bern, Switzerland
dampfzentrale.ch
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1/10/18
LA Art Show Modern + Contemporary
w/ Macaulay & Co. Fine Art
Exhibition Dates:
January 10th - 14th
Opening Reception:
Friday, January 10th, 6-9pm
Los Angeles Convention Center
1201 S. Figueroa St., West Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90015
mfineart.ca
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7/8/17
Summer of Love
curated by Justin Cavin
Featuring Alison Frey Andersson, Kristian Burford, Matthew Chambers, Angel Chen, Fritz Chesnut, Zoe Crosher, Tomory Dodge, Hedi El Kholti, Paul Gellman, Brendan Getz, Yaron Michael Hakim, Pat Hill, Geneva Jacuzzi, Alexander Kroll, Alexander Lemke, Dan Levenson, Janet Levy, Shana Lutker, Andi Magenheimer, Max Maslansky, Seth McBride, Adam D. Miller, Sarah Miska, Warren Neidich, Jed Ochmanek, Marie Peter-Toltz, Ali Silverstain, Nora Shields, Owen Schmit, Betty Tompkins, Clarissa Toussin, Dani Tull, Paige Turner-Uribe, Torbjorn Vejvi
Opening Reception:
Friday, July 8th, 2017
6 - 9pm
Wilding Cran
939 South Santa Fe Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90021
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2/24/17
Desert Island
curated by Epicenter Projects
Featuring Bill Leigh Brewer, Cristopher Cichocki, Scott B. Davis, Olivier Dubois-Cherrier, Ari Elefterin, Jeff Frost, Frederick Fulmer,
Lance Gerber, Aaron Giesel, Matt Hope, John Knuth, Ming C. Lowe, Wm. Marquez, Deborah Martin, Filippo Minelli, Eric Nash, Jed Ochmanek, Chris Peters, Osceola Refetoff, Kas Sanchez, Julie Schafer, Nicolas Shake, Tim Shockley, Steve Webster
Exhibition Dates:
February 24 - April 20, 2017
Opening Reception:
Friday, February 24, 7:30 - 10:30pm
Coachella Valley Art Center
45140 Towne Center
Indio, CA 92201
epicenterprojects.com
catalogue available
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11/5/16
Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency Benefit Art Auction
Online Auction:
October 15th - November 5th, 2016
Closing Party and Exhibition:
Friday, November 5, 3-7pm
Venice, CA
online auction
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11/9/15
Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic LA
curated by René-Julien Praz
w/ catalogue
Opening Reception:
November 9th, 2015, 8pm
Piasa
188 Rue du Faubourg
Saint-Honoré, Paris
piasa.fr
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9/26/15
Permanent Installation at 1299 Ocean Ave.
Jed Ochmanek Studio, in collaboration with Emma Gray HQ, is pleased to announce the permanent installation of seven works, four of which have not been previously exhibited, in the lobby of 1299 Ocean Ave. in Santa Monica. The lobby is open to the public.
1299 Ocean Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90401
emmagrayhq.com
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1/30/15
LA Art Book Fair
w/ X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly
Book release at the LA Art Book Fair for The Benefit of Friends Collected, vol. 2.
Published by the Project X Foundation for Art and Criticism.
45 artists writing about each others' work.
With writing and work by: Kellly Akashi, Animal Charm, David Berezin, Simon Bill, Sergio Bromberg, Kathrin Burmester, John Burtle, Jedediah Caesar, Joshua Callaghan, Anthony Carfello, Rachel Foullon, Joey Frank, Liz Glynn, Patrick Goddard, Patrick Hill, John Houck, Bettina Hubby, Jamie Isenstein, Vishal Jugdeo, Stanya Kahn, William Kaminski, Nicholas Kersulis, Alice Könitz, Jason Kunke, Gabriel Kuri, Lisa Lapinski, Caitlin Lonegan, Marie Lorenz, Molly Lowe, Brian Mann, Emily Mast, Nicole Miller, Joshua Nathanson, Jed Ochmanek, Virginia Poundstone, Sarah Rara, Elise Rasmussen, Isaac Resnikoff, Matt Rich, Amanda Ross-Ho, Miljohn Ruperto, Asha Schechter, Alex Slade, Jill Spector, Clarissa Tossin
Organized by Shana Lutker
Edited by Jesse Benson and Shana Lutker
Opening Reception:
Friday, January 30th, 5-7pm
MoCA Geffen Contemporary
Booth U 04
1201 S. Figueroa St., West Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90015
event information
x-tra online store
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12/4/14
New Art Dealer's Alliance
Miami Beach
w/ ltd Los Angeles
Exhibition Dates:
December 4th - 7th, 2014
Deauville Beach Resort
6701 Collins Ave.
Miami Beach, FL 33141
newartdealers.org
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12/3/14
Huffington Post Interview: Arthena Chats with Jed Ochmanek
w/ Madelaine D'Angelo
huffingtonpost.com
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10/17/14
Sundials
ltd Los Angeles
ltd los angeles is pleased to announce Los Angeles-based artist Jed Ochmanek’s Sundials. For his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Ochmanek will present new works from his on-going series of oil-based enamel paintings on metal sheets as well as new urethane and steel sculptures.
To create the wall-based works on view in Sundials, Ochmanek moved his painting practice from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, California. The site was chosen for its aridity and extreme heat - factors necessary to enable particular behavior and rapid drying cycles of the poured solvent and paint solutions across the works steel and aluminum supports. The plates are tilted to allow material to pour off, adjusted to catch or deflect the wind, and baked in full exposure sun. The rich, unrepeatable diversity of tonal and textural dispersions achieved through their successive layers synthetically registers not only the local atmospheric conditions where the paintings were produced, but the more universal forces of the earth’s gravitational pull and orbit around the sun. Beyond the paintings indexical relationship to their environment, Ochmanek’s work resonates deeply with the bareness of the desert’s features: as the paintings draw the viewer to experience the duration and conditions of their making, so too does the dimension of geological time make itself apparent throughout the sparse expanse of the Mojave.
Ochmanek’s urethane sculptures are cast from a discontinued model of incandescent bulb previously used for theater spotlights. Like the paintings, the bulbs are a result of pouring color. Solid and tinted, the bulbs act as concentrated orbs of pigment, whereas the serial installation of the paintings posits the bulb’s wall-based counterparts as dispersions of pigment across theoretical planes. The bulbs bend and emit light; the paintings absorb it. The bulb’s translucency fluctuates with the ambient lighting conditions, and they become optically active when circumnavigated, as they invert and magnify their environment, encouraging a fluid, time-based read. The planar geometry of their steel supports, however, suggests that one can conceptually reduce the bulbs to three views.
Frontally, the bulbs recall the pure geometry of Helen Pashgian’s 1970’s spherical sculptures. The side view reveals the form’s industrial origins, as the technology associated with the Light and Space Movement was tied to California’s burgeoning aerospace industry from its inception. In the advent of CFL and LED technology, the bulb’s iconic form is lapsing into obsolescence. The nostalgia evoked by the bulb’s form is echoed in the arc produced as the bulb touches down to a single point, recalling the aesthetics of early automotive luxury.
The bulbs are, of course, hermetically sealed from any literal engagement with a larger power structure, a notion re-enforced by the screw base of the rear view’s phallic form. As such, the bulbs are open to assume associative, psychologically charged topologies. Their spheres recall eyeballs; their threads nerve endings. In-as-much as the bulb has come to symbolize an interior, personal illumination, these represent a head (or consciousness) in repose – Brancusi's Sleeping Muse by way of Picabia’s Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity. While the particulate detail and tonal shifts of the paintings induce a waking dream-state, the bulbs suggest, through examining outmoded forms of production and sublimation, that our perceptual mechanisms and subconscious ultimately comingle in an endless play of illuminated reflections.
Exhibition Dates:
October 17th - November 18th, 2014
Opening Reception:
October 17th, 7 - 10pm
ltd Los Angeles
7561 Sunset Blvd. #103
Los Angeles, CA 90046
ltdlosangeles.com
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10/6/14
Life Transmissions
Curated by Marcus Herse
Featuring Bas Jan Ader, Sarah Bostwick, Joshua Callaghan, Megan Daalder, Karl Haendel, Mary Kelly, John Mills, Jed Ochmanek, Gina Osterloh, Robert Rauschenberg, Peter Wu
w/ Catalogue
Exhibition Dates:
October 6th - November 2nd, 2014
Artist Reception and Catalogue Release:
Sunday, November 2nd, 3 - 7pm
The Guggenheim Gallery
Chapman University
One University Drive
Orange, CA 92866
guggenheimgallery.org
documentation
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7/11/14
Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency Exhibition
Zoe Childerley
Shea Hembrey
Andrew Milward
Jed Ochmanek
Opening Reception:
July 11th, 6- 8pm
Joshua Tree Art Gallery
61607 29 Palms Highway
Joshua Tree, CA 92252
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6/4/14
ArtBlitz Los Angeles
w/ Justin Izbinski
artbliztla.com
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4/5/14
Veils
curated by Jhordan Dahl and Ariana Papademetropoulos
Featuring Barry X Ball, Wallace Berman, Erik Brunetti, Marjorie Cameron, Alex Constable, Eddie Chacon, William Claxton, Richard Dupont, Brad Elterman, Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Robert Heinecken, Channa Horwitz, John Knuth, Kevin Lasting, Kelly Lamb, Lucile Littot, Melodie Mousset, Stephen Neidich, Jed Ochmanek, Alia Raza, Angeline Rivas, Albert Samreth, Allison Schulnik, Jim Shaw, John Stezaker, April Street, Nickolaus Typaldos, Kaari Upson, Jeffrey Vallance & Chris Burden, Dylan Walker, Jaimie Warren, Marnie Weber, Logan White, Brian Wills, Francesca Woodman & Sloan Rankin, Bobbi Woods, Eric Yahnker
Opening Reception:
April 4th, 7 - 11pm, 2014
The Underground Museum
3508 West Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90018
theunderground-museum.org
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2/7/14
Material Art Fair
Mexico City
w/ So Fine Arts
Exhibition Dates:
February 7th - 9th, 2014
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2/5/14
The New York Times Style Magazine: The Find
tmagazine.blogs.newyorktimes.com
/
12/5/13
New Art Dealers Alliance Fair
Miami Beach
w/ Young Art
Exhibition Dates:
December 5th - 8th, 2013
Deauville Beach Resort
6701 Collins Ave.
Miami Beach, FL 33141
newartdealers.org
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11/9/13
Near Dark
Nathan Antolik
Milano Chow
Zoe Ghertner
Jed Ochmanek
Pilar Wiley
Exhibition Dates:
November 9th - December 28th, 2013
Opening Reception:
November 9th, 6- 8pm
Young Art
418 Bamboo Lane, Unit B
Los Angeles, CA 90012
youngartgallery.com
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11/6/13
LA><ART
Opening Reception:
November 6th, 6:30 - 9:00pm
The Brick Building
8870 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
laxart.org
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5/21/13
LACE Benefit Auction
Opening Reception:
May 5th, 7 - 10pm
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
6522 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
welcometolace.org
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6/3/13
Headlands Center for the Arts Benefit Auction
Opening Reception:
June 5th, 2013
Headlands Center for the Arts
944 Simmonds Road
Sausalito,, CA 94965
headlands.org
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4/1/13
Art in America Review
"Jed Ochmanek at Young Art"
by Danielle Sommer
"Jed Ochmanek may call his newest series of paintings “flats,” but “depth” more accurately captures what was on display in “Breed St.,” the artist’s third solo exhibition at Young Art. When viewed from the center of the small gallery, Ochmanek’s work—a trio of colorful rectangular panels (all 2012) hung flush with the walls and stretching nearly from floor to ceiling—evoked reflected light, fabric and blown-up photographic negatives; up close, each was seen to feature masses of information in the form of paint pigment and dust, resulting in endless strata of texture and detail.
For the last few years, Ochmanek, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and is currently living in Los Angeles, has experimented with a technique that involves pouring multiple layers of very thin, oil-based enamel paint onto slim plates of industrial metal, such as mirror-polished stainless steel. During the process, the pigments tend to separate from their binder, drying in unique and unrepeatable patterns, which Ochmanek amplifies by letting dust from the environment settle where it will, layering different colors atop each other and allowing the paint to dry in between pours.
For “Breed St.,” Ochmanek used the gallery’s architecture as the only limit for his 8-foot-tall, rectangular paintings. Never one to clutter a room, Ochmanek chose one panel in gold (Beekeeper), another in soft pink (Plateaux) and a third a dark denim blue (Dead Flag Blues). Over the gallerist’s desk hung two reliefs in cast concrete. Neutral in color but still full of captured texture, these two pieces represented a new type of material process for the artist, which he plans to explore further.
The surfaces of Ochmanek’s panels reward attention. With Beekeeper and Plateaux, this crust registers as a grainy quality from a distance; with Dead Flag Blues, on which Ochmanek used a squeegee, it looks more like a tight weave. Traces of Ochmanek’s process can also be perceived in the works’ gentle gradient shifts, or in the sudden disruption of color within a panel, where the liquid from one pour has obviously obscured the previous pour, producing what looks like a water stain. All in all, the paintings turn on the tension between the layers of detail they contain and their status as “flats”—a word that brings to mind surfaces devoid of any texture. Ochmanek exacerbates the tension by using metal thin as canvas, as well as by relying on devices like Velcro or magnets to hang the panels so snugly against the gallery wall that they often look like they’ve been painted on. What results is a weighty dialogue with time: while you can try to grasp one of Ochmanek’s pieces in an instant, the piece fights back, insisting that you experience to no small degree the duration of its making."
artinamericamagazine.com
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12/5/12
New Art Dealers Alliance Fair
Miami Beach
w/ Young Art
Exhibition Dates:
December 5th - 8th, 2012
Deauville Beach Resort
6701 Collins Ave.
Miami Beach, FL 33141
newartdealers.org
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12/4/12
FIXE Interview
with Matt Fishbeck
fixemag.org
/
12/1/12
Animal Shelter Issue 2
Fleeting, ephemeral, non-digital and non-hierarchical, Animal Shelter is, as Alex Gartenfeld wrote in Interview, “a loose collection of texts, sequenced like a mixtape” and dedicated to visions of real freedom in the present. Gathered around a long conversation with philosopher Paul Virilio on “The Littoral as Final Frontier,” conducted on the first day of the “flash crack” collapse of the European markets, Issue 2 features fiction, art work, poetry, conversations and essays by Dodie Bellamy, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Moyra Davey, Robert Dewhurst, Ben Ehrenreich, Matt Fishbeck, Veronica Gonzalez, Bruce Hainley, Chris Kraus, Rachel Kushner, Sylvere Lotringer, Alistair McCartney, Slava Mogutin, Eileen Myles, Jed Ochmanek, George Porcari, Michael Rashkow, Shlomo Sand, Margie Schnibbe, Sarah Wang and others.
Editor: Hedi El Kholti
semiotexte.com
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11/17/12
Bogs
Steve Turner
Steve Turner Contemporary is pleased to present Bogs, a two-person exhibition featuring paintings by Jed Ochmanek and Hugh Zeigler.
Jed Ochmanek will present selections from his ongoing series of paintings on metal as well as a new work made of cast cement. The paintings result from pouring highly thinned enamels onto steel plates. Their surfaces register the sifting of the pigment as it separates from its binder, as well as incidental marks from the studio environment (dust, scratches, etc.). The cement piece is cast in a mold lined with window screen material. An impression of the distorted screen articulates the object’s surface.
Hugh Zeigler’s paintings consist of torn paper adhered to canvas using paint as glue. Two of the paintings feature an underlying grid taken from Chinese calligraphic practice sheets, a grid that is used to repeat and compare ideograms as they are drawn repeatedly side-by-side by the calligrapher. Repetition is a common motif in Zeigler’s work, both as a generator of subject matter and as a compositional element.
Exhibition Dates:
November 17th - December 15th, 2012
Opening Reception:
November 17th, 6 - 8pm
Steve Turner
6830 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
steveturner.la
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11/15/12
Breed St.
Young Art
Young Art is pleased to present Breed St., an exhibition of new work by Jed Ochmanek. The opening reception will be held Saturday, December 15th from 6-9pm and the show will remain on view through January 26, 2013.
The exhibition will consist of three architecturally-scaled, floor-to-ceiling “flats” - paintings produced by pouring highly-thinned, oil-based enamels onto mirror-polished, stainless steel plates – and two works made of cast cement. In referring to the paintings as “flats,” Ochmanek alludes to their support, presentation, and process, in which the flatbed picture plane is interpreted as a sheer surface, tilted along an axis until nearly all of the “information” spills off of a given side.
Dust settles on the plates between coats, acting as thousands of points at which pigment may be retained as it separates from its binder. Assuming shifting tonal colorations though progressive pours, they visually advance or recede like cones and rods in a biomorphic play-act of perception. Continuous exposure to air-borne elements “develops” the plates as such, rendering a composition literally out of thin air. Conversely, the cement pieces are cast in foil molds lined with window screen material, which buckles under the weight and mass of the cement. Their surfaces, articulated by the distorted screen's impression, confront notions of the grid and transparency with an obdurate physicality.
Transposed to the gallery and hung flush with the walls but decidedly not inset, the paintings contingency on the surrounding architecture is explicit, yet their scale threatens to subsume it. The verticality of the flats mimics the ceiling-high doorways Ochmanek sliced from the walls of the disused ballroom that he uses as a studio. A squeegee made of door-sweepers is used to clear a given pour and allows the artist to “step out” of one color and into another.
Harmonic shifts, particulate detail, and the weave of the grid invite visual scrutiny in the metal paintings and cement works respectively, yet both are understood as results of the decidedly physical processes of dispersion, gravitational pull, and evaporation. The attendant awareness of the steel and cements’ ponderous weight complicates a viewing experience of disembodied opticality, catching the viewer in a split perception and stranding him between two ways of knowing.
Exhibition Dates:
November 15th, 2012 - January 26th, 2013
Opening Reception:
November 15th, 6 - 8pm
Young Art
418 Bamboo Lane, Unit B
Los Angeles, CA 90012
youngartgallery.com
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11/9/12
Close Encounters
John Armleder
Steffen Bunte
Claire Decet
Luke Dowd
Samuel François
Oliver Kosta-Théfaine
Andrew Laumann
Renato Leotta
Keegan McHargue
Justin Morin
Morgan-Richard Murphey
Jed Ochmanek
Exhibition Dates:
September 6th - October 13th, 2013
Galerie Jeanroch Dard
13 Rue des Arquebusiers
75003 Paris, France
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