410 S Spring St,
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Curator: Jillith Moniz / Quotidian
Quotidian presents Serpentine Fire featuring LA’s standard bearers in iconoclasm who push boundaries, developing new techniques, modalities and aesthetics. This community of makers feeds artistic and cultural curiosity, realizes visions and sustains itself through their work. Serpentine Fire, based on the song of the same name by Earth, Wind & Fire, captures a group of artists who have radical art practices, much like the band’s early music.
Mel Edwards, Henry Taylor, Ed Love, Kori Newkirk, Umar Rashid, Lyndon Barrois, Glen Wilson and Duane Paul use divergent media to create visually rich language born from life in LA.
Video of Earth, Wind & Fire performing Serpentine Fire shows the band in colorful clothes, singing lyrics with complex rhythms that set them apart from soul bands of their generation. The artists in this exhibition are equally recognizable as they eschew traditional art roles and practices to follow their own motivations, style and aesthetics.
Serpentine Fire highlights historical radical artists Mel Edwards and Ed Love(1936-1999). Edwards studied painting at USC but revolutionized the LA art world with his welded abstract steel works that are allegories for human experience. He had his first solo museum exhibition in 1965. Ed Love was born in Los Angles and began using chrome bumpers as material that could connect people to something larger than themselves. At the time few understood his aesthetic intentions or his emphasis on the stories he wanted to tell about the durability of black life. Edwards and Love stand as models for younger generations of artists inhabiting the rebellious narrative art spaces LA offers those who dare.
Duane Paul’s multiple media practice hones on sublime lines and materiality. His new work provocatively expands the relationship between textile and fine art.
Henry Taylor took on the challenge of painting meaning, color and life in Los Angeles with a dynamic, self-possessed style when many had turned to conceptual art. He boldly situates figures in landscapes, building a visual literacy that conjoins his personal experiences with a historic medium.
From his early classes with James Jarvaise to his time at CalArts, and throughout his career in Los Angeles, Taylor demonstrates his maverick sensibilities with compositions that richly layer painterly brushstrokes with a rigorous passionate attention to aesthetic narratives.
Todd Gray’s vast career began in the early 1970s as a photograph capturing bands including Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. He turned his unique perspectives on popular culture into one of the most prolific and textured art practices in LA. His work in Serpentine Fire comes from his art as protest series plastered guerrilla-style throughout LA during the 1984 Olympics.
Kori Newkirk, winner of the William H Johnson Prize and other notable accolades has developed a chameleon-like practice, trying on ideas then shifting structures and modalities and challenging the viewer to keep up. Like Newkirk, Umar Rashid, also known as Frohawk Two Feathers, melds genres, histories and materials to bring art back to its roots of edifying and resonating cultural meaning.
Lyndon Barrois earned an MFA from CalArts and has become a well-respected animator. Barrois pushes the boundaries of animation with unconventional materials and culturally significant narratives. Glen Wilson also has a foothold in the film business, experiences he translates into beautifully executed and alternatively rendered still imagery.
Serpentine Fire is a gathering of artists who continue to extend LA’s boundaries for art making. Each artist practices in joyfully rebellious margins and this unorthodoxy gives them license to surprise and captivate viewers with strong visual language, using sculpture, painting, animation, photographic and graphic art to locate themselves as well as communicate their mastery of aesthetics.
Curated by jill moniz
Photo: Duane Paul 's- Detail /Sculpture "Sexual Awakening Cut Short by A Glance...
