Liz Craft, Death Rider (Virgo), 2002. Bronze. Collection of Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson, Los Angeles, Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, Photograph Joshua White.

Lari Pittman, Untitled, 2000, Alkyd and aerosol on mahogany panel. Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Sharon Ellis, New Moon and Palm Trees, 2004, Alkyd on canvas, Private Collection, Courtesy Christopher Grimes Gallery.

Matt Greene, We Beheld the Holograph of Our Second Selves (Why Did You Eat
Us), detail, 2004, Mixed media on canvas, Private Collection. Courtesy Peres Projects, Los Angeles Berlin.

Sharon Ellis, Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee, detail, 2001, Alkyd on canvas, Collection of Mark Andrus, Courtesy of Christopher Grimes Gallery.

Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006, Mini-DV transferred to DVD, Courtesy of the artists and Elizabeth Dee, New York.

Jim Shaw, Dream Object: Paperback Cover (In a saloon, a clown is being
sucked…), 1998, Gouache on ragboard, mounted on plywood with Mylar interleaf, 9-½ x 6-¾",Private collection, Switzerland; courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art,
Los Angeles.

Matt Greene, Our Idealized Invisibility, detail, 2006, Painting, acrylic, collage,
and graphite on canvas, Collection of Glenn Fuhrman, New York, Courtesy of
Peres Projects, Los Angeles Berlin.

Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles
310-443-7000
Eden's Edge: Fifteen LA Artists
May 13-September 2, 2007

The contemporary art scene in Los Angeles has become one of the most influential in the world, and the Hammer Museum has dedicated itself to exploring its vitality. The Hammer continues this commitment with the major exhibition Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists, on view May 13 through September 2, 2007.

Organized by Gary Garrels, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, Eden’s Edge offers a multifaceted view of art-making in Los Angeles over the past ten years. Occupying the entire west wing of the Museum — more than half the Hammer’s exhibition space — Eden’s Edge represents an extraordinary cross-section of talent, ranging from established to emerging artists.

Eden’s Edge presents approximately 95 works made by Ginny Bishton (b.1967), Mark Bradford (b.1961), Liz Craft (b.1970), Sharon Ellis (b.1955), Matt Greene (b.1972), Elliott Hundley (b.1975), Harriet “Harry” Dodge (b.1966) & Stanya Kahn (b.1968), Monica Majoli (b.1963), Matthew Monahan (b.1972), Rebecca Morales (b.1962), Lari Pittman (b.1952), Ken Price (b.1935), Jason Rhoades (1965-2006), Anna Sew Hoy (b.1976), and Jim Shaw (b.1952). Although these artists come from disparate generations and backgrounds and work in a variety of medium, Eden’s Edge will emphasize their shared perspectives on the complexities and contradictions of life in present-day Los Angeles.

“Although we are giving each artist his or her own space in this exhibition, we chose the works for Eden’s Edge because of the way they play off of one another, establishing visual and conceptual conversations that reverberate in fresh and engaging ways,” Gary Garrels stated. “What emerges is not so much a single theme as a series of preoccupations: beauty and sensuality, instability and incongruity, craft and materials, articulated within overarching themes of vulnerability, sexuality, and transformation.”

Eden’s Edge is the largest exhibition to date in a series of Hammer-organized exhibitions that offer museum-based insight into recent art. In the tradition of these innovative exhibitions — Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles (2001), International Paper: Drawings by Emerging Artists (2003), and THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles (2005) — this exhibition is a survey of contemporary work that also highlights artistic practices.

“In Eden’s Edge, we have an opportunity to explore an extraordinary period in this city’s art scene,” said Ann Philbin, Director of the Hammer Museum. “We are grateful to the museums and private collectors around the world, and to the artists themselves, who have made this exhibition possible by lending us works, many of which, though made here, have never before been shown in Los Angeles.”

Installed in roughly chronological order according to the amount of time the artist has been working, the exhibition establishes a generational continuum, integrating newly emerging artists with their more established peers. Each artist is represented by artworks made within the past ten years with the goals of including pieces that act as complements and counterpoints to each other.

Works in Eden’s Edge vary in size from the small collages of Ginny Bishton to the large-scale installation of the late Jason Rhoades. In medium, they range from the ceramic fusions of figure and landscape by Ken Price and the ceramic “webs” of Anna Sew Hoy, to the meticulous paintings on vellum by Rebecca Morales, to the video and film work of Harriet “Harry” Dodge and Stanya Kahn.

Ginny Bishton (b. 1967) received her MFA from UCLA in 1995. During the 1990s Bishton made monochromatic drawings, shifting in 2000 to making collages out of thousands of minute, almost-circular fragments of color photographs. These collages capture the idea of constant flux, of time’s fluidity, of dream and reverie. The process of making these collages requires extraordinary patience and takes time. About three years ago Bishton added another approach to her collages by expanding their size and made them with a tighter, more geometric structure. The group of works in this exhibition is composed of thin strips of photographs, arranged by the dominant colors within the photographic fragments. The resulting forms themselves are almost like those of strange shrubs or plantings.

Mark Bradford (b. 1961) graduated from the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in 1997. He began exhibiting extensively in 2000, and his work was included in Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum in 2001. In the past four years, Bradford’s works have exploded in scale and complexity, and incorporate found advertising posters, colored copier paper, metal foil, paint, and end papers. Some of these collages reach the scale of small billboards and bristle with energy evoking the edgy urban environment that is contemporary Los Angeles. Bradford lives and works in South Central and his acute awareness of L.A. as a constantly shifting, kinetic environment that is both real and abstract is mirrored in his unique artworks.

Since receiving her MFA from UCLA in 1997, Liz Craft (b. 1970) has produced highly imagistic sculptures ranging from single figures to tableaux. Craft’s imaginative range is broad and complex, often difficult to describe. Her Death Rider (Virgo), made from cast bronze, premiered at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2004 and has never been shown in Los Angeles until now. In contrast to the Death Rider, a hippie with glasses sits cross-legged playing a guitar and smoking a pipe, the smoke billowing several feet above his head. The time and attention put into the production of these works is apparent; they have been carefully and skillfully made. They are weighty and frozen, serious and unsettling, yet they are also absurd, comic, and sharply humorous.

Harry Dodge (b. 1966) and Stanya Kahn (b. 1968) both began working as performers and writers, each doing solo performance works in San Francisco and New York City. Kahn was a founding member of the performance group CORE. Dodge was the art director and co-owner of the award-winning café/cabaret the Bearded Lady in San Francisco. They both received their MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School, Bard College, NY in 2003. After settling in Los Angeles in 2004, the two have turned increasingly to making collaborative video works, with Kahn as the performer and Dodge as director. The videos take the guise of confessional documentaries, voyeuristic fantasies, and ritualistic dramas, composed as collages.

Sharon Ellis (b. 1955) received her BFA at UC Irvine in 1978 and her MFA at Mills College, Oakland in 1984. Her landscape paintings have a hallucinogenic, otherworldly lucidity, with light as the primary subject. She paints small canvases, starting with a white ground, and then builds up the surface with multiple layers of alkyd glazes. Ellis paints subjects about cycles of transformation - the times of the day, the seasons, the four elements of fire, water, air, and earth, when light and color shift most perceptibly and dramatically. Her subjects themselves are not out of the ordinary, but she transforms them into the supernatural, capturing the dichotomy of the California landscape - its beauty, yet also its lurking cataclysms of earthquakes, flash floods, and fire storms.

After receiving a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1996, Matt Greene (b. 1972) moved to Los Angeles and shifted from making sculpture to painting and drawing. Self-taught, he labored more than five years to reach the point where his distinctive work began to be recognized and shown. Greene collects images from the Internet and merges these with scanned images, overlaying and fusing them into compositions. By 2003 he began to make paintings using the same construction techniques. Greene’s interest in music, and fascination with heavy metal, glam rock and psychedelic album covers from the 60s and 70s, is reflected in his work which encapsulates a mixing of the senses - of decay and regeneration, of androgyny and altered states.

Elliott Hundley (b. 1975) received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from UCLA in 2005. He fuses collage with painting and sculpture, creating works that are three-dimensional, sometimes in shallow relief, some extending off the wall, hanging from the ceiling, or even freestanding. Their surfaces are painted, layered and worked over, often washed with color; and built up from hundreds of disparate elements including a mixture of found objects, and cutout paper images and photographs, either collaged into the surface or suspended by pins.

Hundley’s works balance the subjects of landscape and figure. Tiny, silhouette, cutout photographs taken in his studio of friends, family or self-portraits, act as points of focus in a complex landscape. The photographs are printed repeatedly so that the same image may reappear in the same work. These assemblages reflect the passage of time, as if the figures were suspended in a state of grace.

Monica Majoli (b. 1963) received her BA and MFA from UCLA. Her work up until the late 1990s consisted of small detailed panel paintings of the human body in oil, reminiscent of Northern European Renaissance masters. In 1999, Majoli initiated a series of small watercolors that she continued for two years, eventually producing a series of fifteen works. The glowing flesh tones and acute detail of the oil paintings disappeared. The Rubbermen series depicts an isolated male figure covered from head to foot in a rubber suit, generally in some state of sexual arousal. The first Hanging Rubberman, a series of four monumental watercolors, was finished in 2002, two were completed in 2003, and the final work in 2006. This entire series and the fifteen smaller works are being shown together for the first time in this exhibition.

After growing up in Eureka, California, Matthew Monahan (b. 1972) studied for his BFA at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, followed by further study in Europe and Asia. He now works on the edge of downtown Los Angeles where Latino, Asian, and Anglo cultures converge.

Monahan’s sculptures are made up of hundreds of elements and evoke past history, lost civilizations, and mixed cultures. For this exhibition two sculptures are presented; a Chinese-like warrior in golden armor, sheathed in a tunic of architectural drawings and plans, and the second an upended, fallen classical hero, enclosed in a vitrine. Both figures are surrounded by a frieze of large-scale transfer drawings, made by pressing carbon paper with a pencil or palette knife. Through these sculptures, Monahan evokes myths regarding the evolution and demise of cultures, leaving the viewer with a sense of the fragility and tenacity of humanity.

Rebecca Morales (b. 1962) received her BA from Otis in 1985. She crafts astonishing drawings of botanical subjects in gouache and watercolor on vellum. Morales’s drawings of plants, grasses, lichens, mosses, molds, and fungi, taken from book illustrations, are incorporated with long twisted braids of synthetic hair or strange, found knitted objects. The final works, combining synthetics and parasitic flora, juxtapose natural regeneration with the waste created by humans in the modern environment we live in today. Ideas of sustainability, climate change, and our own parasitic relationship with nature are challenged through Morales’s drawings that examine the complex relationship between nature and civilization.

Lari Pittman (b. 1952) studied at UCLA and Cal Arts and since 1993 has held the position of Professor of Fine Art at UCLA. A mid-career retrospective of his paintings was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1996, and the same year a survey of his drawings was presented at the Hammer Museum. Since then, Pittman’s work has continued to evolve with increasingly nuanced compositions and a more complex toned palette. Over the past ten years, Pittman’s work has become more menacing and gloomy despite their initial vibrancy and color — multiple images are juxtaposed, intertwined, and overlaid. His characters seem suspended in a foreboding contemporary world, perhaps a reflection upon society and the politics of the day, evoking the complexities of the time in which we live.

Ken Price (b. 1936) studied for his BFA at USC, then at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis). He now spends most of his time in Taos, New Mexico. Price has been exhibiting work for over forty-five years, following his first one-person exhibition at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1960. He has always worked with fired clay covered with richly colored glazes, lacquer, or acrylic paint. Ten years ago he left behind the last traces of regular geometric form in favor of hand-wrought, irregular, organic shapes, meticulously crafted. His works evoke molten lava, rounded sensual forms, the surfaces shimmering with tones approaching red, blue, and green, composed of dozens of layers of acrylic paint that have been sanded.

Jason Rhoades (1965-2006) received his MFA in 1993 from UCLA. From his first public installation in 1993 for The Unfair in Cologne, Germany, to his last installation, the Black Pussy Soiree Cabaret Macrame in Los Angeles in 2006 (a work still in progress at the time of his death in August of that year), Rhoades created an art of process and excess. The work presented in this exhibition, Twelve-Wheel Wagon Wheel Chandelier, is for Rhoades a restrained, contained sculpture, one from an extended series of “chandeliers” initiated in 2003 that continued until his death. Born and raised in northern California on a farm, Rhoades use of wooden wagon wheels as the foundation of this sculpture evokes the history of the West, of migrating populations to California. The wheels are used as a support for electrical cords from which suspend a cacophony of vibrant, colorful neon words. The words are all slang for female genitalia, gleaned mostly from the Internet.

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, (1976) Anna Sew Hoy studied for her MFA at Hunter College in New York, and now divides her time between New York and Los Angeles. Over the past three years she has generated families of projects — “tumbleweeds,” “dream catchers,” and “scholars rocks,” among others. The tumbleweeds are made of beer cans, the dream catchers are ceramic webs which have been woven or hung with objects collected from second-hand and thrift stores, the scholars rocks are the newest and most traditional sculptures. These complex structures are made from carved single blocks of clay, glazed and fired, their pedestals made from other materials. All of Sew Hoy’s sculptures are amorphous and ambiguous, a mix of image and texture, creating a collage out of the debris of modern life.

Jim Shaw (b. 1952) received his MFA from Cal Arts in 1978. He has been making art for more than thirty years in a variety of forms — painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video. Their collated imagery is taken from popular culture, centuries of Western high art, and from visual cultures around the world. Over the past 15 years one of Shaw’s richest sources has been his own dream. In 1993 he began making small-scale, pencil drawings of them, and by 1996 Shaw was using dreams not only for drawings but also for what he calls “Dream Objects”; paintings, sculptures, and more complex drawings, enlarged sometimes to monumental proportions, and often intensely colored. In 1998 Shaw began making a series of “Dream Objects” in the form of small paintings of imagined paperback book covers, at the scale of a real book. The imagery ranges from the humorous and fanciful to the absurd — somewhat macabre, threatening, and often sexual, displaying the complex nature of a dream sequence.

Monica Majoli. Hanging Rubberman #3, detail, 2004. Watercolor and gouache on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift, 2005, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, Photograph Douglas Parker Studio.