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Artist Programs Overview Curator’s Exhibition Award FOCAFellowship Curator’s Lab Series

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Site as Symbol - Curated by SURVEY WEST COLLABORATIVE 2011
FOCA Gallery- Chinatown 970 N Broadway Suite 208 Los Angeles, CA 90012 April 9 - June 4 Site-specific events corresponding with the exhibition: An ’Evening of Projections’ with legendary filmmaker and artist Pat O’Neill at his Pasadena Studio Sunday May 1st, Limited to 50 spaces, RSVP only, Reservation details TBA Time: 3:00 - 6:00pm, screening starts at 4pm Plying the P.E. Trail: Bisecting L.A.’s Edge, a bicycle tour lead by reluctant urbanist and ecological ethicist Claude Willey along the Pacific Electric Inland Trail. Sunday June 5, Limited to 20 spaces, RSVP only (closing event), Reservation details TBA Time: 12:00 - 3:00pm		SURVEY WEST COLLABORATIVE Jill Newman & Bari Ziperstein Los Angeles is represented to the world in carefully constructed ways, but those who have spent significant time here have a unique relationship to its complexity. An architect friend once described LA as a “city of dreamers.” Simultaneously, its pockets of injustice are undeniable. Perhaps these two poles fuel each other. Regardless, L.A.’s inhabitants tend to make meaning of this city. Site as Symbol brings together the work of seven artists working in and around Los Angeles. Each artist utilizes local sites as symbols for force and progress, explored as destructive and imaginative in realms political and magical-- as dichotomous as the city itself. Melissa Thorne brings utilitarian architecture into conversation with modernist design, while Bari Ziperstein and Olga Koumoundouros create new connections between site, economics and class. With an allegorical approach to site, Charles Long and Jill Newman preserve and present place as symbolic celebrations of regeneration and wonder. Also focused on landscape as metaphor, Jed Lind and Pat O’Neill explore site as latent energy, and are invested in the tools needed to harness it. In these distinct and comparable ways, the artists address environmental and political landscapes, domestic spaces, and economics by investigating specific ideas of place. By transforming their subjects through context and material play, honor and imagination are reclaimed, critique of our current position comes into play, and site becomes symbol.

Everything is Political - FOCA Fellowship 2010
FOCA Space Mandarin Plaza, Chinatown 970 N Broadway, Suite 208 Los Angeles, CA 90012 October 17 - December 20 November 6th, 3:30PM CONVERSATION AT MOCA Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez, the FOCAFellowship recipients, plus Lucia Sanromán, featured essayist in Everything is Political catalogue and Bennett Simpson Associate Curator MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Ahmanson Auditorium 250 S. Grand Ave Los Angeles, CA 90012 * free and open to the public		Between a Rock and a Hard Place: From Radical Art to Radical Optimism by Lucia Sanromán ’Everything is Political,’ an exhibition conceived by Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez opens this Sunday, October 17th at the FOCA Space in Chinatown. At the exhibition a catalogue will be distributed that was designed by Jessica Fleischmann’s still.room. The ingenious and radical catalogue contains an essay by Lucia Sanromán, Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, entitled ’Between a Rock and a Hard Place: From Radical Art to Radical Optimism.’ About Bowers and Martinez, Ms. Sanromán explains: "Their practices are fundamentally different, yet they share an insistent belief in art as a detonator of forms of agency, social engagement and political action." For her portion of the exhibition, Bowers, continues her investigation on homage and the archival impulse by transforming 15 utilitarian folding chairs into memorials to artists Bowers particularly admires. Martinez adds two elements: the first a ceiling hung sculpture involving a hare strapped within an IED and second, a large photograph printed on an elegant silk background of an anonymous massacre site. This is a show that must be seen, not explained.

All Time Greatest 2009-2010
FOCA Space, Chinatown December 12 - February 27		Natilee Harren Beyond the emergent field of sound art, there exist certain artists for whom music forms one aspect of a multi-faceted practice or for whom it plays a deep influence that may not find expression outside the studio. Conceived as a concept album-turned-exhibition, All Time Greatest offers the opportunity to consider how artists’ musical predilections—the secret soundtrack to their production—might add a dimension of significance to their work in an exhibition setting. The exhibition features the work of 11 LA-based artists: Gabrielle Ferrer, Brendan Fowler, Alex Klein, Dave Muller, Eamon Ore-Giron, Vincent Ramos, Steve Roden, Brian Roettinger, Sumi Ink Club (Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara), and Stephanie Taylor. Featured in the center of the gallery is a turntable and record collection composed of each artist’s chosen “all time greatest” album; visitors are welcome to thumb through and listen to the records. Against the culture of rapid digital file sharing, All Time Greatest uses the exhibition format as an opportunity to revive an analog, old-school approach to sharing music at the same time that it adapts the fan culture of audiophiles to the task of the curator.

Not Los Angeles - Curated by Zachary Kaplan & Aandrea Stang 2009
FOCA Space. 970 N. Broadway, Suite 208, Chinatown. 90012 September 26 - November 28		Zachary Kaplan & Aandrea Stang Unique in both its assertiveness and the breadth of its proliferation, Los Angeles has attracted a genre of scholarship from Reyner Banham to Mike Davis, from ecologies to fortresses, that exists to divine the city’s essential meaning. While this has produced images both laudatory and critical of parking lots, production studios, mid-century property, and more, Not Los Angeles suggests a new way of thinking about the city— ignoring its structures, its boundaries, and collective identities, spurning the meta-narratives, forgetting the things read, and focusing on the individual perspectives and intimate interactions that constitute this inhabited general space. Engaging the exhibition’s participating artists in a reflective activity rather than a traditional display of bodies of work unified by an overarching theme, the goal of Not Los Angeles is to present decentralized vignettes, not a singular argument.

Superficiality and Superexcrescence - Surface and Identity in Recent California Art 2009
Otis Ben Maltz Gallery June 27 - September 12		Chris Bedford, Kristina Newhouse and Jennifer Wulffson John Welchman Superficiality and Superexcrescence features work by Amy Adler, Rebecca Campbell, Marcelino Gonçalves, Lia Halloran, Salomón Huerta, Elliott Hundley, Kurt Kauper, Elad Lassry, Blue McRight, Joel Morrison, Kori Newkirk, Tia Pulitzer, and Catherine Sullivan. Conceived in opposition to the hard and fast interior/exterior dialectic that cultural theorists like Frederic Jameson have used to contrast the modern and postmodern eras, this exhibition offers a close examination of the work of thirteen LA-based artists who are variously committed to the notion that deep cultural meaning inhabits—as code, nuance, and implication—the outer husk of the people and objects that populate our day-to-day lives, remaking superficiality not as a condition to be resisted, but rather one to be analyzed and manipulated. For these artists, surface and substance are not opposed properties, but equally present. Accordingly, each of these artists focuses on what is latent over what is manifest, on implication over demonstration, and on faint whispers over loud, declarative statements, not with the aim of privileging appearance over essence, but rather to suggest that appearance and essence co-mingle in the surfaces that surround us to generate cultural meaning.

Kori Newkirk: 1997-2007 2007-2008
The Studio Museum in Harlem November 14 - March 9 Traveled to the Pasadena Museum of California Art		Thelma Golden Thelma Golden, Huey Copeland, Deborah Willis & Dominic Molon Kori Newkirk (b. 1970) is a celebrated multidisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice is based on transforming modest materials into loaded signifiers that question both cultural and aesthetic notions of beauty. Newkirk elegantly blends medium and message-using photographs, wax, hair pomade, beads and neon lights-to forge a new paradigm in art practice. This survey exhibition presents work produced since Newkirk received his MFA from the University of California at Irvine, includes a site-specific project and illustrates how interrelated strands of his practice have converged and developed over time.

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