Transmogrified
November 12 – December 3, 2022
Opening reception: Saturday November 12, 6-10pm
Curated by Ben Jackel, Ismael de Anda III, Lana Duong, Sijia Chen
Transmogrified, weaves together and juxtaposes a group of artists that experiment with common and unusual materials to transform them into artworks that explore and recontextualize the world we live in.
The artists’ varied, dynamic work and practices hold in common the experimentation of recombination of a myriad of physical materials. They transform the possible expectations of how certain materials are commonly used, viewed, or thought of. They do this by translating modes of expression from aural to visual, simulating and recontextualizing common signage for new use values, processing digital statistical data as hand woven strips of plastic paint, or using graphic design to imagine asteroids as sanctuaries for human refugees.
Featuring work by Analia Saban, Ben Jackel, Bryan Ida, Ismael de Anda III, Josh Callaghan, Lana Duong, Nathan Mabry, Sijia Chen, and Stefan Bucher.
Saturday October 15, 7-10 pm
Please join us for this exciting exhibition:
Climbing the Underside of the Ladder (41 years after A New Spirit in Painting)
Curated by EC, Jenny Hager, David Leapman and Christine Stark
October 15th until November 5th
Opening Reception October 15th 7-10 pm
From London’s Music Machine to Durden and Ray LA 2022.
Climbing the Underside of the Ladder brings together 10 UK and 5 LA painters 41 years after the seminal British exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting”.
Beginning with personal experiences of both the London Punk scene in 1976/7 and the 1981 Royal Academy exhibition A New Spirit in Painting, painters EC, Jenny Hagar, David Leapman, and Christine Stark, look at where contemporary painting is now, four decades later. For “Climbing the Underside of the Ladder” Durden and Ray invited 10 established UK and 5 LA painters to engage and debate the changes in contemporary painting since 1981.
As expressed in Peter Suchin’s accompanying essay, the New Spirit and Punk, true to their nature have not remained on a linear path:
“The regional and international interconnectivity of artists today, whether through physical exhibitions or digital reproductions is more heightened than ever before: a shimmering panorama, weave or tissue, a cloud, community, forcefield, synthesis, distillation, contradiction or concatenation of potential combinations. So, this is no New Spirit but something else again”
SHIMMER!! This Saturday September 10. 6-8 pm in the gallery and SPECIAL ROOFTOP PERFORMANCE 8:30-10 pm.
Please join us for the exciting art exchange with Our Neon Foe Studio Artists from Australia.
Shimmer is a stunning phenomenon on the surface of water, like dreams that are only just lucid on top of the watery unconscious.
The artworks have a shimmer-like effect of mirroring artists’ underlying desires. Part of the shimmer process is being heated just below boiling point while bubbling gently.
Shimmer is the fugitive gleam escaping
Shimmer is the captive dream evaporating
Shimmer is the oil slick bamboozling the eye
Shimmer is the intangible fog engulfing our cities, sharpening surfaces, levitating objects in the dream swell
This is the tale of two cities - Sydney and Los Angeles - baking in heat haze and barely clinging on to reality. Cities that are held together by arterial roads and just the barest suggestion of a shared experience, like a vast cloud defined by the evasive words of a poet.
Skating beneath kaleidoscopic surface-level slicks, the reality barely ever accords with the appearance.
Our Neon Foe is a gallery, a studio complex and a loose collective of artists who curate monthly exhibitions of emerging Sydney and international artists. During COVID, many of us escaped into alternate worlds of imagination, shifting unconscious states, living just as much in our beds as out of them. The new (un)reality allowed us a new freedom, as we shimmered in and out of our old identities, bringing buried fantasies to light.
Curatorial statement written by Elliot Waugh and Priscilla Bourne on behalf of the artists at Our Neon Foe Gallery.
Grassroots in the Spectacle
Grassroots in the Spectacle at Durden and Ray brings together artists from Los Angeles and Tainan, Taiwan to explore how careful observation can guide grassroots societies operating at the dividing line between artifice and nature.
The exhibition is part of an ongoing exchange project between Durden and Ray and artists in Tainan who are associated with the Siao-Long (Soulangh) Cultural Park and Tainan University of Technology. The project includes two panel discussions, with artists and curators from both countries, addressing artistic creation in grassroots culture within Tainan and Los Angeles.
“It’s an honor to work with the curators from Tainan and exciting to be able to bring artists together who are dedicated to considering careful looking as a powerful vehicle for change,” said Ty Pownall, a curator with Durden and Ray.
The curators of Grassroots in the Spectacle ask how the life experiences in the two cities, Los Angeles and Tainan, show up in memory, history, and cultural images and also how those construct a set of imaginary spaces for urban life. The project additionally explores how art finds its own identity during a pandemic while fighting against the simulation and mass production in consumer-driven capitalist societies.
Curators: From Taiwan: Chin Fu Huang, Yi Ting Tsai, From USA: Roni Feldman, Ty Pownall
Artists: Daniel Barron Corrales, Sijia Chen, Dani Dodge, John Emison, Yvette Gellis, Chin Fu Huang, Wen Yung Huang, Hong Wen Lin, Yu Ting Lin, Christina Mesiti, Peir Shyan Shiau, Chun Yi Tseng,
Special Academic Observers: Ming Turner, Yen Ju Yu
Opening reception: 6-9 p.m. Aug, 6, 2022
On view: August 6 – August 27, 2022 Open hours: Saturdays, 12-5 p.m., and by appointment
Panel discussion, session 1: 5:30-7:30 p.m.(Pacific Time), Aug. 18, 2022, Online
Panel discussion, session 2: 7:30-9:00 p.m.(Pacific Time), Aug. 18, 2022, Online
Location: Durden and Ray, 1206 Maple Ave., #832 Los Angeles, CA 90015
WIDERHALL/REVERBERATIONS
Durden and Ray is pleased to present our next iteration of the ongoing relationship with our sister city Berlin in the “B/LA Connect” exhibition exchanges with Axel Obiger Gallery.
This exhibition, “Widerhall/Reverberations” considers the physical and metaphysical repercussions across time and place. Dualities of organic and inorganic structures echo in the works that live side by side in the show as well as within each artist’s work. The artists from both cities highlight the conditions of the individual, social, architectural and environmental events and processes that affect their cities and then articulate these events as visual explorations in their own shifting senses of memory, time, and space. The viewer is invited to experience a resonance between the works that belies any perceived distance – a relationship where each side stimulates the other. Where formal structures meld into abstraction and objective facts turn into poetry.
Artists
Axel Obiger (Germany):
Alke Brinkmann und Wolfgang Matzat, Harriet Groß, Thilo Droste, Juliane Duda, Gabriele Künne, Matthias Moravek, Enrico Niemann, Maja Rohwetter
Durden & Ray (USA):
Arezoo Barthania, Carlos Beltran Arechiga, Gul Cagin, Jenny Hager, Curtis Stage, Alexandra Wiesenfeld, Valerie Wilcox
Opening reception: 7-10 p.m. July 9, 2022
Closes: July 23, 2022 Open hours: Saturdays, 12-5 p.m., and by appointment
Location: Durden and Ray, 1206 Maple Ave., #832 Los Angeles, CA 90015
Axel Obiger:
Founded in 2009 as a project space for contemporary art in Berlin, Axel Obiger focuses on dialogues between its artists and invited guests. With their extensive program the Axel Obiger artists have created an international venue for intensive artistic debates.
The Elephant in the Room
London Painting Now
Durden and Ray is pleased to present an international exchange exhibition of 7 London painters in TURPS Studio Program.
May 28 to June 18, 2022
Reception on Saturday May 28, 7pm to 10pm
Special Panel Discussion at 6pm - Chaired by Leslie Dick
Tom Farthing
Gina Birch
Michael Coppelov
Charles Inge
T.D. Macgregor
Eigel Nordstrom
John Wyatt Clarke
Durden and Ray
1206 Maple Ave. #832
Los Angeles, CA, 90015
Crossing Point
Curated by The Garage (Bristol, UK)
Artists: Joe Davidson, Tom Dunn, Alice Freeman, Rema Ghuloum, Jack Paffett, Max Presneill & Joe Warrior-Walker
April 23 - May 14, 2022
Reception April 23, 6pm to 10pm
1206 Maple Ave. #832
Los Angeles, CA, 90015
This exhibition brings together a group of U.K and L.A based artists, with an aim to explore a fluid, non-linear set of interactions through a process of abstraction. These modes of representation intersect across a varied language of mark making and organic, intuitive approaches.
The show addresses themes of laterally linked moments, events and decisions that are folded into open-ended narratives. Flat planes of color shift into ambiguous internal spaces, whilst figures sometimes emerge from a suggestion of rural and urban environments.
Due to the pandemic and its resultant delays this project has been through several iterations. The title ‘Crossing Point’ developed in response to random events and changing plans, which ultimately lead to a group show that has been shaped by chance meetings and unforeseen circumstances. The artists have been able to build on an existing familiarity with each other's practice, which has helped to further understand the crossover of ideas and experiences that inform their work.
Chrome City
March 19 to April 9, 2022
Chrome City - Australian art in Los Angeles
Artists: Ron Adams, Polly Borland, Chris Dolman, Belem Lett, Adam Norton, Philjames, Genevieve Felix Reynolds
The main idea of this show is to speculate if Sydney, Australia, a sprawling conurbation of coastal and landlocked suburbs, has anything artistically in common with the metropolis of Los Angeles. I am also speculating that there is such a thing as Australian cool, which might reflect or correspond with a perception held that LA art is definitely cool. LA’s emergence as an important art city has been an ongoing matter for debate but has recently become cemented by the by appearance in LA of some major new art museums and international galleries.
Both Sydney and Los Angeles are coastal cities that share the same sea albeit separated by 7,500 miles. They are both important economic giants and huge cultural melting pots in their respective countries. Most important, both cities bask in huge amounts of sunlight during the year so that their skyscrapers sparkle in the light and seem to ignore the daily hustle in the streets below.
I first visited LA in 2007 and have been back half a dozen times since and I can say, whether the art is significant or not, that looking at art in LA is always cool. Maybe it’s the borrowed glamour of Hollywood etched into the streets travelling between galleries, but it is a cool place to look at art. I can compare it to a gallery trip around Chelsea, NYC, in a winter blizzard seeing important stuff but ankle deep in frozen slush!
What do I mean by cool? All the Australian artists in the show do not have any frantic allegiance to historical art movements or profess great significant tropes. They might reference historical modes of art making, but generally use them without heat and with plenty of skill, and always well within themselves. As if they still have plenty in the tank. But I won’t labour the point. I just think they are all very good artists who are worthy of showing in the great shiny city of Los Angeles.
Adam Norton
Enquiries:
Dani Dodge at Durden & Ray dani.dodge@gmail.com
Adam Norton , exhibiting artist and co-ordinator ammnorton@hotmail.com
Samantha Ferris at Galerie pompom samantha@galeriepompom.com
Durden & Ray
Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Ave #832
Los Angeles, CA
Opening hours: Saturday 12-5 or by appointment DandRart@gmail.com
TIEZE
DURDEN AND RAY
Group Exhibition of DURDEN AND RAY Artists
February 12 to March 5, 2022
Opening Reception: February 12, 7pm to 10pm
BENDIX Night Reception: February 19, 7pm to 10pm
1206 Maple Ave. #832 Los Angeles, 90015
Parking on the streets is free and available after 6:00 pm
(parking structure in the Bendix building closes at 6:30)