ART GALLERY

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Annual Student Show 2009

May 26 through June 4, 2009 &
August 31 through September 10, 2009

Monday through Thursday
11 am to 2 pm and 6 pm to 9 pm.

The Art Gallery will be closed for the summer.

The Art Gallery is located in the Art Building. To park, enter the campus at Oxnard Street and Campus Drive.  Park in one of the lots north or east of the Art Gallery. (No permit is required during Art Gallery hours.)

Free to the public

For information, telephone 818-778-5536.

Mailing List

The public is welcomed to all Art Gallery exhibitions and programs. If you would like to be added to the mailing or emailing list, please contact us by emailing reeddj@lavc.edu or mailing a request to: Dean of Arts, Valley College, 5800 Fulton Avenue, Valley Glen, CA 91041.

Recent Exhibitions

Margarete Hahner "After the Picnic" 2009 Oil on vinyl records Collection of the artist	Margarete Hahner "Wings," 2009 Oil on vinyl record Collection of the artist

Seen But Not Heard: Paintings by Margarete Hahner

The Art Gallery at Los Angeles Valley College is presenting Seen But Not Heard: Paintings by Margarete Hahner.  The exhibition offers recent oil paintings done primarily on 33^1/3rd vinyl records. The subjects of these unusual paintings range from human figures and small animals, to depictions of color systems.  These images are painted sometimes on a single record or sometimes on as many as forty records that are overlapped to form a single image.

More often Hahner's paintings are done on a series of records, one after the other, in which the image changes from one record to the next. The result is a visual metamorphosis somewhat like perceiving an optical illusion as one thing, and then suddenly seeing it as something entirely different - though in her work the transition is gradual.  Hahner says, "I often think that I'm painting one image, when another emerges.  I like the transformation, and I somehow want to capture it."

To further explore her ideas of visual transformation, Hahner has also used her painted records as the equivalents of animation cells to produce short movies of her ever-changing images.

Hahner, who is based in Los Angeles and Berlin, has had 15 one-person shows (mainly in Berlin).  Her work also has been seen in a variety of group shows in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Potsdam, Munich, Berlin and Los Angeles, including The First Annual LA Weekly Biennial at Track 16 in 2005.

Quotes from the Guest Book

Intuitive Eye: The Diana Zlotnick Collection

Reception & Discussion with the Collector
7 pm, Wednesday, February 18, 2009

February 18 - March 26, 2009

One summer evening in the 1970s, Diana came to my home for dinner.  She wore sunglasses when she arrived, and she kept them on after she came in the house. After an hour of looking at art, her husband, Harry - a calm anchor and
gentle foil to Diana's offbeat enthusiasm - said, "Diana, take off your sunglasses."  Surprised, she removed them, looked around and remarked, "I thought your house was so dark!"  Wonderful and eccentric, Diana has been my admired friend for some 30 years.

A nonlinear thinker, Diana does not progress logically in even steps from one thing to the next.  Rather she leaps, propelled by her inventive intuition and instinct.  They have served her well.  She has built a unique and enviable collection that includes early works by important artists: Andy Warhol, George Herms, Wallace Berman, and Richard Pettibone, to name but a few.

Her engagement with art is passionate and engulfing.  Although she buys art from galleries, she prefers a more direct link to artists.  She focuses on those whose careers are just emerging.  She often visits their studios and befriends them, being among the first to buy their work.  I have heard artists comment, years later, that Diana provided badly needed money and encouragement to continue working when they most needed it.

When she brings home new art, it is not placed carefully over the couch - I don't think she even owns a couch!  The rooms in her house, even the bathrooms, are small exhibition spaces with rotating shows.  New purchases join older works, so that a newly made piece, the paint barely dry, might hang next to vintage works acquired long ago by now veteran artists such as Andy Warhol, Edward Kienholz, or Lynn Foukles.  She has been collecting since 1954, after all, when one of her first acquisitions was a John Altoon painting purchased from Walter Hopps at the now legendary Ferus Gallery. The work in this exhibition is but a small sampling of her extensive holdings.

Diana has loaned artworks to many museum exhibitions, and selections from her collection have been shown in the art galleries at California State University, Los Angeles (1969), Scripps College (1972), and USC (1985).  She was named a leading Los Angeles art collector by the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1976.  Since 1972, she has published Newsletter on the Arts. She is a longtime supporter of the Art Gallery at Los Angeles Valley College, and she is a member of the college's Arts Council.

I have known many collectors over the years, but none quite like Diana. It is a pleasure to be able to share with others Diana's passionate and intuitive eye.

Dennis Reed, Dean
Fine, Performing & Media Art

One in a series of exhibitions featuring collectors and their collections.

Quotes from the Guest Book

Doug Harvey "Great Expectorations: Bling," 2004 Mixed media Private Collection

Doug Harvey "Joe's Temper #31," 1994 Oil on paper Collection of the artist

Untidy: The Worlds Of Doug Harvey

October 15 - November 26, 2008

When noted contemporary art collector Diana Zlotnick was invited to select the artist for this exhibition, she chose Doug Harvey.

Harvey's imagination - an unruly, fermenting whirlpool - plays out in a surprising variety of artwork: paintings, sculptures, films, alternative radio, performances, sound art, installations, mail art, comic strip drawings and zines (cheap, self-published magazines). The diversity of his output runs contrary to the conventional notion that an artist must commit to a single artistic direction. Harvey, who is best known as the art and culture critic for the LA Weekly, has strayed from that singular path.

Attempting to characterize the breadth of his work, even when one looks only at his drawings and paintings, is challenging. For example he has drawn hundreds of small comic strip panels. He has also created large paintings on canvas done in overall patterns that cover the works from top to bottom. He has produced still other paintings, many featured in this exhibition, which consist of overlapping, artful jumbles of paint, collage and images. These are composed upon a single field of color, typically white, and seem to be arranged by caprice or by stream of consciousness. His approach to picture-making owes a debt to many, including Sigmar Polke, Kurt Schwitters, and particularly Robert Rauschenberg, as does Harvey’s use of collage and his many sources of imagery – popular culture, low and high art, technical illustration, religious iconography, and an active subconscious.

He often works in the style of underground comics, drawing characters in simple outlines with flat colors and including handwritten dialogue. He liberally peppers his work with pasted newspaper clippings, clip art, and retro mid-century magazine ads. One example demonstrates the general tenor of these sources, a 1930s ad entitled Joe’s Temper Almost Broke Up Their Home, in which a domestic conflict is played out in several comic strip panels and resolved when the characters buy softer toilet paper. Its absurd silliness, appeal to blatant consumerism, and cartoon styling were the perfect grist for Harvey’s mill. Layered fragments of this ad have found their way into numerous collages and other works by Harvey.

He is equally freewheeling in his use of painting techniques and materials, which range from kitchen shelf paper to urethane foam to traditional artist supplies. And do not look for pristine surfaces. These works are messy, with rips, stains and smudges. Harvey’s home/studio is a disheveled array of art pinned to walls, stacked carelessly in piles, or left outside to rot. His nonchalant attitude is refreshing in an art world relentlessly concerned with the preservation of unsoiled and untouchable art. When Harvey is finished with a project he moves on – done. Wait, maybe not. Most recently he has begun to paint back into works that have been weathered by the elements or inadvertently damaged, fully incorporating the deterioration into the visual fabric of his art. He has even begun to intentionally “pre-rot” materials for painting.

Harvey’s mixture of sources and materials results in a narrative art that is lively, slyly humorous, wryly hip, and at times crude. These works exhibit the wit of an art world insider who chooses to appear at times either erudite or common, skillful or untrained, sophisticated or naïve. Like most good art, Harvey’s work is subversive and iconoclastic.
The broad range of Harvey’s artwork, from drawings to sound pieces, pack the Art Gallery from floor to ceiling with the detritus of his untidy, unabashed creative energy.

Reviews

LA TIMES - http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2008/11/doug-harvey-the.html
THE MAG LA - http://themagla.com/cgi-bin/artmagla/review.cgi?ReviewID=135

Impossible to Forget: The Nazi Camps Fifty Years After –
Photographs by Michael Kenna

April 7 through May 8, 2008

The exhibition consisted of 88 photographs produced by Michael Kenna, a renowned English photographer, who initially visited the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in 1986. The visit had a profound impact on him, and in 1988 he began a twelve-year project of documenting 30 Nazi concentration camps as an act of remembrance, conscientiously creating images of commemoration.

Impossible to Forget: The Nazi Camps Fifty Years After – Photographs by Michael Kenna was organized by Patrimoine Photographique, Paris, with the support of the French Ministry of Culture, and is toured by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions (CATE), Los Angeles.

Kenna’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is housed in many museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Quotes from the Guest Book

Art Gallery Publications
Publications still available appear in bold and indicate a price. Contact the Dean of Arts at reeddj@lavc.edu to purchase an item. Shipping to be paid by purchaser.

Perceptions: Bay Area Photography, 1945-1960 (catalogue) - $10

Creativity in the Shadow of Political Oppression: Recent Czechoslovakian Graphic Art from the Werksman Collection (catalogue & poster)
Pottery & Photography: Selections from the Fidel Danieli Collection (brochure)
Recent Painting, Drawing & Sculpture of Walter Askin (brochure)
Ornett's Way: Judith Von Euer (poster)
The Furniture of Gustav Stickley (poster - winner of a national design award)

Japanese American Photography in Los Angeles, 1920 -1945
(catalogue - winner of four national design awards) - $25

Richard Pettibone; A Survey of Work from 1961 through 1981
(catalogue) - $15

John Bertolino, The Girl on the Bench, c 1950, from the exhibition Perceptions: Bay Area Photography, 1945-1960 (Courtesy Susan Herzig & Paul Hertzmann, Paul Hertzmann, Inc, San Francisco – © John Bertolino)

Past Exhibitions (selected)