Edward Cella Art & Architecture is proud to present the work of Kendell Carter, Raúl Cordero, Michelle Grabner, Michael St. John, and Jeffrey Vallance at Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2018 from January 25–29, 2018 at The Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, California. The gallery’s debut at the ninth annual edition of Art Los Angeles Contemporary provides the opportunity to exhibit new and recent work of five artists who explore American values and its spectrum of heroics and shortcomings, viewed through the lens of contemporary politics and culture.
Kendell Carter's sustained commitment to observing and exploring race, gender, history, and consumer culture manifests in a studio practice that pushes beyond that of a black artist making art about politics, and towards one that acknowledges the rapidly integrating nature of today's visual culture. His multidisciplinary practice has been exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Monique Meloche, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, and Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA.
The paintings of Cuban born artist Raúl Cordero oscillate between forms of communication. Words and images, cinema and video, documentary and narrative, and imaginary and realistic forms distort the classical figure-ground perception, questioning how visual language has given way to textual information in contemporary art. His work is held in public collections including the Musée National D’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in Havana, Cuba, among others.
Michelle Grabner works across mediums including drawing, painting, video and sculpture. Her recent body of sculptural work is comprised of found blankets cast in bronze. Though the drapery and patination recall Classical antiquities, the hand-crocheted nature speaks to domestic labor, and confronts the traditional views which still pervade the inclusion of “women’s work” in the fine art context. Her work is included in the permanent collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK, among others.
Off the back of his recent solo exhibition at ECAA, Portraits of Democracy, Michael St. John’s identically scaled, small-format works depict aspects of our current culture and society through images of people and objects. Through a strategic selection of processes including appropriation, assemblage, painting, and collage, St. John's new paintings observe an underbelly of the American experience. Recent solo exhibitions include Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY, and Team Gallery, New York, NY, and his work is included in numerous public collections such as The Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami, FL; Neuberger Berman, New York, NY, and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA.
Throughout Jeffrey Vallance’s works, unexpected images of the commercial, the personal, and the political collide with his sincere exploration of idiosyncratic iconography. Vallance, whose practice often includes the obsessive archiving of arcane objects, finds a perfect subject in Bob Flanagan, an American performance artist known for his work exploring the convergence of cystic fibrosis and sadomasochism. Recently exhibited in “Every Breath You Take” a group exhibition at Jason Vass Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); as Whitehot magazine described, “Vallance succeeds in bringing us closer to Saint Bob, through objects that still gleam with menace and power.” Vallance has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA among countless others, and his works are held in such public collections as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Moderna Museet, Sweden and The Vatican Museum, The Vatican, Rome.
