Jeffrey Vallance: La Chapelle de Poulet

Edward Cella Art & Architecture is proud to present, Jeffrey Vallance: La Chapelle de Poulet, an immersive experience into the mind of influential Los Angeles artist Jeffrey Vallance. Over the course of his career Vallance has consistently added to the strong assemblage tradition of Southern California. This exhibition, featuring mixed-media drawings, sculptural works, and performance reaffirms Vallance’s position as one of the most influential and talented artists of his generation whose work combines vastly different symbols along with found objects from his travels and correspondence across the globe, as well as in L.A. itself.

In the dense assemblage works presented in Jeffrey Vallance: La Chapelle de Poulet, Vallance combines the iconography of Blinky the Friendly Hen with drawing, painting and found objects collected over the past 40 years. Often beginning with an intuitive gesture, and then built layer-by-layer through collage and painting methods, Vallance performs the making of each work like a “possessed cat,” scratching and clawing at each surface with manic gestures and pure emotion. Vallance’s exhibition is offset by a large-scale souvenir cart that extends modes and implications of an assembled display in order to reflect on collecting as a deeply engrained human activity.

Vallance’s work pushes one to question the social and personal significance that shape their meaning. Known for his critical yet humorous eye, Vallance ‘s drawings, performances, sculptures and installations often reference his California childhood, voyages to the Polynesian Islands, Iceland, residences in Texas, Las Vegas, the Arctic, and travels to the Vatican. In his legendary Blinky the Friendly Hen project from 1978, a funeral service was held for a frozen supermarket hen at Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park. The artist’s examination of these experiences combines a pseudo-anthropological approach with an art historically informed practice, and addresses themes of faith, myth, ritual and popular culture, along with the geopolitical landscapes of the past and present.

PUBLIC EXHIBITION PROGRAMS

Otis College of Art and Design, Mandy & Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Jeffrey Vallance

Tuesday, October 29, 2019 | Reception: 6pm & Program: 7pm

Artist to Artist: Constance Mallinson in conversation with Jeffrey Vallance

Saturday, November 16, 2019 | 4pm @ Edward Cella Art & Architecture

Join Jeffrey Vallance and Constance Mallinson as they interview each other and discuss collecting, curating, and making art in Los Angeles.

ABOUT JEFFREY VALLANCE

Jeffrey Vallance was born in 1955 in Redondo Beach, California and lives and works in Canoga Park CA. He received his MFA from Otis College. Vallance has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and Centre d’édition contemporaine, Genève. His works are held in such public collections as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Vatican Museum, The Vatican, Rome; and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Vallance’s work blurs the lines between object making, installation, performance, painting, writing and curating. Critics have described his work as an indefinable cross-pollination of many disciplines. Often his intervention/infiltration projects are site-specific, including burying a frozen chicken at a pet cemetery; traveling to Polynesia to research the myth of Tiki; having audiences with the king of Tonga, the queen and president of Palau and the presidents of Iceland; creating a Richard Nixon Museum; traveling to the Vatican to study Christian relics; and installing an exhibit aboard a tugboat and at a Christian Dinosaur museum in Sweden. In Las Vegas Vallance curated shows in the fabulous Vegas Strip museums, such as the Liberace, Cranberry, Magic and Clown Museum. In Lapland, Vallance constructed a shamanic “magic drum.” In Orange County, Mr. Vallance curated the only art-world exhibition of the Painter of Light™ entitled “Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth.” In 1983, he was host of MTV’s The Cutting Edge and appeared on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman. In 2004, Vallance received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation award. In addition to exhibiting his artwork, Mr. Vallance has written for such publications and journals as Art issues, Artforum, L.A. Weekly, Juxtapoz, Frieze and Fortean Times. He has published over 10 books including: Blinky the Friendly Hen, The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings 1978-1994, Christian Dinosaur, Art on the Rocks, Preserving America’s Cultural Heritage, Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth, My Life with Dick, Relics and Reliquaries, and The Vallance Bible.