"Intimate Geography" card and artists

The cards for the show just came back from the printer! We open in two weeks. I have enjoyed working on this show, and I really like the work of all the artists who are participating. Here is the text of the press release describing it:

“Intimate Geography – Getting To Know a Place,” a group show curated by Deborah Thomas and Linda Anne Hoag, offers a collection of imaginative and personal perspectives on how one relates to a particular locale. One goal of the show, which was germinated during a series of conversations between Thomas and Hoag about landscape painting and mapmaking, is to strip away assumptions and conventions about how people locate themselves. The invited artists share a willingness to explore one-of-a-kind encounters with specific locations. Each offers a unique vision:

Edith Abeyta invites viewers into an arrestingly literal archeological scenario by constructing a fanciful neighborhood scavenger hunt in which she fabricates, hides, and maps the locations of small, earthenware plates bearing a bitten imprint of her mouth and teeth.

Daniel Marlos similarly engages the theme of navigation through space in his project “Off on a Tangent” by means of an attractive mix of the conceptual and the personal. A photographer and quiltmaker, Marlos locates and records the appearance of arrows, commonly found in the signage along his usual route to work. His subliminal purpose, however, is to play with directionality in photographic streetscapes, in the gallery, and – in a revealingly tangential yet intimate moment – in the design of a colorful and intricately crafted handmade quilt.

Thomas and Hoag’s piece “Pilgrimage” also maps a personal journey, this time from a cognitive perspective. The organizing thread of this memory map of Los Angeles was dictated by the route Hoag took as she set out to revisit particular locations of past significance during a planned, day-long walk from her current home in Cypress Park to the house where she grew up in West Hollywood. Fragments of maps, old photographs, personal text and miscellaneous memorabilia juxtaposed in the piece reconstruct Hoag’s childhood; recollections of the past were triggered by hints revealed on city streets as they exist today.

Shifting the focus from the personal to the environmental, works by Jennifer Murphy and Deborah Thomas engage viewers to consider the impact of contradictions between nature and technology. Murphy designed a virtual quilt by painting spam phrases – the meaningless yet sometimes poetic linguistic garble that subverts cyber-mapping by slipping through e-mail filtering systems – on leaves gathered locally. Thomas’s shower curtain covered with minute landscape photographs taken in and around the Arroyo Seco water table engages the viewer both to look closely and intimately at the images and to consider questions of water rights in local and personal contexts.

In celebration of Earth Day of April 22, poets Laurel Ann Bogen, Jerry Garcia and Linda Anne Hoag and the musical trio Texere will also read and perform at the gallery at 7 p.m. Bogen, Garcia and Hoag are Los Angeles poets who, in the words of Hoag, “share a lineage” and whose work often considers and engages with the place they live. Texere (from the Latin, meaning “to weave, to twine together, to compose”) is a group of three women composers from Northeast Los Angeles who weave together traditional and original music to create a rich aural tapestry of strings and voices.

Free to the public. Details available at info@ArroyoArtsCollective.org or call 626 794-3627.

The Acorn Gallery is located at 135 N. Avenue 50 in Highland Park, between Figueroa Street and the Gold Line tracks. From downtown Los Angeles, take the 110 Freeway (Avenue 53 exit, then left on Figueroa). From the Valleys, exit the 134 Freeway at Figueroa going south, then turn right on Avenue 50. Street parking.