SHARON LOCKHART
LUNCH BREAK

November 21, 2009–January 9, 2010

Blum & Poe
2727 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Lunch Break is the first one-person exhibition at Blum & Poe's new location and the first U.S. showing of Sharon Lockhart's most recent project, Lunch Break. Featuring two film installations, Lunch Break (2008) and Exit (2008), as well as three bodies of photographs, each element details a different aspect of working life at Bath Iron Works. The shipyard in Bath, Maine, is a microcosm of the issues facing industrial workers all over the United States. Well known for her previous involvement with communities as varied as a city on the Amazon River, a Japanese basketball team, or the youth of a small town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, here Lockhart shifts her attention toward a community of workers.

Together with long-time collaborators Escher Gunewardena Lockhart has designed two unique installations for her films. Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard. Contrary to her previous films, the camera is untethered and, as it slowly moves down the corridor, we experience what was a brief interval in the workday schedule expanded into a sustained gaze. Lined with lockers, the hallway seems not only an industrial nexus but also a social one, its surfaces containing a history of self-expression and customization. Over the course of the lunch break we see workers engaged in a wide range of activities—reading, sleeping, talking—in addition to actually eating their midday meal. The real-time soundtrack is a composition designed in collaboration with composer Becky Allen and filmmaker James Benning, in which industrial sounds, music, and voices slowly merge and intertwine. Together, picture and sound provide an extended meditation on a moment of respite from productive labor.

Lockhart's other film installation is a quite different meditation on time and space. Filmed over a five-day workweek, each of the five takes that comprise Exit shows the long progression of workers leaving the Bath Iron Works at the end of their shift. Each take starts with a title card stating the day of the week, and then begins a routine that varies greatly from day to day. Reminiscent of Louis Lumiere's film, Leaving the Lumiere Factory, Exit emphasizes the flow of time and the nuances of daily experience.

The photographic component of Lunch Break consists of twenty-seven photographs separated into three distinct bodies of work. A set of tableaus in which workers interact around both makeshift and institutional dining tables give us a sense of the various ways workers engage the social space. A collection of the various independent businesses workers have established to provide coffee, hot dogs, candy bars and snacks depicts the makeshift architectures and micro-economies allowed to exist within the larger factory structure. Finally, a series of eighteen more formalized still-lives of the workers' lunch boxes serve as portraits of their owners and an archive of the trades that contribute to the construction of a ship. In each case, the worker is both framed by and frames the work place.

Arzu Arda Kosar, who received her MFA from the USC Roski School of Fine Arts in 1999, has been named Artist in Residence by the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica.

Founded in 1988, the 18th Street Arts Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to provoking public dialogue through contemporary art making. 18th Street programs include rotating exhibitions in the main gallery and project room, an international artist exchange program, community festivals, and workshops. The complex also houses live-work spaces for artists and organizations in residence.

Arzu Arda Kosar completed her undergraduate work in Studio Arts and Art History, with a minor in Philosophy and Women's Studies, at the University of Pittsburgh. Her art focuses on topics related to inter-group relationships and balkanization. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including Shoshanna Wayne Gallery, 18th Street Art Center Crazy Space in Santa Monica and several others. Kosar's work has earned major recognition from periodicals such as The Los Angeles Times, OC Weekly, Lummox Journal, Cumhuriyet, and Nokta, and her articles on architecture and sociology have appeared in Doxa magazine. She is currently collaborating with filmmaker Deb Diehl on a project about the history and physical and psychological boundaries of Los Angeles. She also is setting the groundwork to begin another project with artist Gul Cagin that deals with the coming of age within the city of Istanbul.

For more information, please visit http://www.18thstreet.org/ or http://www.arzuardakosar.org/.

Scott Hassell and Oona Gardner
November 14–December 6, 2009

Chime and Co.
512 N. Hoover St.
Los Angeles, CA 90004

Elad Lassry
Looking Back: White Columns Annual
November 18, 2009–January 9, 2010

Opening reception: Wed. Nov. 18, 6–8 pm

White Columns
320 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10014

Looking Back is the fourth installment of the White Columns Annual. Each year an individual (e.g. an artist, a curator, a writer, etc.) is invited to make an exhibition at White Columns based on their personal experience of looking at art in New York in the previous year. For the fourth 'Annual' exhibition White Columns has invited James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff, who form the New York-based non-profit organization Primary Information, devoted to printing artist books, artist writings, out of print publications and editions.

In a very straightforward sense the 'Annual' exhibition hopes to reveal something of the complexities involved in trying to negotiate - and engage with - New York's constantly evolving cultural landscape. The format of the exhibition inevitably encourages highly subjective and deeply personal responses to the realities of viewing art in New York. The 'Annual' exhibition series hopes to illuminate aspects of the specific, yet highly idiosyncratic routes - geographical, intellectual, historical, social, etc. - individuals follow in an increasingly expansive and fragmented cultural environment.

Elad Lassry, Laminated Structure (For Her and Him), 2009.

Elad Lassry
Berlin_Los Angeles. A tale of two (other) cities
12 November–19 December, 2009

Massimo De Carlo
Via Giovanni Ventura 5
Milan, Italy

Berlin_Los Angeles is collective idea of a journey through the works of thirteen young artists--five from Los Angeles and eight from Berlin--reflecting new tastes and trends of the contemporary art world.

Photographs from Lassry include 1999, 2009; Blue Bar, 2009; Boys, 2009; Papayas, 2009; and Angela Ledgerwood, 2009.

Graham Goddard
365 and counting
November 14–December 6, 2009

Avenue 50 Studio
131 North Avenue 50
Highland Park, CA 90042

From the website:

The year 2008 was historic in the fact that a Black American became our 44th President. We have asked our artists to demonstrate how they perceive the first year, the honeymoon period, of the Barack Obama Administration. He has taken office facing high expectations and immense challenges. Some questions we ask our "365" artists to consider are: Does race affect political choices, or is it more a class question? Have opportunities for minorities advanced? What about health care, the turmoil in the Middle East, the economy? Obama has declared a new spirit of engagement with the UN to confront global challenges, from climate change to nuclear proliferation. But is his foreign policy decisions an extension of Bush administration policy known for its political and international aggression? Our "365" artists tackle these challenging questions with works that are aesthetically profound and timely.

Graham Goddard, Almost Time.

Ruth Weisberg, Dean of the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, has been honored with a Leadership Award by the National Council of Art Administrators (NCAA). The award was presented during Economies: Art+Architecture, the first joint conference of the NCAA and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). The conference, hosted by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, took place from November 4 through 7, 2009.

Other recipients of NCAA awards at the conference included Joe Deal, Professor of Photography and former Provost at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Anabeth and John D. Weil, prominent art collectors and patrons.

The NCAA is an organization of academic professionals dedicated to creating and maintaining a vital network of arts administrators. An affiliate of the College Art Association, it promotes communication among institutions and provides meaningful collaborative opportunities for arts administrators within academia as well as with leaders in related arts organizations. The annual conference supports the organization's goals to provoke a lively exchange of ideas through workshops, panel discussions, lectures, and visits to the host city's cultural institutions.

Hammer Screenings:
Sharon Lockhart, Double Tide
Thursday, November 19, 2009 | 7 pm

Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024

Artist and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart is known for creating beautiful, meditative films that incorporate subtle movement and a static, photographic gaze to examine her subjects. Her new film, Double Tide, documents the work of a female clam digger in the mudflats of coastal Maine and is filmed on the rare occasion in which low tide occurs twice within daylight hours—once at dawn and once at dusk. Expanding the focus of Lockhart's recent films Lunch Break (2008) and Exit (2008), Double Tide creates a portrait of a relatively unseen and singular form of labor, taking as its subject a worker whose job is defined by the most elemental and unchanging forces of nature.

Sharon Lockhart, still from Double Tide, 2009.

Elad Lassry
The Reach of Realism
December 1, 2009–February 14, 2010

Opening Reception
MOCA / Vanity fair International Party
Tuesday, December 1, 7–9 pm

Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
770 NE 125th Street
North Miami, FL

The Reach of Realism brings together an international group of artists exploring the artistic traditions of Realism in an age of digital manipulation and staged reality. The artists in the exhibition use various strategies to address the increasing fusion between daily life and popular media.

From 19th century painters who depicted everyday life during the industrial revolution, to the 1980s "pictures generation" of artists who criticized the media's growing influence on society, artists have used realism as a political strategy. Today, it is widely understood that while images are effective means of communicating ideas, they have lost their impact in communicating truths because of increased manipulation and outright fabrication.

The exhibition's artists convey the desire for authenticity in images while distrusting the ability of images to communicate an objective reality. By choosing to obstruct straightforward depictions and instead reveal poetic truths, these artists question whether the images they produce and the realities they portray can be meaningful. In creating semblances of reality, they are more interested in the inclusion of a detail or moment in a work that contains the potential for realism and not realism itself.

Elad Lassry, Czech Girl, 2009, C-print, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches, Edition of 5, 2 AP, Collection of Carlo Bronzini Vender.

Joel Tauber
Sick-Amour
November 11, 2009, 3:30–4:30 pm

Pitzer College
Pellissier Mall (The Mounds)
1050 North Mills Avenue
Claremont, CA 91711

Join Joel Tauber and president of Pitzer College Laura Skandera Trombley for the tree baby planting ceremony at Pitzer on Nov. 11.

Tauber's Sick-Amour project that began in 2006 when he fell in love with a sycamore tree stuck in the middle of a giant parking lot at the Rose Bowl. After caring for the tree, he produced seedlings or "baby trees" to plant at prominent public locations throughout California as symbols of hope and renewal.

To learn more about the Sick-Amour project, visit www.joeltauber.com

Blank Stare
Photo 309 Exhibition
November 13th–December 2nd, 2009

Reception: November 19th, 6–9PM

3001 Gallery 3001 S. Flower St.
Los Angeles, CA 90008

The 3001 Gallery was established by the Photography Area of USC's Roski's School of Fine Arts in 2009. It is located in the Advanced Photography Lab in the IFT building which is located on the south-west corner of 30th Street and Flower. Enter from the 30th Street entrance.

Student featured during the exhibition are:

• Savannah Wood
• Josh Zeive
• Sherry Zambrano
• Jon Wingo
• Craig Stubing
• Molly Murphy
• Lisa Losorelli
• Josh Dunn
• Erica Doo
• Akhila Bhoopalam