For Immediate Release: Lun*na Menoh: 1986 – 2006, curated by Kristine McKenna Track 16 Gallery is pleased to present the exhibitions, Lun*na Menoh: 1986-2006, and Mark Chiat: Paintings and Drawings. The exhibitions run from December 2 through December 23, 2006, with opening receptions for Marc Chiat on Saturday, December 2 from 5 to 7 P.M. and for Lun*na Menoh from 6 to 8 P.M., with a fashion show featuring the work of Lun*na Menoh to follow, as well as a performance by her band, “Jean Paul Yanemoto”. This first full career survey of Los Angeles artist Lun*na Menoh will feature multiple works from all her art-making practices––painting, sculpture, performance art, and video. Anchoring the exhibition are a dozen of Menoh’s subversive one-of-a-kind sculptural garments. In the Surrealist tradition, these wearable artworks are at turns witty, diabolical, and unabashedly beautiful. “The Magical Story Teller Dress,” for instance, is a mechanized gown with a full skirt that incorporates several picture frames; as the wearer weaves her tale, paintings in the picture frames shift to illustrate the story. “Men’s Wardrobe” is a clothing rack of men’s wear that’s been stripped down to nothing but the seams, and “Which Room Do You Want to Get Into?” is a bright yellow jumper inset with fantasy boxes evocative of work by Joseph Cornell. The show will also include several pieces from Menoh’s “Dirty Shirt Collar,” project, which includes a line of clothing fashioned entirely from dirty shirt collars, and a series of painted portraits of her favorite dirty collars. The founder and sole member of the band Jean Paul Yamamoto, Menoh recently premiered her work of musical theater, “A Tribute to Yoko Ono,” at LACE. Marc Chiat's recent paintings and works on paper are about the moral dilemma of an artist coming to terms with war through creating images that speak vividly, and to as many people as possible. We imagine the artist having fun drawing the tanks like that of a child caught up in his own fantasy war games, and his enjoyment in every brushstroke to miraculously create a stone that would soon become a mountain of rubble. Yet, one senses a perverse pleasure in looking at these works. Chiat is in fact aware of these contradictions. Having been evicted from his long-time studio due to gentrification, with fight (a more personal war), his rubble is not only the rubble of Iraq or Afghanistan, but the rubble nestled between the interchanges of California interstate highways. Both Menoh and Chiat in their individual styles, have stripped to the core what we understand about ourselves from the function of clothing to the meaning of home. For more information, please visit our website at archive.track16.com. |