FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Memory of the L.A. Billboard: Telepolis in the Archetype
Exhibition Dates: May 30-July 3, 2009
Reception for Artists: Saturday May 30, 6pm-8:00pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Friday: 10:00am-5:30pm, Saturday: 11:00am-5:30pm
Panel Discussion: Saturday, June 20, 2-3PM
Koplin Del Rio Gallery is pleased to present Memory of the L.A. Billboard: Telepolis in the Archetype, a multi-media exhibition by a select group of artists and architects showing works based on the Los Angeles billboard imagery landscape. Presented as the matter of subject with Los Angeles as backdrop, the billboard is seen as a symbolic architectural extraction of the urban fabric, positioned as a catalyst of wonder and ambivalence in our pervasive concentration of living in the city of mobility. Like most urban vernacular dealing with affective media psychology, anthropology and sociology, Los Angeles as subject, demonstrates the great diversity of study on the human condition in its collision with an adhesive symbolism to our ways of seeing. This “totem” as billboard, or “monument” to recognition, has always been a representation to post-modern thought, of seeing by physical environment, positioned as the epitome of urbanism, or urbanality, never breaching the threshold of new territory into the now globalization of community. In the show both the artist and architect attempt to extrapolate observations that precipitate the social network of our city and engage the viewer in the everyday semiotics of the most prominent of architectural symbols, and the role it has played in our psyche, questioning why the investment in symbols constitute the way we live. Like a tattoo, Los Angeles carries in its perennial contract of our memory, thoughts of past, present, future and virtual in this archetype of our consumer culture.
Through the lens of the Los Angeles metropolis, defined by the agglomeration of the city proper, we view the current telepolis or “remote” city of Los Angeles by experiencing the movement of technological change- not on the archetype of billboard in place, but of imagery networked, in motion, of the new virtual telecommunications era transforming our ways of thinking. Time and space are no longer linear in thought but fractal in ideas. The archaic limits of public space do not exist as so with the way we perceive our living conditions, or even our ideas of place. Working now to many is thought of as a place of access to the virtual landscape, not being in the landscape itself, but in the collective, the global city, and no longer thought of as place of work, but a cityscape of leisure. Technology has changed the way advertising is viewed, internet opinions are posted for all to respond, and archetypes or pattern of thought, deterritorialized. To reflect on the visible urban archetypes we are so familiar with; the Hollywood sign, large scale billboards on Sunset Strip, Buildboards, Googie Architecture, Gas Stations, Early Hotel Signs, Freeway postings, Wall Graffiti, to name a few, all have played a role in the infrastructure of the city and the memories of the Los Angeles connection to our being. The impact being graphic in nature, rely largely on the experience from the automobile, while apart from the network landscape, whose direction, memory and symbol take on a virtual character movement without demarcation, societies material driven influence of motion to the environment has dominated our viewing of expression in the profane and the profound.
The show will include a selection of works from architects and artists; Jesus Aguilar, Sandow Birk, Darlene Campbell, Wes Christensen, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Neil Denari, Steven Ehrlich, Chris Genik, Kenny Harris, Georgina Huljich, Wes Jones, Eric Kahn, Ira Korman, Michael C. McMillen, Rebeca Mendez, Barrie Mottishaw, Michelle Muldrow, Marcos Novak, Lorcan O’Herlihy, Gary Paige, Jennifer Siegal, Marcelo Spina, Sergio Zeballos, and Special archived works from the late James Doolin.
Memory of the L.A. Billboard: Telepolis in the Archetype was curated by David Jeno, Principal of Perez Design Group, Los Angeles.
