Rocks and Clocks: Cameron Gainer, Mark Hagen, Emilie Halpern and Mungo Thomson
AMBACH & RICE GALLERY
6148 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90048
APRIL 6 – MAY 18, 2013
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, (11am – 6pm) and by appointment
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short horizon perspective of market driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth, which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.
-Stewart Brand, Founding board member of The Long Now Foundation
A & R is pleased to announce Rocks & Clocks a group exhibition featuring new works by Cameron Gainer, Mark Hagen, Emilie Halpern, and Mungo Thomson. The exhibit will include video, sculpture, photography and painting that expand and challenge notions of time and space.
Cameron Gainer’s practice spans photography, video and sculpture. His work investigates themes that include metaphysics, cognition, and natural phenomena. Gainer will debut Sunrise/Sunset, a video installation comprised of a projection of a sunset through a hand blown hourglass. As the sand in the hourglass descends the projection will gradually materialize to physically manifest and quantify a representation of time and its unrelenting and cyclical nature.
Cameron Gainer received his MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Gainer has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. Recent group exhibitions include Midnight Party at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis Mn, Paranoia of Time at Carter and Citizen, Field Notes at Bard College, NY, and Portal at McClain Gallery in Houston Tx, Recent awards and fellowships include a Pollock- Krasner grant, a McKnight Fellowship, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. He currently resides in Minneapolis, MN.
Mark Hagen’s carved and polished obsidian sculptures refer to the rock’s utilitarian function in tools once employed by ancient civilizations while acknowledging its current obsolescence as a sculpted glass. Hagen begins by imposing a strict geometry, carving the obsidian into cubes and rectangular shapes that negate the molecular composition of the mineral-like substance. The pieces are then chipped away at by hand in a manner that is inherent to the material’s property.
Mark Hagen was born in Black Swamp, VA and received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Black Swamp, a solo exhibition at Almine Rech, Brussels BE is currently on view. Recent group exhibitions include A Handful of Dust at the CAF in Santa Barbara, Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Art Public, at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; and Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mark Hagen lives and works in Los Angeles.
Emilie Halpern’s oeuvre explores a wide range of subjects that include astronomy, mythology and geography by employing a combination of poetic restraint and humble gestures. Big Dipper, centrally installed in the east gallery, is composed of a collection of beach rocks suspended from the ceiling above a mirror on the floor. These celestial placeholders are hung at heights correspondent to their distance from the earth, which nullifies their seemingly haphazard arrangement. When their reflection is viewed in the mirror the eponymous constellation materializes.
Emilie Halpern received a BA from the University of California Los Angeles and an MFA from Art CenterCollege of Design. Halpern’s work has been exhibited at Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Art Palace, Houston, TX; Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, CA; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Leo Koenig, New York, NY. Halpern recently had a solo show Jamais Vu at Pepin Moore in Los Angeles.
Mungo Thomson utilizes conceptual strategies to produce irreverent examinations of art history, science and mysticism in a range of mediums. With simple gestures and dry wit Thomson repositions the viewer to reconsider the banal and commonplace as remarkable. Thomson’s animation Untitled (Time) condenses eighty years of TIME Magazine covers over the course of 2:30 minutes. This skittering panoply of history
and mass culture is a literal portrait of both TIME and time.
Thomson attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and received an MFA from UCLA. Solo exhibitions of Thomson’s work are currently on view at SITE Santa Fe and at the Times Museum in Guangzhou, China. Forthcoming shows and performances will take place at the High Line in New York City, ArtPace in San Antonio, and the Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery. A monograph is forthcoming from SITE Santa Fe and Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, and later this year JRP|Ringier will publish Thomson’s musical score with Michael Webster, Crickets. Thomson has also had solo exhibitions at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, FR; and GAMeC, Bergamo, IT, among others. His work was included in the 2011 Istanbul Biennial; The 2008 Whitney Biennial; and Performa 05, among others. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
