GUADALAJARA.- The Museum of Art at the University of Guadalajara presents "Vexing: Female Voices from East LA Punk" from November 27 to January 10, 2008. The burgeoning punk rock music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s in East Los Angeles provided an electrically charged, creative climate. This scene created an atmosphere where performance mixed with poetry, and visual culture was defined by an aesthetic and an attitude. Artists and musicians interfaced and blurred the lines of actions, documentation, photography, sound and style. Taking its name from the all-ages music club The Vex, once housed within East Los Angeles’ Self Help Graphics and Art, "Vexing" is an historical investigation of the women who were at the forefront of this movement of experimentation in music, art, culture and politics, while exploring their lasting legacies and contemporary practices. This documentary style exhibition will include photo, video and audio archives of the era as well as studio work encompassing painting, installation, writings and performance.
In an artistic environment fueled by exchange and experimentation, music played a pivotal role in defining new images of self. This exhibition documents a vital moment of artistic and musical interchange in Los Angeles, with women staking out a position between and within punk rock, East LA and the downtown art scene. "Vexing" not only considers their significant contributions to the cultural landscape of LA, but also examines the multiple scenes and identities they negotiated. These women have also served as a model for subsequent generations interested in alternative social movements as a platform of expression, as well as the post identity conceptual practices of today.
Participants include musicians Alice Bag, Teresa Covarrubias, Angela Vogel, Monica Flores, musician and artist Exene Cervenka, artists Diane Gamboa and Patssi Valdez, photographers Dawn Wirth, Louis Jacinto, Linda Posnick and Frank Gargani, recording label founder of Fatima Records Yolanda Comparan Ferrer, printmakers Richard Duardo, Jessee Vidaurre and John Miner, and filmmaker Jimmy Mendiola. Representing a newer generation of artistic producers influenced by these women are musician/artist Lysa Flores, artists Shizu Saldamando and Sandra de la Loza, photographer Chris TV, performance group Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, and bands The Sirens and Go Betty Go. Vexing also includes pecial concert footage and interviews courtesy of Pete Galindo, Willie Herrón and Lysa Flores from the forthcoming documentary on The Vex, and an excerpt from the forthcoming documentary “Eastside Punks” by Jimmy Alvarado, Pat Perez and Jake Smith.
The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois
In the 1970s and ‘80s, an American woman named Michelle du Bois traveled alone through cities in the Pacific Rim and documented her highly sexual and liberated lifestyle, collecting hundreds of tourist photographs, family snapshots, and risque images of herself – and her alter egos. In "The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois", artist Zoe Crosher has manipulated these archived materials to elicit various narratives from within du Bois’s complex process of auto documentation. In Crosher’s photographic groupings, Du Bois is both heroine and ingénue, toying with persona, identity, fetishism and exoticism. A distinct portrait of a woman emerges, one that is tied to the women’s and sexual liberation movements of the era, while revealing the vulnerability that accompanies the trappings of her lifestyle and her slippery identity.
Zoe Crosher is a Los Angeles-based artist. She received her MFA from CalArts in Valencia, CA and her BA from UC Santa Cruz. Selected exhibitions include: "1-Yr Later", "Diverseworks", "Houston and D. Eleanor Hardwood Gallery", "San Francisco; OUT THE WINDOW" (LAX) at "DCKT Contemporary", NY and Small A Projects, Portland, OR; "Small Things Fail, Great Things Endure", New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA and Re-Make, Re-Model, d’Amelio Terras, New York, NY.
Blah, Blah, Blah Revolution
Frequently employing play on words, Maya Schindler’s practice ranges from the fanciful to the political. The artist’s witty, text-based sculptures and wall pieces beckon the viewer to activate the works by enunciating the phrase presented. Blah, Blah, Blah Revolution is an outdoor sculptural piece that utilizes scale and material to further the irony of a juxtaposition of apathy and activism.
Maya Schindler is a Los Angeles-based artist originally from Jerusalem, Israel. She received her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and attended the CORE program in Houston. Recent solo exhibitions include The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, THE NEW DEAL at Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles, and In Confidence at South First in Brooklyn.
