18 Feb 2012 to 31 Mar 2012
Gallery hours
Opening February 18th from 6-8pm
The Kopeikin Gallery
2766 La Cienega Blvd
CA. 90034
Los Angeles, CA
California
North America
T: +1 310-385-5894
F: +1 310 385-7964
M:
W: www.kopeikingallery.com
Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to announce our first exhibition with artist Kelli Connell. The exhibition "Double Life" appears to document the evolving relationship between two women. By combining multiple negatives of the same model, Ms. Connell uses digital imaging techniques to create constructed realities. The model acts out various fictional scenarios, with the characters' body language and clothing changing in each image. The work represents Ms. Connell's investigation of identity, sexuality, and gender roles, as they shape and are expressed within intimate relationships.Through her photographs she addresses complex issues about visual rhetoric and the self.
The exhibition opens on Saturday, February 18th with a reception and book-signing with the artist from 6:00 - 8:00 and continues through March 31st.
"I've always seen identity as something that is very fluid and as such I usually shy away from labels. Still, a larger part of this work explores the nature of identity formation. In my own personal history, the process of questioning my sexuality was confounding, because the conventional categories, and even the need to categorize in the first place felt like...something being pushed on me. Perhaps this work is trying to figure out why we rely on categories and labels the way we do." - Kelli Connell
Kelli Connell's body of work entitled Double Life has been widely received and included in numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Her work is in the collections of Microsoft, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and The Dallas Museum of Art. Connell's first monograph entitled Kelli Connell: Double Life was published by DECODE Books in the Fall of 2011. Other recent publications include Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography (The Monacelli Press), Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (Phaidon) and Photo Art: The New World of Photography (Aperture).
J. Bennett Fitts "8 Dead Palm Trees"
February 18 - March 31, 2012
Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to announce our fourth exhibition with Los Angeles based artist John Fitts, whose previous three exhibitions, "Golf," "No Lifeguard On Duty," and "Indiustrial Landscaping" explored lesser known aspects of the Southern California landscape. His new series: "8 Dead Palm Trees" continues this fascination. These Palm Trees were found on the outskirts of more populated Southern California communities; remnants of failed real estate developments. As such they are the last evidentiary traces of these failures. The exhibition opens on Saturday, February 18th with a reception with the artist from 6:00 - 8:00 and continues through March 31st.
"If the Palm Tree is a sign of a desert oasis than what does a Dead Palm tree signify?" - J Bennett Fitts
As the population of Southern California has grown, developers, hopeful to capitalize on the seemingly endless population growth, have consistently looked further east in to the inhospitable regions of the Colorado and Mojave Deserts for their next real estate projects. eventually though they pushed too far and today trees are all that remain of their aspirations. They were planted by developers with the intention of lining residential streets, but the homes were never built, they mark the entrance way to gated communities that never came to be and line the fairways of a desert golf course that is now nothing more than contoured hills of dirt. The geographic locales in which these trees were found could all be considered to be "the next" areas to be developed.
Kopeikin Gallery 2766 La Cienega Blvd (just north of Washington) Los Angeles, California 90034 Our hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 - 5:00 310-559-0800 info@kopeikingallery.com
