In January 2018, the Los Angeles Magazine selected five artists as the top 5 Los Angeles based neon artists to follow on Instagram. http://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/5-l-neon-artists-need-follow-instagram/
Eastern Projects is proud to present four of the five artists in the exhibition, “All Lit Up” July 28 - August 25, 2018. These four artists are all lit up when it comes to choice of media to use in their art making practice. Their different approaches to neon show compelling and original viewpoints.
Michael Flechtner’s work reflects his sense of humor. With fingers on the pulse of contemporary culture, he plays with language, pop imagery, rebuses and lovingly create artworks with a continuing reverie for the craft of neon glass bending and all the artists and craftsmen who came before him.
Leticia Maldonado is influenced by the elegant bravado of graffiti, the super energetic independence of punk rock and the special space-time visual beauty of comic books. Leticia uses neon and tube bending to explore botanical forms and symbols of personal power.
Linda Sue Price is known for injecting her personal reflections to stimulate emotion and to manipulate how neon is perceived as a medium. Elements of historic neon signs, abstract expressionism, social realism, pop art and graphic design influence her work.
Lisa Schulte uses neon to explore work that provokes a broader dialogue pertaining to relativity and environmental adaptation. In collaboration with set designer Jason Howard, they created a mixed media installation piece about the ‘selfie’. Howard is interested in the intersection of technology, perception and sense of self in the modern world.
Join Us Saturday, September 15th from 6pm-10pm for the opening reception of “RIO XANTA”
In his second solo exhibition, Armando Lerma of the “Date Farmers” collective, invites us yet again into other worlds. His show, titled “Rio Xanta” includes glimpses of colorful scenes that encapsulate unique dimensions, drawing us into their timelessness. Inspired by hand-painted signs, commonly associated with the mundane, Lerma elevates their functionality to a place of intrigue. His appropriation of old signage mixed in with original works bends space and time, weaving the past with the present, and creating a multi-dimensional reflection of commercialized brands, painted over and drowned out by new colors and expressions.
“SO MUNDANE AND INCOMPLETE (some drawings & paintings)” May 19-June 29, 2018.
López’s work is informed by his immediate surroundings. Each drawing is a careful examination of elements found around his environment: an old decrepit home, a hill with houses, crooked telephone poles, bent palm trees, tall cypresses, a sitter caught in mid-thought, the stillness in a yet continually shifting landscape, and the fleeting appearance of an everyday object forever caught on paper. López relies on interest, observation, memories, materiality, touch, and presence, in order to reach and evoke a feeling of familiarity.
For the exhibition SO MUNDANE AND INCOMPLETE (some drawings & paintings), López gives us a series of landscape drawings developed on location, with attention to detail, a confident line, whimsical pattern, and flattening of space. Beautifully capturing views of East L.A., City Terrace, Boyle Heights, El Sereno, etc., López’s drawings breathe and expel energy and freshness. He portrays friends and loved ones in natural settings and takes figures of local Mexican-American pop culture, as images filtered thru his memory.
His still life works call forth objects from his childhood not only as simple, limited, flat, one dimensional objects but bearers of memories, beauty, design, and influence. On these sheets of paper, the viewer will experience the moments of isolation on top of a hillside spent contemplating roof tops, a friendly showdown between drawer and sitter, the quiet contemplation of a banal object, and López’s simple joy of placing a well put mark that carries a certain ‘un no se que’ on paper.
He draws from many spheres, a scope of which includes engaging, both high art and lowbrow, the sublime and mundane, American and Mexican, high craft and rasquachismo—ultimately digesting it all—what is regurgitated is something singular and uniquely his.
Manuel López (b.1983, East Los Angeles CA) attended East Los Angeles College, transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where he earned his BFA in painting and drawing. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions in institutions and museums nationwide including Dark Progressivism; The Built Environment, at the Museum of Art and History, in Lancaster, CA; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Friends Do Not Fear, at New Image Art, in West Hollywood, CA; Dia de los Muertos Exhibit at Self-Help Graphics, Boyle Heights, CA; Surface Place at Abrazo Interno Gallery at The Clemente, New York, NY; Spill at the Betty Rymer Gallery, Chicago, IL SAIC Undergrad Exhibition, at Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He lives and works in East Los Angeles.
For further information please contact the gallery at easternprojectsla@gmail.com or at 323.327.8020.
