Opening Reception November 11, 5-9pm
Curated by Jeanne Dreskin & Santi Vernetti
November 11–30, 2017
Featuring work by: Michael Cataldi, Abigail Collins, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Fleurette West, Richard Wheeler
http://angelsgateart.org/gallery/hot-flat/
We want… architecture that bleeds, that exhausts, that whirls and even breaks.
Cavernous, fiery, smooth… brutal, alluring, repelling, wet, dry, throbbing.
Cold—then cold as a block of ice. Hot—then hot as a blazing wing.
— Coop Himmelb(l)au, 1980
In 1978, Viennese architecture firm Coop Himmelb(l)au proposed designs for a deconstructivist apartment complex with a glass atrium in the shape of a massive, undulating flame. Though it was never erected, its plans called for an edifice that uncannily embraced the sensuousness of human life both inside and outside its walls. The building, called Hot Flat, was to exist as architecture “in the throes,” challenging domestic conventions of stability and privacy and viscerally gesturing toward its own material destruction. By invoking the elemental timelessness of fire, its composition pointed insistently beyond the geographic and temporal specificity of its intended metropolitan context.
Taking Himmelb(l)au’s ambitious project as a point of departure, “Hot Flat” at Angels Gate Cultural Center presents new work by Michael Cataldi, Abigail Collins, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Fleurette West, and Richard Wheeler. Each engage modes of sensorial flux between bodies and the physical and social structures that impel their displacements and direct their lines of sight. Reassessing the architectural and environmental context of AGCC, which includes a cluster of 1940s-era Army barracks, defunct gun emplacements, and bunker ruins at the peak of Angels Gate Park, these artists’ works locate potentialities in the enduring tensions between imposed architectural or geopolitical lines of demarcation and mutable, entropic forces that undermine them.
Michael Cataldi (b.1982 Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles (2015); a Master of Urban Planning from the City College of New York (2009); and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2004). He attended the Whitney Independent Study Program (2010) and has been awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. His work investigates labor and alienation in the production of culture and the abstraction of geographic space and productive material by finance capital. His sculptural, photographic, and print projects have been exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Sculpture Center in New York, and the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.
Abigail Raphael Collins (b. 1986, New York, NY) lives and works in Los Angeles. She’s an interdisciplinary artist working in video, installation and photography. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2015 and her BFA from Cooper Union in 2009. Recent exhibitions have been at PØST, Torrance Art Museum, 3 Days Awake, USC Station Gallery, Yeosu International Art Festival, and Seoha Gallery. She is the recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, UCIRA grant for research in the arts, and a year long residency at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon.
Gelare Khoshgozaran (b. 1986 Tehran, Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living and working in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2009 and her BFA from the University of Arts, Tehran. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Queens Museum, Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Malmö Konsthall, Human Resources, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The LA Municipal Art Gallery, Southern Exposure, Interstate Projects and Thomas Erben Gallery, among others. Gelare was the recipient of the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, the 2015 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award for Emerging Artists. She is the co-founding editor of contemptorary.org.
Fleurette West (b. 1982, Lynwood, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Center College of Design in 2012 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California, Roski School of Art in 2015. Recent exhibitions include F3307 (2017) at BOOKSHELVES: 3307 West Washington Blvd; Master Bath (2016) at The Homer Project; Thus Spake the Fungus (2016) at Arturo Bandini; and Monocoque (2016) at DIANA. She was the 2015 recipient of the Kathleen Neely Macomber Grant for her research on Eileen Gray’s E.1027 in Roquebrune Cap-Martin, France.
Richard Wheeler lives and works in Los Angeles. He investigates locations, tools, methods, and cultures of observing, representing, and interacting with the world around us. He received an MFA from UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts in 2013 and an MA from Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program in 2007. He is an occasional faculty member of Art Center College of Design’s Media Design Practices department and UCLA’s Design Media Arts department and has lectured at American University, Georgetown University, and USC. His writing has appeared in KCET’s Artbound, and Wired’s Danger Room.