June Haul by June Edmonds| Glittering Faces and Ashy Ankles by Kori Newkirk
From June 4th to June 19th, Transformative Arts celebrated June Edmonds first major monoprint collection entitled June Haul and made in collaboration with master printer Francesco Siqueiros at Nopal Press and Luis De Jesus Gallery. The title June Haul rifts off Andy Warhol's silkscreen monotypes and highlights Edmonds' prolific activity during her Transformative Arts residency this spring where she first created monoprints from glass transfers to rag paper, then worked with Nopal Press to create a linocut monoprint varied edition on special exhibition.
June Haul focuses on two ideas – Edmonds' masterful color making and the iconography of her practice. In the prints made during her residency, she rearticulates her eye/portal symbol in intimate scale. Each monoprint contains this visual language in a unique color that Edmonds created while the linocut was on the Nopal Press. In conversation with Transformative Arts founder jill moniz and Nopal's Siqueiros about emotion, textual and light, Edmonds added color to each run on the press, creating over 100 art works.
Winning the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship gives Edmonds new freedom to explore her large scale acrylic paintings. June's bounty of print works allows her to stay connected to her community with another modality that contains all the elements and philosophy of her studio practice. Both approaches sustain her desire to speak heart to heart through her aesthetic innovation in all the ways she can imagine.
In conjunction with June Haul, Kori Newkirk will be showing Glittering Faces and Ashy Ankles in which also, Kori is a current Transformative artist in residence. Newkirk's installation is a playful experiment and use of our space. Here, he is working out ideas and thinking about his relationship to his/our neighborhood. All the materials used here are collected from within a 1.5 mile radius of Transformative Arts and Newkirk's home around the corner.
Newkirk's residency is an homage to Toy and Garment Districts of downtown Los Angeles. These spaces long ignored by people in power but populated by salt of Los Angeles are now vulnerable to developers and gentrification that threatens to reshape our in an image we must resist.
These confluences have shifted Newkirk's vision, if only for the moment. There is a thread in Newkirk's practice that trends towards the subtractive. This installation is not that. The residency gave him the opportunity to try piling on to see how these accumulative effects transform his and our perspectives.
Additionally, this installation marks the swan song of Newkirk's antennae as motif, even as he continues his exploration of the analog. His interest in questioning the past, particularly how we receive information remains a fundamental part of his practice.
Kori Newkirk's work at Transformative Arts began over a year ago when he created the SONIC SURVIVAL STRATEGIES Volume 90013, where artists in our neighborhood made cardboard boomboxes to visually replicate the energy of the area's prolific boombox sounds.
This new installation is bookended by June Edmonds TA residency project that culminated in June Haul. The conversation between the artists and works makes certain for us the benefits of our programming at Transformative Arts.
