MOAH (Museum of Art and History) is pleased to present Homebody, a solo exhibition of works by Chelsea Dean

Artist’s reception:
Saturday, October 2, 2021
4:00–6:00 p.m.
MOAH
665 W. Lancaster Blvd.
Lancaster, CA 93534

With Homebody, Chelsea Dean shines a light on the affinities and tensions between everyday domestic objects and the sociological and architectural structures they occupy. Dean thoughtfully composes new relationships that are both playful and phenomenological; reinvigorating cognitive and bodily interactions. The works in this exhibition uncover interstitial meaning generated between things when they are in relationship with each other. By energetically intervening and abstracting cast off, lost, or abandoned objects, Dean gives them new life, where they become tender and personal once more under her care.

Dean’s practice analyzes the psychological and sociological fallout of Mid Century American design and architecture. Many of her artworks are made of objects scavenged from abandoned Jackrabbit Homesteads, a 1930s government-sanctioned housing boom (and speedy bust) that encouraged settlers to develop the harsh landscape of the Mojave Desert with promise of home and land ownership. Like the Levittown development in Pennsylvania, or the Case-Study Houses of Los Angeles, these structures exist as historical remainders. They are physical manifestations of American social transformations —including collapse— that grew out of 20th century American ideals of an industrious life, personal liberty and property ownership.

The work in Homebody animates and illuminates the challenge of living through these epochs of social transformation by reworking the personal, private objects which are vehicles for those experiences. Adornments for the home and the body appear throughout the exhibition, including furniture remnants, building materials, jewelry, mirrors, and gold leaf. Her assemblages make space for reflection, not only of the moments that define us socially, but also the ways in which we puzzle our way through and make meaning in life.

On View:

#SVLA1 Screen at the Courtyard Marriott
901 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, CA
Playing every 5 minutes from April 26th – May 16th

StandardVision’s latest artist spotlight features powerfully stark images of abandoned homesteads in the high desert from multidisciplinary artist Chelsea Dean on the digital facade at the Courtyard Marriott L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles.

Click here for details and more images.

A short film on Chelsea Dean, directed by Traci Carter, 2019.

The Loft at Liz’s presents collaborate and create, curated by Andi Campognone, January 18–March 3, 2020.
Artists include:
Alex Couwenberg & Lisa Schulte
Joy Ray & Dianna Stevens Woolley
Terry Cervantes & Marthe Aponte
Samuelle Richardson & Catherine Ruane
Vicki Walsh and Jim Daichendt
Margo Ray & Scott Yoell
Jane Szabo & Jill Sykes
Annie Seaton & Laurie Sumiye
Dani Dodge & Chelsea Dean
Snezana Saraswati Petrovic & Chenhung Chen
Karen Hochman Brown & Ann Marie Rousseau
Randi Matushevitz & Debbie Korbel
Marisabel Bazan & Vojislav Radovanovic
Terry Arena & Chris O'Mahony
Bailey Ferguson and Michelle Schwengel-Regala
Jeanne Dunn & Edwin Vasquez
Stevie Love & Cudra Clover

Opening reception Saturday, January 18, 2020, 7-10 p.m.
Artist Talk: Collaborating as a Community Tuesday, January 28, 2020, 7-9 p.m.
Collaboration Workshop, Saturday, February 29, 2020, 1-4 p.m.

The Loft at Liz’s
453 S La Brea Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Brand Library & Art Center presents The Nothing That Is, curated by Yaron Dotan and Christine Rasmussen, November 16, 2019 —January 17, 2020. Exhibiting artists: Holly Boruck, Arminée Chahbazian, Chelsea Dean, Yaron Dotan, Dawn Marie Forsyth, Jenn Fuentes, Kaloust Guedel, Michael Henry Hayden + Anthony Lepore, Larry Kagan, Andrew Paine, Christine Rasmussen, Colin Roberts, Linda Vallejo, Joséphine Wister Faure, and Monica Wyatt.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
—Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man (line 13-15)

Humans are innately creative. We have the ability to make something out of nothing, with just our bare hands. But lately our newest innovations have become soulless, the human touch lost in the pursuit of purported efficiency and flawless design. In this show, the artists bear witness. Observe closely. Respond with hand-crafted objects. Through shadows, empty landscapes, broken and reassembled vessels, depictions of invisible people, and humans distorted by technology, an understanding begins to form. Delacroix said, "I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will." Likewise, the artists declare: We will give you a human being made of emptiness provided you let us surround it as we will.

They ask viewers to see for ourselves, suggesting, as Wallace Stevens did in his poem The Snow Man, that we behold the "nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is."

The Opening Reception for The Nothing That Is is on Saturday, November 16, 6-9PM at Brand Library & Art Center (1601 West Mountain Street, Glendale, CA 91201). The reception is FREE and open to the public. Artists will be in attendance.

PRESS RELEASE

CATALOG .PDF

Keystone Gallery presents Golden Hour, an exhibition and marketplace organized by Chelsea Dean and Kyla Hansen, October 6–20, 2019. Opening reception is Sunday, October 6, 1–4 p.m.

Keystone Gallery
at Keystone Art Space
338 S. Ave 16
Los Angeles, CA 90031

California State University Long Beach
Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum
September 9 - November 14, 2019
Guest curated by Anita Bunn and Francesco X. Siqueiros

B.A.T. State III was a group exhibition co-curated by Anita Bunn and Francesco X. Siqueiros. In printmaking, the French phrase Bon à Tirer (good to go) refers to the final trial proof that an artist approves before the master printer begins production. The artist gives this approval by initialing the proof with “B.A.T.” and signing it. In B.A.T. State III, prints by 37 women artists are featured, produced over a span of 30 years at Siqueiros’s El Nopal Press in downtown Los Angeles.

Drawn to El Nopal Press by Siqueiros’s technical expertise and collaborative spirit, artists are encouraged to experiment. The results can be seen the vibrant mix of lithographs, relief prints, and monoprints on view at Kleefeld Contemporary.

This presentation is a third, expanded iteration of B.A.T. Bunn, who had collaborated with Siqueiros to produce an edition of lithographs for a 2011 exhibition, was intrigued by the number of women artists with whom he had worked. In 2013, she proposed the first B.A.T., which she curated at Offramp Gallery in 2013. This show received much acclaim and was heralded as a “feminist tour de force” by Artillery magazine.

Artists:
Lisa Adams, Judith F. Baca, Judie Bamber, Marietta Bernstorff, Susan Bolles, Mariana Botey, Anita Bunn, Carolyn Castaño, Yreina D. Cervántez, Emily Cheng, Chelsea Dean, Sandra de la Loza, Pia Elizondo, Yanieb Fabre, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Elsa Flores, Diane Gamboa, Silvia Gruner, Sherin Guirguis, Shirley Jaffe, Annie Lapin, Laurie Lipton, Dominique Liquois, Mara Lonner, Rocío Maldonado, Rebecca Morales, Ruby Osorio, Renée Petropoulos, Daniela Rossell, Analia Saban, Susan Silton, Linda Stark, Marika Echachis Swan, Laureana Toledo, Alison Walker, Marion Wesson, and Liat Yossifor

About the Curators:
Francesco X. Siqueiros has been an artist active in the Los Angeles art scene since the mid-1980s, establishing himself as a master printer at Cirrus Editions. During a trip to visit colleagues in Mexico City, he was struck by the level of artistic collaboration and genuine communication between artists. It prompted him to propose an artistic exchange between artists in Los Angeles and Mexico, that resulted directly in the 1990 exhibition, Aquí y Allá (Here and Over There) at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, which he co-curated with Gabriela Cortines. Siqueiros received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1993, which allowed him to dedicate more time to El Nopal Press to facilitate conversation between the two nations. Since that time, the conceptual focus of El Nopal has remained to underline the heterogeneity of cultural production and question the hegemony the current dominant cultural perspectives. Siqueiros’s own work as a painter and printmaker has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States, Mexico, and Paris, among other locations.

Anita Bunn has made Los Angeles her home for more than 30 years. She received her BFA from Art Center College of Design in 1990 and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2007. Bunn is an artist and adjunct instructor of photography at several colleges and universities. She has exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, and has developed several local curatorial projects. Her artwork is in many public and private collections, including the Wallace Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Capital Group, Los Angeles.

Blackheart Studios exhibition opening September 6, 2019, 6-11 p.m.

I'm thrilled to announce that my work Happy Trails will be included in the EVERY WOMAN BIENNIAL in Los Angeles! 

The EVERY WOMAN BIENNIAL is the all woman and women-identified art biennial founded and curated by C. Finley. What began as the Whitney Houston Biennial, a wild one-night event of art and performance celebrating women in 2014, and expanded to a two-week exhibition in 2017 in the awakening of the #MeToo movement, will present its third iteration, titled Every Woman Biennial, from May 20 - May 29 in NY, and a sister biennial featuring LA-based artists June 2 - 12 in LA.

The Biennial has grown in scope to include over 600 artists in its two unique presentations in NY and LA, featuring expanded art exhibitions, a NY film festival, and events including I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY Flash Mob in NY, and performances of Girl Bands in LA. Timing with The Whitney Museum’s Biennial, the aim is to extend the celebration of art and create even more positive opportunities for emerging women artists. The Biennial engages artists, through a democratic open call, to cross-pollinate with each other from a variety of mediums, generations, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. The salon-style exhibition features painting, photography, installation, sculpture, video art, textile, and multimedia works, activated by performance, dance, music, poetry readings, theater and film.

The exhibition was recently featured in the New York Times. Pictured below: The artist C. Finley, organizer of the Every Woman Biennial, in front of works by Deming Harriman, Florencia Escudero, Cynthia Alvarez, Amy Vensel and Valincy-Jean Patelli that are part of the exhibition. (Photo credit: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)

MORE INFO

Fellows of Contemporary Art presents Space + Land
Curated by Chelsea Dean
August 25 –November 2, 2018
Featuring work by:
Chelsea Dean / Susan Feldman / Susan Logoreci / Aili Schmeltz

Opening Reception:  Saturday, August 25, 5-8 pm

Space + Land is an exhibition featuring the work of four female artists who employ architectural concepts to construct new realities. With the City of Los Angeles and its surrounding geography as their muse, each artist responds to the rich history of the built and natural environments around them that are simultaneously forming and eroding. Their use of transitional subjects emulates the gridded landscape through order and entropy, balance and fragility. By manipulating and reimagining these spaces, the artists create systems that offer alternative experiences of the grid.

Chelsea Dean’s drawings and mixed media collages embody her attraction to systems that erode. By gathering and incorporating discarded elements from abandoned homesteads in the remote reaches of the Mojave Desert, she layers and builds them back into her collages, assigning new meaning with the addition of gold elements and embellished patterns. She carefully documents then reconstructs these spaces, offering the viewer a spatially rich experience that responds to the original site. Memorializing architectural histories, Dean emphasizes sites in transition to re-contextualize and illuminate their inherent value.

Susan Logoreci’s colored pencil drawings offer viewers dizzying versions of the city where, from a bird’s eye view, the architectural grid and the buildings within it become simplified and warped. By methodically layering colors in thousands of tiny shapes, Logoreci’s work reveals the massive expanse of the city and its individual components. Her drawings depict the underlying possibilities and anxieties produced and sustained in our shared spaces.

Susan Feldman’s visually complex assemblages mimic the provisional structures that she’s drawn to. Her practice mirrors the process of building, intuitively weaving and layering raw materials and imagery to construct personal narratives. The works manifest as installations, drawings, and mixed media projects. Feldman utilizes the grid through both medium and subject, calling attention to the pattern and rhythm of Los Angeles’ frenetic energy.

Aili Schmeltz’s sculpture utilizes the Cartesian grid as a framework, referencing architectural drafting systems and modernist art icons. The work simultaneously exists as a form imposed on the space, while also offering a grid through which the viewer experiences the exhibition space. Schmeltz articulates the absence of space and form via a dramatically different approach through her large-scale drawings. Her monumental works envelop the viewer with their seamless gradations and shifts in spatial orientation, where lines deviate and bend into pattern and form. The atmospheric light and space of the desert landscape coalesce as graphite on paper, recalling minimalist systems and twilight of the desert sky.

Special Event Workshop:  Sunday, October 28, 1-4 pm
A hands-on workshop inviting the community to build and reinvent architectural spaces using raw materials provided by the artists. Artists Susan Feldmdan and Chelsea Dean will perform an all vinyl DJ set during the event.

MORE INFORMATION

Chelsea Dean and Molly Segal
Shoot Out the Sun
On View: Saturday, July 28, 2018
Reception: 7-9 pm
PØST 1206 Maple Ave #515
Los Angeles, CA 90015

In conjunction with PØST’s annual July Kamikaze event, Chelsea Dean and Molly Segal are pleased to present their two-person show, Shoot Out the Sun. The reception for this one-day exhibition is Saturday, July 28th from 7:00 - 9:00 PM.

In Shoot Out The Sun, Los Angeles-based artists Chelsea Dean and Molly Segal complicate ideas about “California living” by exploring layers of drought, decay, and abandonment. Dean and Segal dig through these layers and find beauty in forgotten or hidden places: the rotting foundation of an abandoned homestead or an oil field tucked off a main road. Surveying a harsh desert landscape, these artists ask Who can possibly live here? What survives?

Dean’s multimedia pieces embody systems that erode. Her collages salvage history, suspending Southern California architecture in time with a process of carefully controlled chaos. By combining her photographs with experimental printmaking, drawing, and collage techniques, she elevates the conflict between order and entropy. Dean’s most recent body of work focuses around her fascination with abandoned Jackrabbit Homesteads in Wonder Valley where she continues to meditate upon the allure of beauty and decay.

Segal’s large scale watercolors of oil fields, dying thistles, cacti, and cockroaches serve as reminders of cyclical interdependence the price of survival. The oil pumps speak to the act of penetration, the compromises we make for comfort, and how the things that give us strength often leave us vulnerable. Segal’s loose, wet-on-wet technique suggests an ambiguity of physical and emotional boundaries. The plastic paper doesn't absorb the paint, leaving the pigment to sit at the surface, impermanent and vulnerable.

Chelsea Dean was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona and has a BA in Studio Art from the University of Puget Sound, and an MFA in Drawing from Claremont Graduate University. Dean has exhibited throughout Southern California at High Desert Test Sites, Carl Berg Gallery, Raid Projects, Summercamp ProjectProject, Monte Vista Projects, and Cirrus Gallery, as well as internationally at Gallery Lara Tokyo in Tokyo. She currently teaches art full-time in Los Angeles and has a studio in Lincoln Heights.

Molly Segal lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received a BFA from the California College of the Arts and an MFA from The School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery, Zevitas Marcus, BLAM, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Betti Ono Gallery. Segal’s work and writing have been featured in publications including Venison Quarterly, Reflections of The Burden of Men, Full Blede, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She was a resident artist at Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 2017 and the Vermont Studio Center in 2018.

Merchant Gallery is pleased to present TO THE DESERT, May 25–June 24, 2018, with an opening reception on Friday, May 25, 5-9 p.m. E. Tyler Burton, Chelsea Dean, Harrison Fraley, Sara Marlowe Hall, Lynda Keeler, Eric Nash, Janelle Pietrzak, Orianna Reardon, Melissa Parke Rousseau, Julie Weiman, and Jay Zaretsky.

Image: Immured In Concrete II, Chelsea Dean, 2017. Lithographic photo transfers & distressed mylar on paper, 22.25 x 15 inches,

MERCHANT GALLERY
3004 Lincoln Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90405