Edward Cella Art & Architecture is proud to present, Jeffrey Vallance: Now More Than Ever, an immersive experience into the mind of this influential Los Angeles artist featuring mixed-media drawings, sculpture, and performance. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, with an essay by Doug Harvey. An opening reception will be held November 5th from 6-8pm.
In this distinctive exhibition, Vallance returns to his first love, and the first medium of many artists: drawing. Beginning first as an intuitive gesture, and then built layer-by-layer with collage and paint, Vallance performs their making; attacking each work like a “possessed cat,” scratching and clawing at each surface with manic gestures and pure emotion. The dense mixed media works encompass iconography visible throughout Vallance’s nearly 40-year career such as the wild dog, the crow, the rooster, and the eye. As stated by art critic Doug Harvey, “the bulk of the imagery is rendered in Vallance’s signature folky cartoon pictography, but extends to meticulous realism in several instances, while emerging almost uniformly from a miasma of gestural calligraphic mark”.
Employing an array of techniques, the works presented in Jeffrey Vallance: Now More Than Ever, direct attention to the social and personal significance of objects, and the contexts that shape their meaning. In one work, a chaotic field of marks frame the bleeding severed head of a chicken, a “Ralph’s” grocery store sticker visible on its comb, surrounded by three smaller collaged iterations of the same chicken, a small city skyline, and a snake. In another, an octopus, eyes bulging, swims in a sea of grocery, brand, and store logos, intermixed with price tags, stamps, miniatures of past artworks portraying artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012), next to a collaged in DUI mugshot photo of “Painter of Light” artist Thomas Kinkade (1958-2012) in a floral shirt. Throughout the works, unexpected images of the commercial, the personal, and the political collide with Vallance’s sincere exploration of idiosyncratic iconography.
In our project space will be a small, curated survey exhibition of Mr. Vallance’s works from private collections, including works from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
To read more about the exhibition and artist, please visit HERE
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