IN A SPLIT SECOND (IT HAPPENED.)

HEDREEN GALLERY | May 31-August 12, 2018

Danny Jauregui, Dan Paz and Elise Rasmussen are artists who produce original research in forms of video, photography, print and sculpture. In this exhibition, each artist shares a distinct suite of artworks that simultaneously excavates, acknowledges and memorializes a site of invisibilized historical trauma and collective loss.

_{in a split second (it happened) as installed at Hedreen Gallery, group exhibition featuring artworks by Danny Jauregui, Dan Paz and Elise Rasmussen. Summer 2018. Photo Joe Freeman Jr.}

Danny Jauregui shares work from Disguised Ruins and the Piss Elegant/Some Motorcycle series, two bodies of work which trace the psycho-geograph(ies) of Bob Damron’s Address Book, a coded list of queer meeting places in and around Los Angeles that began annual publication in 1965. Jauregui’s digital video, sculpture, works on paper and works on canvas focus specifically on the erasure of queer bathhouses (and the erasure of the queer communities these bathhouses brought together) in Los Angeles from the late 1960s to present.

Elise Rasmussen will exhibit research in photography, filmed performance and letterpress prints that honor the life, the loss and the troubling public/institutional legac(ies) of Ana Mendieta, a prolific interdisciplinary artist born in Cuba in 1948 and sent to the United States as part of Operation Pedro Pan in 1961. Rasmussen addresses two conflicted sites and two conflicted public imaginations: The Finding Ana series documents a journey to a park outside Havana, Cuba, where the unacknowledged remains of Mendieta’s 1981 Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) are still located. Variations takes place in a studio replica of the 34th floor, New York City apartment where Mendieta argued with her husband (and acquitted murderer) Carl Andre before she “went out the window”, falling to her death, in 1985.

Dan Paz’s Monument a Surface series employs photography, sculpture, video and print as evidence to interrogate a constellation of memorials and monuments along a tourist beach in Key West, Florida- The African Cemetery, The Key West AIDS Memorial and a sculptural lectern in dedication to a local philanthropist at the former White Pier. This stretch of beach becomes a center point for Paz’s multifaceted and multisensory investigation of shifting attitudes toward memory, monument and philanthropy  in Florida— a critical analysis charged by the context(s) of centuries of enslavement and forced migration in south Florida, catastrophic  losses of life to the AIDS epidemic and the mass shooting on June 12, 2016 at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. 

The scales of loss and mechanisms of erasure each artist addresses differ significantly. Rather than flattening this difference, this exhibition presents the work as three autonomous investigations and highlights each artist’s subjective, and often conflicted, research methodology: digital archives meet material experiments; facts meet feelings; dreams meet documents; images meet identities. Yes, (it happened.), and here there is proof in geometric canvases, covered with intricate patterns of tiles, all marbled by human hair reminiscent of hair left on a bathhouse floor. Here there is proof in a contemporary photograph of the remains of site-specific artworks that the Guggenheim Museum claims are long destroyed. Here there is truth in a series of bright yellow beach towels monogrammed with an endless string of prepositional phrases: about, per, off, minus, following, regarding, despite, except... 

By bringing these three bodies of work together in one space at Hedreen Gallery, in a split second (it happened.) not only offers a platform to encounter and experience the intricate tensions in these memorials in simultaneity, it also offers an opportunity to analyze appreciate artist research processes where more traditional preoccupations with efficient, objective evidence (legal documents, dates, times, and facts) give way to elevate forms of subjective, embodied evidence derived from the artist-researchers’ sustained acts of witness, complicity, mourning and making.

Artist Bios

Danny Jauregui is a Los Angeles based artist working in a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. Jauregui received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002 and his MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2006. In the summer of 2005 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in Maine. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in such venues as The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Estacion Tijuana, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Bowdoin Museum, The Museo Ruffino Tamayo, and more recently The Power Plant in Toronto Canada and the Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Sprint Collection, The Long Beach Museum Of Art, and Bowdoin Museum. Jauregui is Associate Professor of Art at Whittier College where he teaches photography, drawing, and theory. www.dannyjauregui.com

Dan Paz is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working between Seattle, WA and Chicago, IL whose practice explores the labor of lens-based production as a collaborative site where the intersections of the image-idea and lived experience are produced and contested. Dan received their BFA from The Atlanta College of Art and MFA from The University of Chicago. Dan has exhibited internationally and nationally with Hayward Gallery (London, UK); the 12th Havana Biennial at Fábrica de Arte Cubano (Havana, CU); The Media lab (NYC); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Gene Siskel Film Center, and The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (Chicago, IL). Dan’s exhibitions have been generated out of residencies with El Centro Desarollo de Artes (CU); The Studios of Key West (FL); Chicago Artist Coalitions’ Hatch Residency (IL); The Luminary (MO); ACRE (WI). Selected awards include: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur’s Connection Fund, The Ann Metzger National Award for Prints, The Links Hall LinkUP Grant & Residency, The Open Practice Committee Grant, UofC Arts Council funding, The Claire Kantor Foundation Grant, and The Wyckoff Milliman Endowment for Faculty Excellence Grant. Paz is a full-time lecturer in the IVA Program in The School of Art, Art History, and Design, and is affiliate faculty in The Contemporary History of Ideas Program at University of Washington. A publication on Paz’s 10-year collaborative project Arte No Es Facil/ Art Present is forthcoming. Dan is currently a co-curator of the Seattle-based collective gallery, The Alice. www.danpaz.com

Elise  Rasmussen  (born  1977,  Edmonton,  Canada;  resides  in  Brooklyn, NY)  is  a  research-based artist working in photography, video and performance. Her work has been exhibited, performed and screened at international venues including the Brooklyn Museum (NY), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), CCS Bard Hessel Museum (Annandale-on-Hudson), Night Gallery (LA), Pioneer Works (NY), and Erin Stump Projects (Toronto). Elise received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a Merit Scholarship (2007) and is a 2017-2018  artist in residence at LMCC’s Workspace program in Manhattan. She gratefully acknowledges support and assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts for works in this exhibition. www.eliserasmussen.com

 *The banner image at the top of this page features artwork by Carol Rashawnna Williams (2019), Romson Regarde Bustillo (2019), Sanctuary City Project (2019-20), and E.T. Russian (2019-20).

Hedreen Gallery

Lee Center for the Arts (CNFA)

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