If you haven’t yet explored LACMA’s Manly Pursuits exhibition, here’s another possible incentive. Los Angeles-based photographer and video installation artist Tad Beck provides a supplement to the show with Palimpsest, a response to Thomas Eakins’s Grafly Album, a collection of near-nude photographs of Eakins’s students.

With a precise sense of modernity, Beck emulates Eakins’s photographs using his contemporaries as models, their bodies repositioned and placed in the original photographic settings. Underscoring his manipulation of the Eakins images, Beck includes anachronistic elements such as wristbands and modern hairstyles.

To create the body of Palimpsest, Beck surrounded the photographs with silver repousse frames, occasionally obscuring heads and limbs. Beck then photographed each framed image against a monochromatic black background, enlarging and printing the images in 42-inch squares. This process generates an austere, minimal product, standing in stark contrast to the ornate, softened nature of the late-19th-century aesthetic ethos.

Find more at LACMA.

Tad Beck / Palimpsest
LACMA
5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 857-6000
publicinfo@lacma.org

Starting September 4, the Swiss town of Vevey will feature monumental exhibitions of photography as part of the visual arts festival IMAGES.

Every two years, the festival, consistently free to the public, visits various locations to present open-air installations and indoor exhibitions. This year’s three-week run will include the work of approximately 100 artists, temporarily reinventing the city as a hub of contemporary art.

The open-air component, heralded by a new urban project from the artist JR and the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, will also exhibit the work of Jean-Christian Bourcart, Cristina de Middel, Shadi Gadhirian, Alberto Giuliani, l’Homme Bleu, Bronek Kozka, Li Yu & Liu Bo, Andrea Star Reese, Moira Ricci, Matt Siber, Malick Sidibé, Li Wei, and more.

Indoors, the festival will present monographic exhibitions in a building which previously stood as a shopping mall, collaborating with the Jenisch Museum, the Swiss Camera Museum, the Historical Museum, the Photography School of Vevey and Espace Quai N°1. Its artists include Peter Aerschmann, GMB Akash, Anna Artaker, René Burri, Jean-Jacques Lebel, David Lynch, Ursula Mumenthaler, Hans Op de Beeck, Sheung Chuen Pak, Malick Sidibé, and more.

Find more at Art Daily.

Q: Tell us a little about yourself?
I’m a former advertising photographer who used to make pictures of food that were mostly beautiful lies. I was quite good at it, but got tired of being a photo monkey. Twenty years of executing art directors’ layouts was enough, so a few years ago my wife and I quit the business and began making our own art. Now I use my digital skills to conjure up visions of a strange Utopia. It’s a lot more satisfying than endlessly cranking out perfect Pizza Hut pies for the ad agency.

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On September 4, the visual products of artist Lee Friedlander’s cross-country excursion will come to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in his latest photographic exhibition, America by Car.

At the beginning of the decade, Friedlander embarked upon a program of American exploration, visiting nearly all of the 50 states. Fashioning his car into a studio, the artist employed the sideview and rearview mirrors, the windshield, and the side windows as framed surfaces for the reflection of American imagery. With these devices, Friedlander created foreshortened, multifaceted photographs of roadside bars, motels, churches, monuments, suspension bridges, and iconic landscapes. While paying homage to previous work, America by Car epitomizes the clarity of Friedlander’s contemporary style.

Find more at the Whitney Museum.

Lee Friedlander: America By Car
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
(212) 570-3600
info@whitney.org

This Sunday (August 29th) marks the final day of exhibition for Christopher Ulrich’s Illuminator: The Royal Wedding. As a special treat, the artist will be discussing the work and signing books and prints, which will be available for direct purchase. Following the lecture, at 6 PM, if you purchased a painting or drawing or digital proof edition, you will be able to take it with you.

Ulrich’s paintings are steeped in allegory, and it will be a challenge to cover every aspect of each piece in the allotted time frame, so this is your chance to engage the artist with your own insight of his work and pick his brain about the piece that greatest embrace you. Christopher is incredibly easy to approach and talk to, and while some of the paintings are rather intense, this is a great opportunity to expose young people to fine art –presenting a rare opportunity for juvenile artists to ask questions about technique and integrity.

In just one week we’ll be opening solo shows for Yumiko Kayukawa’s 49 Days and Nathan Ota’s An Unforeseen Homecoming. Previews for each show are already posted, and work is beginning to sell. Yumiko is flying down from Seattle so both artists will be attending their opening on Friday, September 3rd, and in celebration of the occasion, we’re releasing posters free to the first 100 people through the door. The artists have agreed to sign them for one hour preceding the opening of the exhibit, starting at 6PM.

Nathan received preview coverage this, his first solo show on Hi Fructose’s website, and will be live painting on Thursday evening at Montana Cans paint shop on Sunset Blvd., from 7-9ish in a collaboration with L.A. graffiti legend Risk.

This is followed by a weekend of outta sight book signings. On Thursday, September 9th from 6-9PM, we welcome Brian McCarty as he signs and discusses his book Art Toys, an extensive photo-tome of the secret lives of designer toys. Then on Friday, September 10th, we welcome back author Mick Farren to sign his latest mind-bending, counter-culture non-fiction work: Speed-Speed-Speedfreak: A Fast History of Amphetamine, tracing the cultural and criminal use of this very dangerous narcotic. There will be a story contest and musical performances, so rush on over from 6-9PM! At the end of the month we’ll be welcoming back Dave Cooper, to kick off the tour of his new book Bent, which is much more than just the catalog of his sold out 2008 BSFA show. Info soon!

A special mid-month exhibition of the art of Dee Dee Ramone will debut on the punk rocker’s birthday of September 18th. A special Memorial poster will commemorate the show, and rare, classic photos of Dee Dee from the Jenny Lens Photo Archive will be made available as oversized, signed, numbered Museum quality prints. The very next weekend La Luz de Jesus pal Brad ‘Tiki Shark‘ Parker opens his Ocean Dreams exhibit at the Manhattan Creative Arts Center. That’s on Saturday, September 25th, and it runs through October 14th. We’re handling the sales, so let me know if you want to buy anything. The preview is posted.

Hi Fructose readers will also be familiar with the Art of the Lowbrow Tarot exhibition that guest curator Aunia Kahn has assembled in anticipation of a new book and tarot card deck featuring the art of 23 of the biggest name in pop-surrealism and the pieces they created specifically for this project: Carrie Ann Baade, Christopher Ulrich, Edith Lebeau, Cate Rangel, Kris Kuksi, Chris Mars, Christopher Umana, C.C. Askew, Brian Viveros, Claudia Drake, Heather Watts, Molly Crabapple, David Stoupakis, Laurie Lipton, Patrick ‘Star 27′ Deignan, Chet Zar, Jessica Joslin, Danni Shinya Luo, Jennybird Alcantara, Angie Mason, Scott G. Brooks, Aunia Kahn, and Daniel Martin Diaz (pictured left) have all brought their A game, and this exhibition is sure to be talked about for a long time after it’s over. This show opens on October 1st, but the preview is already posted, and I wouldn’t be surprised if everything sold before the opening reception.

Also on the walls in October is Art Center alumni Karen Hsiao, who’s been catching much press in the UK, Europe and Asia for erotic painted photography art and has just seen the publication of her first book, Rubber Duck, and recent Art Center grads Christine Wu (whose painting in the recent 100 More Artists See Satan exhibition sold pre-opening) and Matt Wood (whose Mom’s in Prison show warrants Art in America coverage).

I didn’t even get to mention the TIKI FARM 10th Anniversary show in October! Watch this space for more info soon!

Two local museums are highlighting contemporary Korean art this month.   The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is focusing on contemporary Korean photography with the exhibition “Chaotic Harmony”  while The Fowler Museum at UCLA is examining Korean ceramics. “Chaotic Harmony” runs through September 19th and The Fowler’s “Life in Ceramics: Five Contemporary Korean Artists” opens August 22nd and ends February 13, 2011.

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Rick Shameless will open Psssstt… Wanna Good Time? on Saturday, August 21st @ A&I featuring Polaroid portraits of porn stars shot over a 2.5 year period.  Soon to become a book, the project “makes a startling correlation between disposable art and women who are perceived as disposable within the adult industry”.

Rick Shameless / Pssstt… Wanna Good Time ?
Opening: Saturday, August 21st 2010 (7-10 PM)
A&I Photo Lab
933 N. Highland Ave.
Hollywood, CA 90038

Artist Carol M. Highsmith has embarked upon a 16-year process of photographing the U.S. state by state, the products of which will be donated to the Library of Congress. Upon completion, the collection will be available to the public for viewing and downloading via the Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

Highsmith spent four months capturing the first state in the series, Alabama. In this collection, she includes such varied subject matter as parades, festivals, fishing boats, rattlesnake rodeos, schools, churches, landscapes and buildings. Highsmith’s current focus, spanning the summer of 2010, is Washington, D.C.

According to Highsmith, the project was inspired by the photography of Frances Benjamin Johnston, one of the first widely recognized American female photographers. Johnson traveled and pictorially documented the American South at the turn of the 20th century, also donating her work to the Library of Congress.

Jeremy Adamson, the Library’s Director of Collections and Services, commented, “The acquisition of Carol Highsmith’s 21st-Century America archive is a top priority for the Library of Congress. Her color images are certainly of the highest technical and artistic quality. But more importantly, she has the uncanny ability to identify, focus on and capture for posterity the essential features of our social landscape and physical environment, both natural and man-made.”

For more info, visit Art Knowledge News.

Last night we went to check out Photographer, artist, and hand-stitcher Amber Dianda’s (Clubmumble) first Los Angeles solo show SummerWinter at the POVevolving Gallery, in Chinatown.  This show featured some of Amber’s newest characters like Mr. Anchor  and a beautiful short film (by Kirk Dianda) that narrates the story of the art show.  The soundtrack was composed by Loren Humphrey.  Ten special hand-sewn and hand-screened tote bags were available which I believe were to help raise $500 for Elemental Awareness, an organization that reaches out to under-privileged kids through skateboarding and wilderness skills.

Here’s an excerpt from the artist on the show:

For this show, I took a minimalist approach in my work, which was inspired by my husband. I have always been about color, but in this show I kept the pallet strictly to black, white and grey. I also experimented with other textiles and media for this show… Along with my sewn creatures, I created a limited edition Ombré dyed scarf to symbolize black and white becoming one (grey). My husband and I also created a short film that will be shown at the exhibition.

The entire show centers around a single love story between the characters Summer andWinter, who fall in love. Even though they live on opposite sides of the world, they consummate their love, and perform a seasonal dance of love for eternity.

Amber B Dianda: “SUMMER WINTER”
Friday, July 16, 2010
POVevolving Gallery
939 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA

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Terry Richardson just shot a series of new photographs of the always humble Kanye West and West’s special lady friend Amber Rose and posted them to his online diary.

In Richardson’s typical style we get some nice portraits of West and Rose licking each other – always tasteful!

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LA’s Kopeikin Gallery and De Soto Gallery have collaborated to exhibit “Hyper,” a new collection of photographs from Denis Darzacq.

In preparation for the show, Darzacq asked street dancers from the working-class neighborhoods of Paris and Rouen to perform in the aisles of the large-scale supermarkets and global retail chains, or “hypermarché,” prevalent in France. In the photographs, Darzacq confronts mass consumerism with floating, ethereal figures, conjuring themes of globalized commerce, the relationship between individual and environment, and the human cost of materialism.

“Hyper” will also include selections from “La Chute,” a photographic series inspired by social unrest-based riots in the housing projects around the outskirts of Paris in 2005. In this series, Darzacq explores desire in the midst of extreme distress.

Find more at Kopeikin.

Denis Darzacq / “Hyper”

Opening Reception: June 10, 6-8 p.m.
8810 Melrose Avenue
West Hollywood, CA. 90069
(310) 385-5894

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Santa Monica Auctions at Bergamot Station begin Sunday, June 6 at 1 pm. This live public art auction features modern and contemporary paintings, photography, sculptures, drawings, multiples and prints. Visit the online catalogue to view pieces from Keith Haring, Banksy, Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha, Takashi Murakami and many more.