FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Main Gallery:
John M Valadez
“Pastels”, Works on paper
Project Room:
Harry Gamboa Jr.
“Accumulation”, Digital photographic prints
Exhibition dates: September 10 - October 9, 2004
Reception date: Friday, September 10, 2004, 5-9:00pm
PATRICIA CORREIA GALLERY
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bldg E2, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Attention: Carolyn Mendoza, Associate Director
Tel: 310.264.1760, Fax: 310.264.1762
E-mail, <correia@earthlink.net>
Web site, <http://www.correiagallery.com>
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Friday,; 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-6pm, Sunday and Monday closed
John Valadez, “Leed’s Shoes 1983”, 2004, pastel on paper, 38” x 100”.
Patricia Correia Gallery is pleased to present the pastel work of artist John Valadez in his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Valadez’ bold, intense and colorful art has long been used to express the Chicano experience. The Valadez style of painting presents intense contrasts; the formal and narrative interpretations resemble unlikely photographs. His pictures become a revelation, a polished imitation of intimate deviations and of social commentary evident of Los Angeles urban life.
A native of Los Angeles, where he currently resides, Valadez studied at East Los Angeles College in the early 1970s. He earned a B.F.A. from California State University Long Beach in 1976, and was one of the founding artists of the Public Arts Center in Highland Park, CA.
During the mid through late 1970s, Valadez worked almost exclusively on mural projects in the Los Angeles and Long Beach areas. Valadez’ Broadway Street Mural (1981), is seen as one of the most extraordinary achievements to grow out of the Chicano Mural Movement. Valadez’ pictorial proficiency includes several monumental murals in public buildings. Between the early 1990s through 2003, Valadez undertook several mural commissions in Texas and Southern California. In these murals, his themes of invisible borders and histories unite the encounters of Spanish, Mexican, and American culture. Some of his federal and state commissioned mural projects include the El Paso federal office building, the Ysleta Border Station in El Paso, TX, and the federal courthouse in Santa Ana, CA. In 2003 Valadez was commissioned for a state project at the Junipero Serra State Building in downtown Los Angeles, and a sculpture for the Los Angeles County Metro Gold Line in Memorial Park Station in Old Town Pasadena.
In 1987, Valadez became the first American to be awarded an artist residency fellowship at the Foundation of Art D’La Napoule in France. In 1994 Valadez received the Getty Fellowship award and in 2001 he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, New York, NY. Valadez is renowned both nationally and internationally with exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Mexico. His artwork is in the permanent collections of such prominent institutions as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Mexican Museum, Chicago, IL, the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, the Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA, the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA and the Centre d’Art Santa Monica in Barcelona, Spain. Valadez is currently part of two travelling exhibitions in the United States: “Chicano Vision: American Painters on the Verge” from the Cheech Marin Collection, exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego/La Jolla from May 30-Sept.12, 2004, and the “Arte Caliente! selections from the Joe Diaz Collection”, exhibiting at the South Texas Institute for the Arts from May 7- Aug. 22, 2004.
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Harry Gamboa Jr. "Red Curb", 2004, digital photographic print, 16" x 20".
Patricia Correia Gallery is pleased to present works by artist Harry Gamboa Jr. in his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Harry Gamboa Jr. has been chronicling, documenting, and interpreting the everyday life in his native Los Angeles in a variety of performance and visual media for over twenty-five years. His production of conceptual art in urban form continues in the current exhibition which is composed of eight prints that afford a look into “accumulations” that occur both naturally and unnaturally in the Los Angeles landscape. The characteristics of the city become fluid and the border of what is and what isn’t becomes blurred and are only annotated with a title.
Since 1972, Harry Gamboa Jr. has been actively creating works in various media that document and interpret the contemporary social shadows of the Chicano experience. He was co-founder of ASCO, the East L.A. conceptual-performance art group that invented the No-Movie concept and created a number of absurdist intermedia performance works during 1972-87. He has been producing artwork that brings together his interests in conceptual, performance, and documentary genres. A photographer, writer, video and performance artist, Gamboa Jr. traverses media to find the correct vehicle to transport his vision each time.
Gamboa Jr. has produced over thirty videos including: Imperfecto (1983), Baby Kake (1984), Loner with a Gun (1994), and L.A. Familia (1993). His videos have been screened at such prominent institutions as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 1995 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Primera Muestra de Video Latinoamericano in Barcelona, Spain and the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark. His collected essays on visual culture, plays, performance scripts, fiction, poetry, reproductions of mail art and No-Movie have been published as Urban Exile: The Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa, Jr.(1998). Since 2000, Gamboa Jr. has created works in digital media, and recently received the Rockefeller Foundations/California State University of Los Angeles, Humanities Fellowship.
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