Installation View
NANCY POPP
June 28th – August 9th, 2014
Opening Reception: June 28th, 6 – 8pm
CLOSING PERFORMANCE: August 9th, 3 – 5 pm
Klowden Mann is proud to present our first solo show featuring exhibition, performance, and intervention in the commercial gallery setting by Los Angeles-based artist Nancy Popp. The exhibition will include large-scale photographic prints of a selection of Popp’s performance sites in the main gallery space, one adhered as a mural to a wall built specifically for the exhibition, and others mounted on plexi-glass, perforated, and strung through with orange mason line that is then interwoven into the existing gallery architecture. The opening reception on June 28th from 6-8pm will include a performance by Popp in which she will drill in and perforate the built-out gallery wall and mural, performing the process of mason line intervention in front of the reception attendees. The gallery project space will exhibit photographic and video documentation of select previous performances. The exhibition will run from June 28th through August 9th, with a closing performance on August 9th in which Popp will physically deconstruct the mural wall featured in the opening performance.
Nancy Popp is a Los Angeles-based educator and multi-disciplinary artist. Her performances, videos, drawings, and photographs draw upon the rich traditions of durational, corporeal performance and political intervention to explore relations between body and site, incorporating public and architectural spaces. Collaboration is a long-term strategy she employs in her practice. She has exhibited at such venues as the 2014 Dallas Biennial, 2011 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; the Manifesta 9 Biennial, Belgium; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center; Rowan University, New Jersey; SUNY University, New York, numerous galleries in Los Angeles including a recent solo show at Monte Vista Projects, Düsseldorf, Belgrade, and Tijuana, and many other public sites and institutions. She holds degrees from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and the San Francisco Art Institute, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation’s Visual Arts Fellowship and a Lucas Artist Fellowship from the Montalvo Arts Center.
During the exhibition, Popp will be featured in a panel discussion at offramp gallery entitled "Context as Narrative in Contemporary Art," along with Matias Viegener, Stephen van Dyke and Dominic Quagliozzi, and moderated by Skip Snow, on Sunday June 29th at 3pm.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Although I have had an active practice in Los Angeles for close to 15 years, I rarely show in commercial gallery settings. It was a challenge to translate my common forms of performance, intervention and public action into two-dimensional representational works. I find representation (of any kind) inherently problematic, which is why my work takes the route of direct action.
Whatever contexts I present within I try to keep a slightly antagonistic stance towards, because a critical stance is crucial to maintaining some sense of perspective on a wider view. This includes the context of the gallery you find yourself standing within. Most recently I’ve taken this stance in relation to redevelopment or architectural markers.
The scale of resources and capital poured into such enormous projects begs the question, “Who benefits?” This applies to the re-gentrification of the downtown Los Angeles historic core, the transformation of San Francisco, and the investment of public monies into stadium construction for the World Cup in Brazil. Architecture houses bodies, but it also directly embodies capital, power and political agendas.
A singular body, particularly a female body, in relation to these sites, particularly while they are still forming, still permeable, still able to be entered and examined, and the transformative use of the Mason Line upend the established ‘grid’ and dominant structure of architecture. This is the critical stance, the outside-the-dialectic “third space”, the possibility, however small or individualized, of change.
CLOSING PERFORMANCE, August 9th, 3 – 5 pm
In showcasing Popp’s engagement and actions in architectural constructions and spaces, a large wall has been constructed in the gallery; left unfinished from the back, it is the ground for a photo mural of a potential performance site in Dallas, TX. During the opening performance Popp perforated the wall to create a concept sketch for a physical intervention using Mason Line.
For the closing performance, Popp will deconstruct the wall using hand tools. Pieces of the mural will be cut out of the wall, eventually breaking it apart where it can no longer function as a barrier or physical plane in the space.
Popp’s physical performance interventions in white-walled spaces address the deconstruction of such spaces and the creation of alternative paths or channels of movement. In Corner (2007) she built and deconstructed a confined exhibition space with construction materials and seamless photo paper, perforating, re-constructing, and re-perforating the planes, conflating interior and exterior spaces. Her intervention at the Armory Northwest in 2008 included the ripping apart of a building slated for demolition. Later works using seamless paper (Wall Space-Three Women, Artist Curated Projects, 2009; Cut Performance-LACE, 2010; Aperture-Venice Arts, 2013) have also reconfigured and altered existing gallery spaces using seamless photo paper to create temporary architectural structures that are then demolished.
Drawing from the vein of Gordon Matta-Clark and Henrique Oliveira, Popp’s performance actions continue the dialogue between exteriority and interiority. Her closing performance at Klowden Mann continues this exploration of creating new openings within gallery and architectural spaces, using the body as the vehicle for movement and change.
Nancy Popp wishes to thank the following individuals for their generosity:
Paul Cheng, Heyward Hart, Joseph Hill, Adrian Rivas
Rebecca Ripple, Gina Osterloh, Bill Brunell, Lindsay Buchman, Annie Shaw, Calvin Lee, Dane Johnson
and the staff at Klowden Mann Gallery