Installation view, West gallery
Were Not Now
Rebecca Farr
Bettina Hubby
Christopher Russell
gallery km - west gallery
December 15, 2012 - January 26, 2013
gallery km is pleased to present Were Not Now, a group show of work by Los Angeles-based artists Rebecca Farr, Bettina Hubby, and Christopher Russell. The exhibition explores the traces of physical presence and absence in our relationship to place, space and identity. Each artist’s work approaches found and past imagery with layering, erasures or additions that invoke experiences of the body in relation to land, self-perception, and physicality. The show will be on view in gallery km’s west gallery from December 15th, 2012 through January 26th, 2013 with a reception for the artists on Saturday, December 15th, from 6 - 8pm.
Rebecca Farr was born in 1973 in Los Angeles, CA, and was raised in Olympia, Oregon. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Her current series, Lineage, continues her exploration of the themes of Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion, approaching the historical impulse towards migration and its resulting displacements in a way that does not represent a specific historical narrative, but rather explores the mythic and archetypal experience of the body in vast expanses of land, the fragile relationship of land to identity, and the power and vulnerability of disassociation with homeland.
Bettina Hubby received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her practice is wide-ranging, encompassing curatorial and project-based work as well as more traditional media such as collage, drawing, printmaking and photography. Hubby’s projects engage diverse communities and often exist in settings that challenge the conventions of exhibition spaces. In Los Angeles, Hubby’s projects have been featured at, among other venues, the Outpost for Contemporary Art, The Santa Monica museum of Art, The Center for the Arts, Dan Hug Gallery, The company and Diane Pruess Gallery, as well as The California Arts Foundation in Santa Barbara. Here work has also appeared at LACE, Track 16 Gallery and WPA in Los Angeles, and The Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara.
Christopher Russell was born 1974 in Sacramento, CA. He employs photography, bookmaking, writing, drawing, and digital-media printmaking to illustrate his explorations of the darker side of the human psyche. Investigating, and sometimes fabricating, the reasons people live or behave outside of socially acceptable margins, his work offers visions of what many would deem dirty, broken, useless, or criminal. Russell received his BFA from California College of the Arts and Crafts in San Francisco in 1998 and his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 2004. From 2001 to 2005 Russell edited, designed, produced, and distributed the “destroy-to-enjoy” literary art zine Bedwetter. He was the subject of a 2009 Hammer Museum Projects solo exhibition and is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. He has also exhibited his work at Acuna Hansen, Samuel Freeman, Circus Gallery—all in Los Angeles; White Columns, New York; Van Harrison Gallery (Gallery 1R), Chicago; and other venues, in addition to publishing multiple literary projects and artist books.