FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:


Regen Projects
629 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424
Fax. (310) 276-7430


TOBA KHEDOORI, CATHERINE OPIE, JENNIFER PASTOR, FRANCES STARK:
INVITATIONAL 93
7 - 30 October 1993
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11-6


Regen Projects is pleased to announce an invitational exhibition with works by Toba Khedoori, Catherine Opie, Jennifer Pastor, and Frances Stark. All of the artists are L.A. based, and for the most part, have not exhibited previously in Los Angeles. Entirely disparate in their ways of approaching art, the invitational came about as a way to incorporate a sampling of what seemed most interesting after a slew of studio visits.

Toba Khedoori’s large-scale works on paper are almost mute constructions. Emblematic in their odd depictions, covered with wax, they have an opaque mysterious quality that delves into the oneiric. As objects in empty landscapes they are both familiar yet distant, and finally, silently menacing through their quality of dislocation.

Catherine Opie’s C-prints blur gender. Using traditional portraiture, the works often defy photographic truth by twisting our preconceptions of what we think we are seeing. Photographing friends and acquaintances from various subcultures, Opie brings us into a realm of beauty where sexual boundaries are blurred beyond recognition, ultimately breaking down codified notions and offering an alternative, polyglot space for desire.

Jennifer Pastor works in sculpture, building large, impressive constructs which operate both formally and analytically. Sometimes juxtaposing the real and the fabricated, or certainly examining artifice, her works take on a very definitive presence. Also on view in this show will be several working drawings which have informed a variety of her sculptures, moving progressively toward a more embellished baroque architectonic.

Frances Stark is a writer as well as a visual artist. Her approach to art-making is informed by writing, often using her adolescent discovery of Henry Miller’s books as a point of departure. In one work a worn paperback of Miller’s Sexus is accompanied by a simulation of a paperback onto which the first three pages have been laboriously copied in red carbon paper. Another piece is a blown-up drawing of her college transcript with taxonomic descriptions of institutional knowledge (benign and outrageous) accompanied by good and less good grades: a formal self-portrait with a barrage of wandering-early-adult-angst “Incompletes”. The construction of self, through nefarious by-ways like Henry Miller, institutional constructs, the act of writing, experience, or desire, becomes the catalyst for the writer/artist as outsider. For Stark art and writing are interstitial toward the pursuit of that persona.



An opening reception for the artists will be held on Thursday, October 7th from 6-8 pm at Regen Projects. For further information please contact Stuart Regen or Shaun Caley at the gallery.