LES Gallery

You Are You

November 09 - December 09: New Works by Jaret Penner

The painter’s subjects range from solitary and grotesque figures of lonelihood to scenes of austere rusticity. His portraits, while depicting sexual mania, outrageous grief, faltering masculinity and crumbling intellect are not contritional; rather, these are works of humor and pathos. There is, however, a manner of relief sought beyond the insular confines of these personalities. The alliance shared by bodies in a landscape promises, if not transmutation, a greatly diminished agony.

Jaret Penner, was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, went to Capilano University College, and has exhibited world wide throughout Spain, Italy, USA, Canada and Japan. Penner currently lives and works in Lake Errock, BC. http://www.jaretpenner.com/

Tout Va Bien

photographs from the series “Mystic Heather and Virgin Snow”
By Tim Barber

September 25th - October 31st

As a former photo editor of Vice magazine, Barber has been instrumental in exposing the best in contemporary camera work, and his own photos display the best and most characteristic traits of today’s informal photography: the ability to make something meaningful out of the material of one’s own life, and to make the casual look striking over and over again. To do it once takes luck, but to make it happen all the time requires both a finely-developed sensibility and a good instinct for curating: the question is not only what to shoot, but what to show. Barber has demonstrated his ability to do both with his long-running online gallery, tinyvices.com, which has evolved into one of the best places in the world to find exciting new photographers. In 2008, he co-curated the New York Photo Festival and launched his own independent publishing house, TV Books, producing unique books, artists monographs, zines and posters. Recently, he has curated a series of five photography books published by the Aperture Foundation. For Tout Va Bien (photographs from the series Mystic Heather & Virgin Snow) at the LES Gallery, Barber is showing a selection of works from a series that focuses on a single subject.

Movable Sculpture

Window Installation by Nathalee Paolinelli
August 22nd - September 12th

Artist Statement:
My practice is studio based and is focused on abstract drawing painting and sculpture. I typically work with invented formal systems that on the surface might appear to operate with in a typical abstract, modernist vocabulary. As I work to strip things down by reanalyzing color, surface, and structure I am simultaneously attempting to discover, and make public, complex private emotions in a systematized way. I find it interesting how complicated the harmonics of art work necessarily becomes when paired with introspective emotion. Regardless, I strive for the results to be hopefully intelligent, considered, humorous, and at best inspirational.

www.nathaleepaolinelli.com

Variables

by Jessica Eaton

June 12th - July 25th

Jessica Eaton’s work is photography about photography in an expanded sense that includes both modernist formalism’s concern with medium-specificity and the conceptualist critique of illusion, authenticity, and convention. In her hands, concern with the medium becomes concern with perception in general: not just vision, but our whole experience of apprehending the world. So her method is experimental in the best sense. It is free play, games, and sensuous curiosity – and her images are often strikingly poetic – but it’s also serious business. Eaton’s investigations are guided by specific hypotheses, constants, and variables, and her field of study is nothing less than the nature of reality and how we perceive it.

American Art Now

Nicholas Pittman, Keegan McHargue and Ry Fyan
Opening reception Friday May 8th, 7 - 11pm
May 8th - June 6th

“i guess we called it “american art now” partly as a diplomatic joke, but perhaps also because all three of us are very serious about making work that does not directly respond to current trends in american contemporary art. We are just trying to preserve our souls. Despite the ambitious title, all of the work in the show will be modest in scale, and though all three of us have different approaches, the thing we have in common is an attempt to provide an experience akin to a psychadelic one with out referential tendencies: not an illustration of the trip but an actual trip itself.” - Nicholas Pittman