Klausner, Norton, and Patridge Galleries

Luis Gispert and Jeffery Reed
Film still from Stereomongrel, Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed, 2005 Courtesy of Zach Feuer Gallery, New York	Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed Film still from Stereomongrel, 2005 Courtesy the Artists

Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum is pleased to present Stereomongrel, a film and photo series by the team of Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed. In their first formal collaboration, these long-time colleagues explore notions of hybridity and subcultural phenomena in a twelve-minute film about Hortencia, the daughter of a white Upper East Side socialite and an African-American museum security guard, whose telekinetic powers lead her on a journey from a disappointing birthday party to the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This exhibition employs a saturated aesthetic of multilayered references: music, cinema, art history and pop culture, in which nothing is inviolate, indigenous or sacred. In the film, Hortencia encounters boombox wielding cheerleaders, geisha turntablist curators, and an Aztec warrior folksinger; characters whose transcultural appropriation becomes a means of fantastic empowerment.
Too dense to be constrained to one film, the back-story, in effect the Stereomongrel world is chronicled in an accompanying photo series. Five images read like the pages out of National Geographic from an alternate universe, documenting fictional subcultures with a warped resemblance to our own society. In Senioritas Suicido, a group of Suicide Girls (alternative porn-stars) float in a frothing pool posed like Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon. In Stereomongrel, Gispert and Reed draw into question not only the superiority of high art and the museums and curators that distinguish and elevate it, but also the preciousness and protection of subcultural idioms and the authenticity of the underground communities that perpetuate them.

Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed both received their Masters of Fine Art from Yale in 2001. Gispert was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and has had recent solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum at Altria (2003) and Art Pace, San Antonio (2004). Reed has recently been featured in the Independent Curators International traveling group exhibition Boys Will Be Boys (2004) and has been working primarily as a photographer and music producer.

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Charles Bloom and Glassbox Galleries - BLOOM PROJECTS Series

Les Fleurs du Mal Francesca Gabbiani
Francesca Gabbiani, Spectacle V, 2005 Colored paper collage, gouache, airbrush on paper 51 x 77 inches Commissioned by Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum Collection of Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin TX	Francesca Gabbiani, Wonderland, 2005 Colored paper, airbrush, and gouache on paper 107 x 78 inches Courtesy the artist and Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum is proud to present new work by Los Angeles-based artist Francesca Gabbiani, in her first American museum exhibition in five years. Gabbiani is known for her large-scale paper collages composed of hundreds of intricately cut and layered pieces of colored paper accented with airbrush and gouache. Flat cinematic lighting and layered visceral colors transform seemingly banal landscapes and interiors into eerie, fantastical places.

Reminiscent of movie backdrops and interior settings, Gabbiani cites Los Angeles and cinematic history, particularly the horror films of Dario Argento, as influences on her work. Conspicuously staged outside of time and place, these landscapes and interiors seem suspicious, potentially threatening, particularly in contrast with the child-like color and materials of their construction. According to Gabbiani, “I love the innocence of the material, paper, in contrast with the dark subject matter.”

Gabbiani will present two large-scale collages, including one piece specially commissioned by CAF. This work, entitled
Spectacle V, depicts a forest of charred tree trunks and branches engulfed in a raging fire, evoking collective anxieties of Los Angelinos in an uncannily beautiful panorama. The other featured collage, Wonderland, juxtaposes the joyful color of a vase of flowers with an ominous shadowy staircase. The title suggests both Alice’s fictive land and the 1970’s murders on the Los Angeles street of the same name. In addition, Gabbiani will display a mesmerizing artist book of white, pop-up landscapes inspired by the popular non-fiction novel Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, an account of the architect responsible for the 1893 Chicago Worlds Columbian Exposition and the serial killer who worked in its midst. Gabbiani has painstakingly cut in white paper miniature the architectural structures, most notably the Ferris wheel, that reveal the magical appeal and horrifying events of that Worlds Fair.

Francesca Gabbiani was born in Montreal and has thrice received the Swiss Federal Award of Art, where she attended the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts, Geneva. The artist has been shown at Marriane Boesky Gallery, New York; Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Bern, Kunsthalle Basel; and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Most recently Gabbiani’s work has been the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the CentrePasquArt, Geneva.

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