ZZYXZ, Las Cienega Projects, Los Angeles, USA, 2011
June 18- July 16, 2011
Installation Views
Individual Works
Press Release
Las Cienegas Projects is pleased to present ZZYZX: an exhibition of new work by Sayre Gomez and J. Patrick Walsh III. ZZYZX is a highway town, ranch and spa located in the Mojave Desert somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. According to Curtis Howe Springer, a self-proclaimed minister and medical doctor who created the word and named the site in 1944, ZZYZX is the final word in the English language and the ZZYZX hot springs are to be the “cure to end all cures”. The word was created by Springer solely to function as a linguistic anomaly, and is an interesting example of a word defined through its use rather than a word used by its definition.
For their exhibition at Las Cienegas Projects, Gomez and Walsh present a series of paintings, collages, sculptures and video that loosely explore various relationships between speed and movement, language, image and the conveyance of meaning.
Gomez continues his ongoing investigations into the ways in which meanings are contextualized and disseminated. Included are new paintings and sculptures that cite as their source a process of mining image-based blogs and online image archives. Divorced from their original context, the images––now painted––become physical signifiers of how a blogger might reassign their importance through appropriation and reuse. The paintings are complimented with a series of text works in which Gomez pulls from websites that generate Greek, a tool used by graphic designers to generate dummy text based on Cicero’s The Extremes of Good and Evil. The passage is algorithmically processed using hundreds of random Latin words subjected to a variety of permutations within pre-existing sentence structures which work to create a never-repeating, potentially endless arrangement of words and pseudo-words and create the visual appearance of the English Language. Gomez then translates this pseudo-Latin language into English. The phonetic merits of the selected phrases function much in the way that these images do, as abstractions that resonate based on their aesthetic presence rather than on their linguistic definitions.
Walsh features a series of sculptures and a single-channel video. The works thread themselves together by relating to the body’s movement through space, whether seated in repose at 0mph, walking through a threshold, or speeding in a car. In Whisper, two wax tires attached to steel rims sit on a small wooden table, behind which hangs a modified fashion poster, a checkered flag now dangling from the model’s mouth. Season 3 combines performance and sculpture into one object by drawing the viewer in through its colorfully striated threshold, created by a process of melting, coloring and forming reclaimed wax. Additional works revolve around notions of car movement (or stagnation), including Stephen King Sun Shade (SKSS), originally intended as a personal fundraising project for car improvements, which promised to block the sun from a car’s windshield while also warding off potential crooks by “striking fear in their hearts”; and Knife’s Sun, a video in which the artist removes a moldy ceiling liner from inside his 1984 Volkswagen Scirocco, distracted in the moment by the sun’s reflection caught in the knife. Cobra Gimp and Cobra Gimp Double use the armatures of two Marcel Breuer chair knockoffs to create a friendship braid-like cover around the bent metal piping.
Sayre Gomez (b. 1982, Chicago, Illinois) currently lives and works in Los Angeles and holds a B.F.A from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and an M.F.A. from CalArts (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include Self Expression or Fog and Other Works at Kavi Gupta Gallery Berlin, DE, and Self Expression at 1430 Contemporary in Portland, Or. Recent group exhibitions include California Dreamin’, curated by Fred Hoffman as part of Arte Portugal 2010, Other People’s Projects at White Columns in New York, and The Awful Parenthesis curated by Aram Moshayedi at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles.
J. Patrick Walsh III (JPW3) (b. 1981, Tallahasee, Florida) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in sculpture and performance. His work shifts between interests in science, sound, architecture, archaeology, and speed. He has exhibited and performed in and around Los Angeles and New York including at Actual Size, Los Angeles; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, NY; D’Amelio Terras, NY; Elk Gallery, NY; Wildness, LA; and John Connelly Presents, NY, among others. He holds a B.F.A. from the The School of the Art Insititute of Chicago and is currently seeking an M.F.A. at the University of Southern California.