Thinkspace Projects x Tlacloc Studios x California Cowboys Collective present:
‘NEXUS IV: RAIZ’
On view January 21 through March 1, 2023 at:
The Brand Library and Arts Center
1601 W. Mountain Street
Glendale, California 91201
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 21, 4-10pm
Live Music, Refreshments, Car & Bike Clubs, Live Painting, Video Projections, Cash Bar and more!
Always in pursuit of uniting and elevating the New Contemporary Art community, Thinkspace Projects teams up with Tialoc Studios and the California Cowboys Collective to present ‘RAIZ’, an all day blowout event to mark the opening of the two month art show at The Brand Library and Arts Center in Glendale, California.
With 60 artists in the group show alone, the extravaganza is sure to be diverse and varied, bringing universal appeal from so many incredible contributors. With a focus on local Los Angeles based artists, the lineup is as impressive as it is varied, including new work from the likes of Antonio J. Ainscough, Young-Ji Cha, Kristy Moreno, Zeye Oner, Perez Bros, and Aof Smith just to name a few. Solo shows from Anthony Clarkson, Ken Flewellyn, Matthew Grabelsky, Anthony Hurd, and Cody Jimenez round out the gallery exhibits, filling the walls with innovative and genre-blending pieces across mediums. It’s not just the walls inside the Arts Center, but the walls inside the hallways of the Brand as well that are being transformed for this event, with site-specific murals from Brek, Love Yo Dreams, and Mr. B Baby adorning the entry hallway area and outdoor courtyard.
The surrounding grounds themselves will also be bursting with compelling content, from the food provided by Zavalas Pies, Sweet Life LA, and Bad Jimmy’s to the car and bike clubs in the parking lot with Cabrones Car Club, Ghetto Car Club, and Bikes On The Blvd. That’s not all that is happening for the opening event, so be sure to keep an eye out for local artisans painting live around the grounds alongside video projections, a cash bar and live DJs providing entertainment all day and into the evening hours. Save the date and we will see you soon!
The show opens January 21st with a reception from 4PM to 10PM. They will remain on view until March 17th at The Brand Library and Arts Center in Glendale, California.
‘RAIZ’
Curated by Thinkspace Projects x Tlaloc Studios x California Cowboys Collective
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 21 from 4-10pm
Exhibitions on view January 21 through March 17, 2023 at:
The Brand Library and Arts Center
1601 W. Mountain Street
Glendale, California 91201
‘RAIZ’ group show featuring new work from:
Antonio J. Ainscough
Fajar Amali
Michael Bardales
Brek
Ezra Brown
Karla Ekatherine Canseco
Rene Casamalhuapa
Young-Ji Cha
Sara Chakmakian
Paola Ciarska
Leo Eguiarte
Sofia Enriquez
Isaac Escoto
Ha Haeng-Eun
FEMS
Priscilla S. Flores
Genavee Gomez
Melissa Govea
Fabian Guerrero
Daniela Garcia Hamilton
Chuy Hartman
Emiliana Herniquez
Armani Howard
Carlos Jaramillo
Haylie Jimenez
Sydnie Jimenez
Kai
Jolene Lai
Andrew Lopez
Selena Lozano
Steve Martinez
Jay McKay
Gibran Mendoza
Aryana Minai
Vanessa Morata
Kristy Moreno
Mr. B Baby
Baby Mueller
Guillaume Ollivier
Chaz Outing
Jerry Peña
Perez Bros
Pinche Kid
Jason Ramirez
Lily Ramirez
LoveYoDreams
Marissa Reyes
Gustavo Rimada
Euan Roberts
Roja
Esperanza Rosas
Conrad Ruiz
Javier Hache Ruiz
Tamara Santibañez
Fandi Angga Saputra
Mia Scarpa
Aof Smith
Melly Trochez
Ever Velasquez
Jacqueline Valenzuela
Daisy Velasco
Manuel Zamudio
Zeye Oner
ALONGSIDE SOLO EXHIBITIONS FROM:
Anthony Clarkson ‘Enigmatic Dreams’
Ken Flewellyn ‘Remix’
Matthew Grabelsky ‘Riders’
Anthony Hurd ‘Verified’
Cody Jimenez ‘Efferverence’
MURALS FROM:
Brek | Love Yo Dreams | Mr. B Baby
OUTSIDE IN THE PARKING LOT & COURTYARD AREA:
Car Clubs:
Cabrones Car Club | Ghetto Car Club | Bikes On The Blvd
Food:
Zavalas Pies | Sweet Life LA | Bad Jimmys
Plus a cash bar, Venice Beats providing the tunes, video projections from Digital Debris and live painting curated by GoopMassta
Anthony Clarkson ‘Enigmatic Dreams’
The art of Anthony Clarkson is a portal into child-like innocence, mixed with troubled spirits, broken hearts and a sense of emptiness.
‘Enigmatic Dreams’ is Anthony Clarkson’s seventh solo exhibition with our gallery. A painter, designer, and illustrator, Clarkson’s oil paintings are ghostly and surreal – dreamlike meanderings through eerily cast dimensions. Stylistically dark, they feel like haunted eruptions of the subconscious. Combining character-based narratives with the unexpected juxtaposition of suggestive symbols and absurd elements, they create jarring nightmarish figments and provocative associations. At times playful and others nihilistic, his works are graphically and illustratively inspired to elicit a gut reaction.
Artist Bio:
Anthony Clarkson graduated from the Colorado Institute of Art in 2002, and launched his career in the arts as a graphic designer for a prominent record label in Los Angeles shortly thereafter.
Inspired by the continuously evolving Los Angeles new contemporary art scene, Clarkson began to revisit the drawing style of his youth, mixed with the feelings and dark emotions he has dealt with throughout his adult life. Clarkson’s vision continues to expand as his paintings evolve into more intense expressions of his own dark thoughts.
Ken Flewellyn ‘Remix’
Since my last solo show in 2019, the world is a changed place. But I view this new reality from the lens of my history and the culture that has shaped me. The community of artists and friends that surround me helped me stay focused and sane. While there are similar themes from my previous shows, I have been looking inward to my personal experiences more. Self examination is not always easy, and it may take some time for me to open up to people. My hope is to continue to share pieces, like a Remix’ tape of familiar songs, with a new twist. As an extra bonus, my longtime friend, mentor, and Thinkspace Projects co-founder LC collaborated on meaningful pieces with me. His collages and my paintings combine to capture the true essence of a mixtape… bringing a certain vibe when you need it most. I hope this Remix’ sends you on a sonic journey through art.
Artist Bio:
Inspired by his lifelong love of Hip Hop and his coming of age as a b-boy during its golden age in the 90s, Flewellyn’s work has always been about music and its impact on his personal vantage point and outlook on the world. As a cultural form, Hip Hop emerged from a localized cultural moment only to evolve into a variegated and international form that would systemically embrace the freedom of appropriation, and the complexity of multiple voices. This idea of cultural heterogeneity has influenced recurring themes in his imagery and has shaped his belief in the positive power of cultural mash-up.
The subjects of his paintings remain anonymous, visible only by hands, body, and gestures, seldom, if ever, are faces or individuals revealed in their entirety. The subject’s identity, as a result, is relayed by the presence of revelatory objects, tattoos, and accessories – external clues that point to something beyond the seen and allow for the aesthetic to prevail over individuation or the distraction of specificity. That being said, however, Flewellyn depicts real women based on actual people – friends, and strangers – anchoring his imagery in reality rather than unrealistic idealizations.
The juxtaposition of formal cultural garb and pop cultural accoutrements keeps the work fascinating. These tightly cropped compositions are always informed by the presence of Hip Hop imagery, whether in the form of boom boxes, tapes, gold chains or typography. Playful and energized with tactility and detail, they’re both sensual and contemporary – solemn and light.
Matthew Grabelsky ‘Riders’
This new body of work continues my exploration of people with animal heads riding the New York City Subway, and in one case the London Tube. Each painting contains elements from pop culture (a magazine, a poster, a tattoo, a character in the background) which relate to the specific animal, creating a series of humorous tableaux. With a realistically rendered and highly detailed oil painting technique, my goal is to create the effect of looking at a scene on the subway as if it were a diorama at a natural history museum. The images present richly detailed moments frozen in time allowing the viewer to closely inspect every element and make connections between them to read an overall story. In this world, people are transformed into part-animal to create scenes that are strange, funny, and endearing.
Artist Bio:
Los Angeles-based artist Matthew Grabelsky combines a hyperrealistic painting technique with a surreal penchant for unlikely juxtapositions. Raised in New York City, Grabelsky uses its subway’s underground world as the setting for his unlikely pairings.
Grabelsky’s works depict couples on subways, often nonchalantly reading magazines or newspapers, but the male figures in these dyads are strange, quasi-mythological human hybrids with animal heads. Deer, bears, elephants, tigers, and everything in between, make a suited appearance in rush hour. By contrasting the platitudes of the day-to-day with the presence of the extraordinary and unlikely, Grabelsky stages the unexpected within the most unassuming of circumstances.
The appearance of the animal head feels distantly totemic, an archetype for something primordial, ancient, and psychologically motivated. Fascinated by the persistence of animal imagery in mythology and communal cultural imaginaries, Grabelsky superimposes its presence onto his depictions of the contemporary world. For the artist, the animal becomes a manifestation of the inner workings of the hidden subconscious, literally revealing the latent identities and motivations lurking beyond the composure of the human mask.
Technically inspired by 19th Century academic and naturalist painters, Grabelsky creates these unlikely, surreal scenes with a staggering degree of realistic detail. The contrast created between the visual verisimilitude of the works, and the surreal improbability of their content catches the viewer in a prolonged moment of convincingly suspended disbelief.
Anthony Hurd ‘Verified’
In a wonderful world of random blue check marks, engagement farming, social media clout chasing and general acting a fool, we find ourselves in the midst of the golden age of the death of social media. It’s failing us all. Every morning I reach out in hopes of some comedic value, as an escape from the dread of being unable to reach the vast majority of my own audience. Still feeding the beast that buries me daily in anxiety I continue my joyous doom scroll and do my civic duty of providing endlessly useless data to the advertising machines. No matter the damage, I still come crawling back to my abuser for comfort, to suckle on its black barred, censored tit and let it caress my burning brain with one hand while it picks my pockets with its other 99 hands for that sweet, sweet, dopamine rush, worth it.
So I embrace my capture, I turn the dialog inward and say “this is fine, this is ok, just keep clicking!” And I along with billions of others continue to scream into the void of endless data gathering in hopes of a better tomorrow.
Artist Bio:
Anthony Hurd is a multidisciplinary artist currently residing in Albuquerque NM. Their work is focused on the expressions of identity. What we relate to and why. The skin we’re in, the jobs we have, the families we create. Why are human’s so obsessed with identifying with and as things that are seemingly limiting to our long term growth?
Anthony was born is Kansas City, Missouri and raised on skateboard culture. As the weird gay kid who made they’re own clothes, cut their and they’re friends hair, painted all night after skating all day, and played bass in hardcore straightedge bands, They knew all too well that they needed to get out on his own and create his own path.
Their art career would start a couple of decades later, after years spent in the entertainment industry doing advertising and subsequently doing freelance work for years following that. The freelance jobs allowed Hurd to get back into painting and explore they’re creative process again.
With vulnerability and compassion for himself and others, they’ve been able to put a voice to previously unspoken moments. Constantly influenced and inspired by skateboard and music culture to this day, and the perspective of being a queer , non binary step dad, Hurd has created their own space to tell their stories.
Cody Jimenez ‘Efferverence’
In Cody Jimenez’s Efferverence’, he explores a world where emotions are embodied in physical forms. The emotions are represented through vibrant colors and shapes that affect their environment and characters around them. By using physical representations of those emotions, he investigates the dualities of beauty and danger that mirror mysterious forces he experiences in his life.
Artist Bio:
Cody Jimenez is a Mexican-American artist whose work focuses on the natural world through a lens of Imaginative Realism. He received his BFA in painting from NMSU in 2014 and MFA in painting from LCAD in 2017. His work has been exhibited throughout the country, including Los Angeles, CA, Denver, CO, Baton Rouge, LA, and Santa Fe, NM.
About Thinkspace Projects:
Thinkspace was founded in 2005; now in LA’s thriving West Adams District, the gallery has garnered an international reputation as one of the most active and productive exponents of the New Contemporary Art Movement. Maintaining its founding commitment to the promotion and support of its artists, Thinkspace has steadily expanded its roster and diversified its projects, creating collaborative and institutional opportunities all over the world. Founded in the spirit of forging recognition for young, emerging, and lesser-known talents, the gallery is now home to artists from all over the world, ranging from the emerging, mid-career, and established.
Though the New Contemporary Art Movement has remained largely unacknowledged by the vetted institutions of the fine art world and its arbiters of ‘high culture,’ the future promises a shift. The Movement’s formative aversion to the establishment is also waning in the wake of its increased visibility, institutional presence, and widespread popularity. Thinkspace has sought to champion and promote the unique breadth of the Movement, creating new opportunities for the presentation of its artists and work. An active advocate for what is now one of the longest extant organized art movements in history, Thinkspace is an established voice for its continued growth and evolution, proving their commitment by expanding its projects beyond Los Angeles, exhibiting with partner galleries and organizations in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and Honolulu among many others, participating in International Art Fairs, and curating New Contemporary content for Museums. Committed to the vision, risk, and exceptional gifts of its artists, the gallery is first and foremost a family. From the streets to the museums, and from the “margins” to the white cube, Thinkspace is re-envisioning what it means to be “institutional.”
About Tlaloc Studios:
Tlaloc Studios is an interdisciplinary creative space with a diverse range of artists and practices, including Film Photography, Printmaking , Ceramics , Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Graphic design ,Videography and Fashion Design. Tlaloc Studios also host workshops and curates exhibitions and events for the Los Angeles community.