DGS NEWS

M.A. Peers at the Pomona College Museum of Art

Greetings from the DGS offices! We hope your Halloween was as exciting and spooky as ours was.

We wanted to let you know about an upcoming panel discussion for the M.A. Peers exhibition “Project Series 42: M.A. Peers", hosted by writer and curator Doug Harvey, joined by artist Steve Roden.

Thursday, November 18, at 7 p.m.,
at the Pomona College Museum of Art
The panel will be followed by a public reception from 8-10 p.m.

The reason why is, (A) because these are all interesting folks with a lot to say, and (B) the exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that we designed. We had a lot of fun working with M.A. Peers, and her broad array of paintings, including Soviet space dog portraits, made for the Museum of Jurassic Technology, purebred dogs painted on Op-y fabrics, and corporate figures slyly swallowed up in fields of brilliant color. The fact that Peers doubles as a competitive whippet trainer is also an extra-special bonus in our book. Check out the fluorescent spiral binding and the special hidden fold-out.

For more information on the exhibits and directions to the museum, see the Pomona College Museum of Art website.

Things to do this weekend

There are many good things to do this Saturday in and around L.A.. Here are just a few of the things are friends are up to:

MACHINE PROJECT BENEFIT

11/7: Machine Project is hosting its first ever fund-raising benefit. It should be loads of fun.
"What to expect? Opportunities to steal art from a laser-protected, action movie-style perimeter, wager on microscopic slime mold races, try your hand at gold panning to prospect for real gold nuggets, stay late to huddle around the firepit to make ’smores, partake from the amply stocked wine and beer bar, have a wood-fired pizza from an on-site brick pizza oven, enjoy music from four different acts, replace your old Getty Museum fake ID, participate in head-to-head speed soldering contests and eat noodles supplied by Kwong Dynasty Noodle Cart."

Oh yeah, the new book Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA is hot off the press and available for purchase.

PROJECT 39: RACHEL MAYERI

11/7: The opening reception for Rachel Mayeri's exhibition at Pomona College Museum of Art is this Saturday.
The exhibition "focuses on “Primate Cinema,” a video series begun in 2006 that deals with primates and their on-screen dramas and consists of several related videos, performances, and installations."

The exhibition runs through Dec. 20. Be sure to check out the catalog Primate Cinema while you are there.

WINTER CACTUS SHOW @ THE ARBORETUM

11/7: The San Gabriel Valley Cactus and Succulent Society exhibits the splendours of fall and winter by celebrating succulents and cacti rarely seen in summer shows. Featured plants will include the succulent pelargoniums - wild relatives of the common geranium - and cyphostemma - succulent members of the grape family. Haworthias and echeverias will be devloping new leaves at the start of the winter growing season, and conophytums - the jewels of the Mesembryanthemaceae - will be at their best.

L.A. Garden Show is this weekend!

Visit the L.A. Garden Show at The Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden this weekend. The focus of this year's show is edible plants.

• See Showcase and Terrace garden displays designed by Southern California landscape architects and designers featuring edible plants.
• Learn about design, edible plants, organics and sustainable gardening practices from guest speakers.
• Shop The Marketplace for garden elements, edible plants, flowering favorites and rare finds.
• Discover new ways to incorporate edible plants in containers, small plots and landscapes.
• Enjoy food, entertainment and gardening activities just for kids.

L.A. Garden Show runs today 5/1 through Sunday 5/3.

Meals on Wheels on Marketplace

St. Vincent Meals on Wheels was profiled on NPR's Marketplace this morning. This piece takes a look at the growing number of seniors in the L.A. area that are in need and the care and dedication that St. Vincent Meals on Wheels and Sister SAM deliver with each meal. You can listen to or read the Marketplace story here.

Five Years of Fellowships for Visual Artists

California Community Foundation (CCF) with the support of the Getty Foundation will unveil their retrospective awards catalogue: Common Threads, Shared Spaces: Five Years of Fellowships for Visual Artists. Department of Graphic Sciences has been given the honor of creating the book's design and is collaborating with writer and project manager Irene Tsatsos. Others members of the project team include Namju Cho and Leslie Ito of CCF and Angie Kim of the Getty. This catalogue provides the unique opportunity of highlighting the diverse works of 61 Los Angeles artists. It will release in March, 2009.

A Field Guide: the Book

Keep an eye out for a comprehensive guide to The Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA, currently in the works and due out in September of this year. The explosive exhibition took place at LACMA on November 15, 2008, featuring performances, workshops, installations and events that introduced new ways of experiencing LACMAs expansive space and it's mazelike galleries. The book seeks to not only document these projects but further practices beyond the actual day by  featuring new works, essays and interviews.

Print Magazine awards

DGS was awarded 3 times in Print Magazine's 2008 Regional Design Annual! The projects recognized included the book cover for Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, Machine Project's membership package, and the book cover and packaging for Lize Mogel's An Atlas of Radical Cartography.

Lamp Community

DGS is proud to be building a new relationship with an outstanding Los Angeles organization: Lamp Community. Their Build-a-Village campaign, helping men and women with severe disabilities move from streets to homes, aims to end chronic homelessness and transform lives. We helped put together their campaign booklet, featuring cover art by residents participating in their support services.

Make Some Light!

Artwork for one-night arts festival. Commissions for new artwork range from $500 to $2,000.

The City of Santa Monica is seeking proposals from artists and/or artist teams for temporary art installations for the city's newest event, Glow. For one night, the Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica Beach, Palisades Park and surrounding areas will host unique and diverse temporary artworks. Inspired by Paris' all-night festival, Nuit Blanche, Glow is also partly in homage to the California grunion, a native fish that comes ashore during spring and summer months to spawn on local beaches, thereby creating a momentary iridescent glimmer. The Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Division is pleased to invite artists to partake in this unprecedented nighttime event by submitting proposals for artwork.

Go to www.glowsantamonica.org (designed by you know who!) to get all the details and some effervescence.

The Alchemy of Comedy. . .Stupid Book Release Party Nov. 7

Please join Department of Graphic Sciences, Gallery 400, WhiteWalls & Susanne Vielmetter in toasting the release of The Alchemy of Comedy. . .Stupid, the book supporting the multi-media installation work of the same name by Edgar Arceneaux. Featuring video pieces from the 2006 exhibition, the evening will include a dramatic reading by David Alan Grier and book signing by Edgar and David.

WhiteWalls will also present its latest books, The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets and Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68 with a reading by a special guest, and a Sun Ra-inspired video installation by artists Robby Herbst and Karl Erickson.

Wednesday, November 7, 6-9pm

LA><ART
2640 S. La Cienega, Los Angeles, CA 90034
323.951.9790 | www.laxart.org

Edgar Arceneaux and the hosts enthusiastically thank LA><ART for the generous donation of their space for this event.