Los Angeles Center for Digital Art
102 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
LACDA at Red Dot Miami

If you are in the Miami area this weekend, don't miss our stellar exhibit at ArtSpot, Red Dot Miami at 30th Street and NE 1st Avenue in the Wynwood Arts District. 
Curator's Statement
by Anneliese Varaldiev
Rex Bruce
Twig Capra
Jonathan Cecil
Ted Owens
Mei Xian Qiu
Anneliese Varaldiev
"iBrow" is a group of six artists based in Los Angeles, whose work, individually and collectively, examines various aspects of this unique and perplexing city: on one hand, the actual physical substance of the place—its distinctive topography as well as its close relation to human physicality and flesh—and on the other, the intangible substance of its most enduring legacy: the fabrication of monumental, iconic images, emanating in the past from small squares of celluloid and projected light, now sent around the world as pulses of electronic data, monumental in their profusion rather than their actual material size.
The work of each of these artists is at times interconnected and at other times, distinct from the rest of the group—for example, Mei Xian Qiu is the only foreign-born artist among the six and the only one whose subject touches on a foreign culture (the "Hundred Flowers Movement" of the Cultural Revolution in China) yet her images have the lush physicality and saturated color palette of a Hollywood epic from the age of Technicolor. Stylistically these images are closer to Douglas Sirk than to any Maoist propaganda machine, and light years away from the clenched, unsmiling teeth of social realism. She avails herself of several theoretical and actual cinematic constructs in the creation of her images, using local Asian-American artists and academics to appear as actors in her tableaux, which, like the work of Wang Qingsong or Gregory Crewdson, can take days or even weeks to stage. 
The male characters in Qiu's set-pieces are always in some sort of military uniform, either Chinese or American. (The unifying theme of the work deals with an imagined takeover of the US by Chinese forces.) Interestingly though, the historical Chinese uniforms worn by these characters are not authentic army issue, but rather costumes obtained from a Beijing photography studio where tourists could rent them in order to participate in reenactments of Cultural Revolution propaganda imagery.
Sharing Qiu's intense color palette and cinematic imagery is Anneliese Varaldiev, whose work is imbued with an underlying sensibility taken from classical painting and European cinema, as well as Hollywood cinema of past eras, when the close-up was not not merely a variant from the medium-shot or the master, but rather an obsessive, reverential contemplation of the human face, often painstakingly lit and composed so as to create a sublime manipulation of nature—at forty feet high, literally larger than life, and certainly unlike any life-form that one would encounter outside the luminous cave of a darkened movie palace.
Varaldiev utilizes a number of photographic techniques to replicate the illusive shimmer of a projected cinematic image (even when the end result has the lacquer-hard, glossy surface of a Cibachrome print), often re-photographing the same image several times in succession with different cameras and different media in order to generate the desired effect of diffusion and transparency. She is also interested in the aesthetics of scale, at times producing the same image as a mural-size photographic print or a wall-size projection—emulating the scale of cinema—or showing it on the smallest possible electronic medium, such as an iPod Nano, thus evoking the luminosity of cinematic images (not to mention the approximate dimensions of an actual frame of celluloid) as well as the talismanic intimacy of miniature religious icons.
Both Varaldiev and Twig Capra examine the notion of the iconized female persona in media, but while Varaldiev's images evoke the hazy, ephemeral quality of bygone screen idols, rendering the model in a detached, almost abstract manner, Capra's self-portraits embody the sexy self-assuredness of work by a photographer born into an age where media and identity have merged, and where the tools of image-making change with such rapidity that fluency with all forms of media capture and dissemination is mandatory, the only constant being a perfectly calibrated artist's eye. At twenty, Capra is the only digital native in this group of artists—she is young enough to be as unencumbered by the burdens of identity politics and the beauty myth as she is grounded in the process of fabricating her numerous alter egos.
Varaldiev's screen persona is an apparition from our collective cinematic past, idealized and mysterious, invoking the gauzy, objectified intimacy of the meticulously crafted close-up, whereas Capra's character-driven photographs and videos borrow content and sensibility from mass media today. Both behind the lens and in front of it, the artist is fully, strikingly present. There is nothing tentative about these self-portraits—they have the punchy urgency of images shouting to be heard above the din of a world already teeming with images, and their beauty exists for its own sake, not for the sake of post-feminist vivisection.
Jonathan Cecil addresses other concerns of the post-digital age—exploring the notion that technology is "creeping into every facet of human life"—that our desire for automation and expediency gives rise to software and hardware systems that are "aware" of their surroundings, and therefore, aware of us—perhaps, in the end, to our detriment. His piece "Faces of Los Angeles" blurs the boundaries between our technology, our environment, and our physical beings, utilizing facial recognition software to interpret aerial images from the Los Angeles urban area. The result is an ghostly, quasi-human presence on the screen, as the program struggles to decipher a human visage among the roads and structures—it is the ultimate post-urban landscape, now post-human as well. The ghost is no longer inside the machine, or inside the shell—now the ghost, shell and machine are one entity.
Cecil does not attempt to create any sort of identifiable persona with this imagery, but rather a slightly anthropomorphic hybrid being that melds terrain and physiognomy, while simultaneously exploring the disconnection between awareness and perception, between anima and mind. 
Rex Bruce's video work continues on the theme of terrain—with a decidedly dystopic bent—utilizing images shot from the actual and symbolic vantage point of a moving car. In this artist's photographic practice, the automobile is not merely an accessory to the camera, it is as integral a part of the camera as its lens or recording mechanism. A native of Los Angeles, Bruce views the city as "a shiny, cacophonic silicon wafer, a vast crust of technologically-generated business, transportation and imagistic exchange, rushing at a high velocity through an endless grid of infrastructure which has become a hub for the global." Through his eye, however, we see the proverbial dark underbelly of the shining wafer and its environs, as the viewer is transported through "an endless mapping of turns, accelerations and stoppages," along desolate freeways and gritty, congested surface streets, pausing only for traffic jams or for the occasional pit-stop at a vaguely nightmarish fast-food drive-through.
To underscore the sensation of random, frenetic motion, Bruce cranks up his footage to twenty times its original speed, then processes it at different frame rates, compression levels and resolution. The resulting digital degeneration "creates a mood of overkill and noisy intensity that expresses the motorized zeitgeist of LA—the capital of vehicular excess." Although one would expect such a frenzied excursion to be harsh and disorienting, there is actually a sense of contemplativeness at the heart of this video work, a hypnotic pull generated by Bruce's complex use of visual and sonic rhythms, and the constantly shifting interplay of miles-per-hour and frames-per-second.
Jonathan Cecil and Rex Bruce both examine the surface and infrastructure of Los Angeles, but while Cecil's imagery is cooly seductive and mathematical—and almost reptilian in its detachment—Bruce's video pieces pummel the viewer with the velocity of a high-speed freeway pursuit and the dissonance of screeching tires. His approach "constitutes a turbulent violation of many tenets of 'good' image-making, but the imagery nonetheless retains a musical and lyrical sense in its form," (Which, of course, is our task as viewers to discern.)
If Bruce and Cecil's imagery depict the macro view of LA topography, Ted Owens is interested in the same surface, but seen in microcosm, through a macro lens. Bruce's camera travels dozens of miles during a single take—Owens' camera moves imperceptibly and precisely, within the boundaries of a few inches. But there he finds, greatly magnified, a whole societal structure and interplay, not with the human inhabitants of the city, but with creatures infinitely smaller than we are, discovering—and trying their best to make sense of—our detritus. There is a widely-held belief that after the apocalypse—whether natural or man-made—the only life that will remain on the planet are these minute insects. So—even today—they are, in a sense, the most logical recipients of the appellation "post-human."
In a sense, all these artists are dealing with the concept of detritus, in that none of these constructs—political systems, cars, infrastructure, electronic devices, software, even icons—are essential to human existence or survival. But what may increasingly be the pertinent question, as least as far as computers and technology and are concerned, is whether or not human beings will ultimately be essential to THEIR survival. These artists have certainly addressed this issue in their work, and will continue to do so. Stay tuned.
It is worth noting that, while these six artists are united here under the banner of The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, and while all of them embrace "new media art" as a viable and very relevant component of the larger art world—and, of course, all six utilize various forms of digital or electronic media in their work—they do not categorize or label themselves as "digital artists" any more than a person who happens to type a manuscript on a laptop computer would be called a "digital writer." They are artists, period. And, just as young people emerging from art schools today are trained to be adept and conversant with a number of disciplines, tools and practices, these six, as multi-disciplinary artists, utilize whatever tool is appropriate in order to bring their ideas to light, whether it be a Bolex or a Canon 5D, a complex computer program or the most basic iPhone ap. Or even a tube of paint. Ultra-Hi-Res may be the new black, but the old black works fine, too.
We are in the digital world, but not of it.
Artist Biographies
Mei Xian Qiu is a photographer and installation artist based in Los Angeles. She was born in the town of Pekalongan, on the island of Java, Indonesia, to a third generation Chinese-minority family. In the aftermath of the Chinese and Communist genocide in that country, the family immigrated to the United States. Qiu is a graduate of UC Davis, and has also studied in Europe. She has had solo exhibitions at MoCA (NY), the Chinese-American Museum of Los Angeles, and a number of galleries, including LACDA. She has also exhibited her work at Art Basel, PhotoLA, and Art Platform (LA).
Anneliese Varaldiev is a photographer and videographer whose work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cinémathèque Française, the Museé d'Art Moderne (Paris), and the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), as well as a number of private collections. Her camera work for broadcast media includes a long association with French television, for documentaries (or, more precisely, "film essays") on such figures as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Orson Welles, and Roy Lichtenstein. Her American credits include Dateline NBC, the E! Entertainment Network, VH1 and Animal Planet. Vaaldiev's portraits have appeared in a number of books and magazines, and as artwork for classical music CD's (the most recent being the Ysaÿe Quartet's recording of Mozart Piano Quartets). Her own book, "Kameramusik," a series of photographs of classical musicians—including Pierre Boulez, Janos Starker, Helene Grimaud and Alfred Brendel—will be published this year. She has exhibited at Art Basel (Switzerland), Galerie Michèle Chomette (Paris), Stephen Cohen Gallery (LA), the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Photo LA, LACDA, EZTV, and the 18th Street Gallery (Santa Monica), among others.
Twig Capra is currently attending the School of Visual Arts, pursuing a BFA in photography. Prior to living in New York City, she was raised in the Texas countryside. Experiencing such contrasting environments causes her to have a deep interest in liminal states, especially those that lie between reality and fantasy. Although she is only twenty, Capra has received a number of grants and awards, including SVA's Silas H. Rhodes Scholarship. Her work has been shown at PhotoLA, Galerie Open in Berlin, and the Grace Museum in Abilene, TX, among others.
Jonathan Cecil is a visual artist working and living in Los Angeles. His work focuses on the reconstitution and transformation of media through digital processes. He he received a MFA in Design Media Art at University of California Los Angeles in 2012. He graduated from University of California Santa Barbara with a BA in Studio Art in 2000. Cecil is a resident at the Game Lab at UCLA, and supervisor of the UCLA Design Media Art Fabrication Lab. Exhitibitions inlcude the California Museum of Photography (UC RIverside), Young Projects at the Pacific Design Center, PhotoLA, and the Wight Gallery at UCLA.
Rex Bruce is the founder and director of Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. He founded the digital program at Artists Television Access (San Francisco) for which he curated exhibits and created curriculum. He received his MFA from SFSU in Interdisciplinary Art, where he also taught and developed curriculum for many years. His work has been shown internationally for over two decades, and he has emerged as a significant artist and organizer in the burgeoning art renaissance in Downtown Los Angeles, as well as being a driving force in the exploding international scene revolving around art and technology. Bruce's work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Laznia Center for Contemporary Art (Poland), the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, the California Museum of Photography (UC Riverside), New Media Center Santa Ana, Found Gallery, Start SOMA San Francisco, the Center for Political Graphics (LA), Niche.LA Video Art, the Silver Lake Film Festival, the Downtown Film Festival–Los Angeles, PhotoLA, Photo San Francisco, and LACDA. His video piece "Widescreen" was shown at Pulse LA in 2011, presented by Skylight Projects NYC, and he recently performed in the collaborative work "Up in the Air" at MOCA (the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles).
Ted Owens is a designer and filmmaker working in the field of appropriate technology and green design, in addition to art. His book and DVD/video, "Building with Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home" (New Society Publishers), is the result of his designing, building and documenting the construction of his own solar straw bale home. "Building with Awareness" has been featured in a number of national publications such as The Washington Post and Su Casa Magazine, and has won several awards. A native of Los Angeles, Ted is a graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He is the owner of Syncronos Design, a company that promotes natural building and "green tech" in our built environment. He is currently directing a feature-length documentary film on sustainable design and energy efficiency.
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