BEYOND EDEN ART FAIR 

October 9 - 11, 2009

 

www.beyondedenartfair.com <http://www.beyondedenartfair.com/>

October 9 - 11, 2009
LA Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park
4800 Hollywood Blvd. (near the Vermont intersection)
Los Angeles, CA 90027


The Beyond Eden Art Fair is a multi-gallery event celebrating the new
contemporary art scene in Los Angeles. The public is invited to attend this
special event and admission is free.

After the success of last year's East of Eden exhibition which drew over
3,000 people, the organizers have decided to branch out the scope of the
fair and expand the focus geographically to include galleries from all
across Los Angeles. The goal of Beyond Eden is to celebrate the new
contemporary movement that has been building momentum and a patron base in
Los Angeles for the past several decades and is finally starting to receive
mainstream recognition from major institutions and publications the world
over. Organizers are partnering with some of Los Angeles' leading cultural
and community organizations to help broaden the scope of the event. A
percentage of the event's sales also will be donated to MOCA on behalf of
the MOCA Contemporaries. The event organizers forecast this year's event to
be even larger and more well received and are expecting upwards of 5,000
people to pass through over the weekend.

Beyond Eden will showcase the works of over 15 galleries and will be held
inside the beautiful confines of the historic Los Angeles Municipal Art
Gallery during the weekend of October 9th, 10th and 11th, with an opening
night celebration planned for Saturday, October 10th. Participating
galleries include Billy Shire Fine Arts, Black Maria Gallery, Carmichael
Gallery of Contemporary Art, Copro Gallery, Crewest, DRKRM, Gallery 1988,
Gallery Nucleus, La Luz De Jesus, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG),
LeBasse Projects, New Image Art, Subliminal Projects, Synchronicity Space
and Thinkspace.

Beyond Eden will also feature an 'Artist Village' in the courtyard outside
of the LAMAG in the beautiful confines of the Barnsdall Art Park. The
'Artist Village' will feature an array of live painters curated by the
featured galleries alongside installations from DeLab and Machine Projects
plus live screen printing from P.U.M.A. Project and performance art courtesy
of Cannibal Flower.

Founded in 1951, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is a historic 10,000
square foot facility located on the sprawling grounds of Olive Hill in the
Barnsdall Art Park. The park overlooks the city of Los Angeles and is also
home to the famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock House and Arts Complex.
Under the Department of Cultural Affairs, the LAMAG is the premier city-run
gallery that focuses on contemporary art, particularly the work of living
Southern California artists.

Beyond Eden: Urban Indie Art in Paradise

by Shana Nys Dambrot

Building on the overwhelming response to last year's East of Eden
locals-centric art fair, the organizers broaden the scope of this year's
much-anticipated sequel. They made great strides in codifying the invaluable
contribution of LA's East Side to the overall flavor of the city's visual
culture-and now with this year's Beyond Eden, they prepare to take stock of
that flavor across the entire spectrum of LA's independent gallery scene.
Analogous to that term as it's used in the music world, independent or indie
is as much if not more a state of mind and taste-a lifestyle, an identity-as
it is a business level.

This year the geography is conceptual and aesthetic, not literal.
Participating galleries represent the most popular voices in the "new
mainstream," from Bergamot Station to Mid-Wilshire to West LA - Copro,
Carmichael, New Image Art, Subliminal Projects, Black Maria, Thinkspace. At
Beyond Eden the whole genealogy of galleries where this kind of work is most
associated, nurtured and celebrated, all present their take on the no-name
genre, and with 15 galleries side by side, the project is the perfect place
for DIY scholars to work out their own definition of what the indie art
world looks like now. LA is where everything starts; every trend is exported
from the west coast. What was Helter Skelter here 15 years ago is the most
mainstream thing imaginable these days. It's all over the newspapers and big
glossy monthlies, in the biggest galleries, on high-end clothing lines and
vodka bottles, and museums around the world..

LA is a stage for emergence into the international art scene. More artists
live and work here from around the nation and globe than any other global
art center-at least it certainly feels that way. Maybe it's the schools.
Maybe it's the film money, or the sunshine. Maybe it's the illusion of
eternal youth. The answer is not likely to be either simple or finite, but
the question is certainly worth asking. Curious art-world minds want to
know-what is it about LA that makes it so unique? Well, Beyond Eden is a
great place to start.

Narrative, figurative, poetic, even mythological at times, the indie LA art
style is edgy and illustration-based, drawing on street-art forms like
tagging and posting, with a taste for the vintage, for the seducing of the
innocent, the facing down of monsters, the mastery of nature. It's part
surrealism, it's omnivorous when it comes to source material, it's
cinematic, sci-fi inflected, rebel-embracing. It's romantic sometimes, often
beautiful to a point of vertigo. It's all that and occasionally none of it.
And now this loose affiliation of independent, alternative, post-Brow,
avant-Brow, pop surrealist, urban romantics-whatever you want to call them
is okay as long as it's clearly outside the boundaries of the high-end,
forbidding, over-priced, white-box fortress stereotype.
-Shana Nys Dambrot

Los Angeles, 2009

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Fri, October 9th
VIP invite only event

Saturday, October 10th
Noon-5PM: OPEN FAIR HOURS / ART VIEWING

7-8PM: OPENING NIGHT KICK-OFF EVENT, benefiting the MOCA Contemporaries.
Special membership drive (sign up and receive a special 'gift bag')

7:30PM: SYMPOSIUM - A special address from Mark Steven Greenfield, the director of the LA Municipal Art Gallery

8PM: SPECIAL PRESENTATION - Presentation of a lifetime achievement award to
Billy Shire in recognition of all he's done for the new contemporary art movement.

8PM-Midnight: OPENING NIGHT GALA

Cash bar by 1933 Group and Bigfoot Lodge. Tunes from DJ Mr. NumberOnederful (Bitter:Sweet)

Admission is Free / Open to the Public

Sunday, October 11th

Noon-5PM: OPEN FAIR HOURS / ART VIEWING

2PM: SPECIAL EVENT - Film Screening at The Barnsdall Theater 'Scribble.08' - 48 minute art documentary film featuring Clayton Brothers, Martha Rich, Jeff Soto, Joe Sorren, Camille Rose Garcia, and Kevin Christy from Murphy Fine Art Films

Admission is Free / Open to the Public

Partners:

1933 Group, Arrested Motion, Art Ltd., Artillery, ArtScene, Baby Tattoo,
Bigfoot Lodge, Citizen LA, Coolhaus, Daily Dujour, Department of Cultural
Affairs (DCA), East Hollywood Neighborhood Council (EHNC), Eric Garcetti's
office, GGPNC, Hi-Fructose, Indie Printing, Juxtapoz, Keep-A-Breast, LA
Weekly, LAMAG Associates, Lee Joseph Publicity for the Visual Arts, Living
Color Graphics, MOCA Contemporaries, Modern Painters, Murphy Design, NOTCOT,
Sherman Gallery, Sour Harvest, THE Magazine, Visual Art Source

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