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Los Angeles-based artist Jesse Fleming presents a sci-fi-techno ecstatic voyage, "Jane the Baptist" installed in the ALAC theatre opening day.

The single channel video takes the viewer through the birth canals of modern automated car washes within Los Angeles County. The view is myopic, brutal, and candy lush with frothy synthetic ooze delivered by an attentive robotic hand. It is unending and internal, providing a transcendent passage to see the extraordinary in the mundane. The original musical score by Miguel de Pedro / kid606 delivers an accompanying tone that is dizzying, with both ascending and descending notes. Together it is a world gone mad but simultaneously beautiful and hypnotic, like a drive down the Sunset Strip. It is, and it will be a good ride. Presented courtesy of Five Car Garage.

Join Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-Curators Amanda Hunt and Matthew Schum for a reception followed by a discussion on the upcoming Desert X 2019. The mission of Desert X is to bring leading artists to the Coachella Valley to create site-specific art, engage viewers, and focus attention on the valley’s environment, its natural wonders, as well as the environmental, socio-political and economic issues facing California’s desert communities.

The inaugural exhibition took place in 2017 to critical and popular acclaim attracting more than 200,000 local and international visitors and was the recipient of multiple awards for its extensive education and community programs.

The second edition of Desert X opens February 9–April 21, 2019 in the Coachella Valley, CA.

desertx.org

Naima J. Keith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles talks with Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock about his practice and upcoming projects.

For nearly two and a half decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock has created elaborate works that interlace personal memoir with the history of painting and pop-cultural pulp imagery. Hancock’s childhood was immersed in resonant biblical themes, whose power persisted even as their religious specificity waned later in his life. This early influence informed a complex amalgamation of characters and plots possessing universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the grey in between. Infused with mythologies presented at an operatic scale, his exuberant and subversive storylines employ a variety of cultural tropes, ranging from his personal experiences, the western art historical canon, comics and superheroes, and medieval morality, where text and abstraction both drive and complicate his narratives.

Trenton Doyle Hancock is represented by Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; James Cohan, New York; and Hales Gallery in London. Shulamit Nazarian is featuring his work at ALAC.

Art Los Angeles Contemporary is extremely pleased to celebrate its ninth edition with a performance by seminal Los Angeles hip-hop group Freestyle Fellowship on Friday, January 26 at Zebulon Café Concert.

Founded in the early ‘90s in South Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood, Freestyle Fellowship emerged right before the social and racial tensions of Los Angeles erupted in the 1992 L.A. Riots. Gesturing musically more towards the freestyle and free-associative work of De La Soul or A Tribe Called Quest, they were among the first jazz-influenced hip-hop groups. Their first record, To Whom It May Concern (1991) presciently foresaw the issues that Los Angeles at that time, with lyrics that questioned gangsta rap’s self-destructive tendencies as well as the ruthless brutality of the L.A. Police Department of that era. One further album would follow, 1993’s Innercity Griot, before each member pursued individual work until their third album Temptations in 2001 and then returning again for their fourth album The Promise in 2011. Currently, members in Freestyle Fellowship include Aceyalone, Myka 9, P.E.A.C.E. and Self Jupiter.

The performance at Zebulon Cafe Concert takes place on Friday, January 26 at 8pm. Purchase tickets online in advance via TicketFly.

Advanced reservations are strongly recommended as the venue has limited capacity.

zebulon.la

New York-based artist and filmmaker, Ben Fain, will showcase a number of interventionist projects conceived and executed over the past fifteen years, as selected by Los Angeles-based artist, curator, writer, and researcher, Keith J. Varadi. The screening will be accompanied by a conversation between the two about cults of personality and populist communities, followed by a question and answer session open to all in attendance.

Carmina Escobar will lead the public audience in a performance activating her piece Passing Through Dimensions (2017), a do-it-yourself instrument in the style of a megaphone made out of centerfold included in the current issue of the Art Los Angeles Reader. Escobar is an experimental vocalist, performer, sound and multimedia artist from Mexico City whose work focuses primarily on the voice, the body and their interactions to physical, social and psychological space. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.

CoachArt is hosting hands-on art activities for ALAC visitors ages 5-16, under the generous instruction of some of L.A.’s great artists: Ry Rocklen, Rosson Crow, Channing Hansen, and The Haas Brothers.

Join us in the ALAC Theatre for art-making workshops and an opportunity to learn about the important work CoachArt is doing to connect chronically ill children and their siblings to volunteer mentors in sports, music, dance, cooking, visual arts and more.

Since 2001, CoachArt has matched volunteer coaches with children impacted by chronic illness for one-on-one or group lessons in arts and athletics. Their vision is that one day every family impacted by chronic illness will be connected to a community of support and an opportunity to learn and grow together.

To sign up for the workshops and for more information please email coachart@artlosangelesfair.com

coachart.org