Please join us Saturday, August 26th from 2-3pm for a conversation between Cole Sternberg and Honor Fraser gallery director, Jamison Edgar. Sternberg will introduce and expand upon his conceptual political project, The Free Republic of California as well as his painting and image-based art practice.
Please join us Saturday, August 12th for a summer block party in concert with the gallery’s summer exhibitions.
Live music, performances, and poetry readings by Edgar Fabián Frías, Vaughan Larsen, Marcel Monroy, Priestusssy, Cielo Saucedo, and Sammie Veeler. Food and drink vendors will be on site for purchase.
Edgar Fabián Frías is a multidisciplinary artist with a diverse skill set that spans various art forms, including installation, photography, video art, sound, sculpture, textiles, performance, and community organizing. Their work explores themes such as historical legacies, resilience, and radical imagination within the context of Indigenous Futurism, spirituality, and queer aesthetics. Frías was born in East Los Angeles in 1983 and received dual BA degrees in Psychology and Studio Art from UC Riverside. They later obtained an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling with a focus on Interpersonal Neurobiology and Somatic Psychotherapy from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. In 2022, Frías earned their MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley.
Vaughan Larsen received their BFA in Photography from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Later that year, they placed First in the Getty Images 2019 International Creative Bursary Award, first prize in the Amsterdam Pride Photo Award, and was named a 2019 Fellow by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary Nohl Fellowship. Their work has been shown throughout Wisconsin, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, New Orleans, Pratt MWP’s campus gallery, and Europe. Their work has been written about in several publications, including Humble Arts Foundation. Larsen has presented at the Paul Brach Lecture Series at CalArts in 2021. They are now preparing their first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Marcel Monroy is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and cellist. They currently live remotely in Northern California and are attending an MA program in Los Angeles.
Star Feliz/Priestusssy (b. 1992, Lenapehoking, New York, NY) is an artist and healer living and working on Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA). Feliz illuminates the processes of world-building as they braid back together the strands of life within their Afro-Taino lineage of the Dominican Republic and the wider Caribbean diaspora that were so violently fragmented since the onset of European colonization. Working across media, their conceptual installations take the form of maps, songs, dimensions, and talismans. Through the exploration of the twinned histories of humanity and the earth, a unique visual lexicon emerges that embraces the mundane and the unknowable as sacred. Often functioning as wayfinding tools, these interventions bring an inter-dimensional perspective to the forefront and make manifest the transcendent possibilities between the scientific, the intuitive, and the fantastical. While investigating universal phenomena like loss and desire, they engage with the theoretical touchstones of feminist thought, the queer radical tradition, contemporary Black liberation movements and land rematriation. Under the moniker of Priestusssy they create experimental devotional music with the earth through intimate narratives of transformation.
Cielo Saucedo is an interdisciplinary artist and access worker. Their work focuses on the dispersal of ableism through cultural economies. They work to dissolve curative aspirations encoded in technology. Their practice hybridizes computer generated imagery, sculpture, writing and virtual reality. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and are currently an MFA candidate at UCLA.
Sammie Veeler is an artist based in Los Angeles whos work takes the shape of undulating loops in time playing out across performance, digital media, world building, and prose. Veeler seek to examine the spiritual and transformative power of personal and collective digital archives by connecting the personal practice of preserving her late husband’s personal data to the collective production of history online. Veeler is the co-founder and Gallery Director of New Art City.
Food by Kumpay Kitchen
Organized in collaboration with Star Feliz.
Please join us Friday May 19th 7-9PM, for a live performance by Antigoni Tsagkrapoulou, followed by a screening of Wesleigh Gates’ recorded zoom performance A/B Machines, 2020.
Please join us, Wednesday May 25th at 7PM for a double screening of two films by Derek Jarman, Blue and Journey to Avebury.
There will be an introduction by LA based film maker Jamie Ross
Please join us on Friday, May 12 from 7-9PM for a Drag Con Kick off party hosted in collaboration with LA-based queer collective, House of Avalon. The event will begin with a roundtable conversation with House of Avalon discussing their video installation currently on view at Honor Fraser, followed by drag performances by Symone, Gigi Goode, and Rylie.
House of Avalon merchandise will be available for sale.
RSVP to secure your spot
Please join us Saturday, February 18 from 2-5PM for a closing reception of Lucy McRae’s solo exhibition Future Sensitive. Our closing celebration is hosted in partnership with THE LAB MAG. A walkthrough with Lucy McRae and LAB MAG artistic director, Louise Salter will be held at 3PM.
Lucy McRae is a science fiction artist, filmmaker, inventor, and body architect. She is regarded as a pioneer who blurs the boundaries across art, architecture, design, and technology with a healthy disregard for labels that limit interdisciplinary practice. McRae has exhibited at art museums, film festivals, institutes, and science forums across the world including MIT, Ars Electronica, and NASA. Selected major artworks have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, NGV, Science Museum London, Centre Pompidou and Milan Triennial. McRae is a visiting professor at SCI Arc in Los Angeles and is recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. McRae encourages scientific conversation and has spoken at TED, Royal Albert Hall, Cannes Lion and Tribeca Film Festival.
Louise Salter is the artistic director of The Laboratory Arts Collective. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Lab Mag. Salter is one half of the directing duo Salter & Kihlstedt, a female run production company.
The Summit for Future Sensitivity brings together seven leading artists in the field of art and technology to present short lectures on creative research and radical-tech imaginaries. During the live-streamed event, each artist will share aspects of their ongoing research and discuss overlapping themes in a public forum. The online webinar will last approximately one hour and is free and open to the public.
Featured Speakers: Lena Chen, Mia Imani Harrison, Young Joo Lee, Lucy McRae, Romi Ron Morrison, Tiara Roxanne, and Skawennati
Moderated by Jamison Edgar
Please join us Saturday May 21 at 2pm for a screening of Surabhi Saraf’s video, Alaap, followed by a conversation between the artist and K Allado-McDowell. Light refreshments will be served.
2PM Video Screening
2:30PM Conversation between Saraf & Allado-McDowell
Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer and founder of Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores our complex relationship with technology using embodiment as a tool and the body as a site for transformation. Surabhi is the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship Award by the Fleishhacker Foundation (2015), the Djerassi Resident Artist Award (2012) and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She was a 2019 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and 2020 resident at HarvestWorks, NY.
K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the book Pharmako-AI, and are co-editor, with Ben Vickers, of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They record and release music under the name Qenric. Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.
The Berggruen Institute is pleased to present a Salon featuring the work of filmmaker and body architect Lucy McRae at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles.
McRae’s solo show, through film, fashion, and other media, suggests that we propose radical new modes of kin-making. Babies that can be designed and grown, CRISPR technology that can edit genes, and off-Earth environments are future-facing phenomena that are challenging previous concepts of family, gender, and the body. She will be in conversation with Northwestern Assistant Professor of computer science, chemical & biological engineering, and mechanical engineering Sam Kriegman whose lab evolves, builds, grows, develops, breeds, trains, and teaches robots. Associate Director of the Future Humans theme Claire Isabel Webb will moderate a discussion of how scientific and artistic questions about what counts as “life” are remaking the category of “the human.”
About the Speakers
Lucy McRae, Science Fiction Artist
A world-acclaimed science fiction artist and body architect, Lucy McRae considers how human biology might be augmented by a mixture of physical design, modification of genes, and emotions –– technology transforming the body. Lucy McRae leads a multi-disciplinary, artist-research studio investigating the impact future technologies have on human evolution. Boldly staring down the status quo, the studio pioneers a new story for how future technologies will fundamentally alter human intimacy, reproduction, spirituality, biology, and wellness culture — shining a light on the ethical implications of genetic engineering. Based in Los Angeles, Lucy is a visiting professor at the architecture school SCI_Arc, and a World Economic Forum, Young Global Leader, and TED Fellow.
Sam Kriegman, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Chemical & Biological Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University
Sam Kriegman is an assistant professor of computer science, chemical and biological engineering, and mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. His research seeks general theories of life, in which the details of carbon-based organisms would represent a special case. As we have yet to invent a time machine or the means of interstellar travel, Sam and his students design, build and breed robotic lifeforms to catch a glimpse of life as it may have arisen here on Earth or as it might exist elsewhere in the universe. Most recently, this led to the discovery of a previously unknown (kinematic) form of biological reproduction.
Sam received his PhD in computer science and the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the University of Vermont in 2020. He conducted postdoctoral research in the biology department at Tufts University and Harvard University. An AI2050 Fellow and Cozzarelli Prize recipient, his creation of the world’s first computer-designed organisms (the “xenobots”; together with his three co-authors) has enjoyed widespread media attention, added a new word to the dictionary, and was displayed as an exhibit at the Design Museum in London.
Claire Webb, Associate Director, Future Humans, Berggruen Institute
Claire Isabell Webb, Ph.D. is a historian and anthropologist of science and the Associate Director of the Future Humans Theme at the Berggruen Institute. Webb researches the history of the search for life beyond Earth beginning in the late 1950s, and how that quest has shifted the boundaries, conditions, and thresholds of concepts we call liveliness, intelligence, species, and consciousness. Her work asks, how do technologies of perception of the extraterrestrial— space telescopes that by which scientists seek to apprehend biosignatures of exoplanetary atmospheres, radio telescopes that might be tools to detect evidence of alien technology — inflect what it means to be human, on Earth? At the Berggruen Institute, Webb is developing experimental initiatives around the futures of life, mind, and outer space. These initiatives convene philosophers, scientists, and artists to collaborate on projects that tug together current knowledge about life to speculative philosophies of what life will become.
About the Berggruen Institute
The Berggruen Institute’s mission is to develop foundational ideas and shape political, economic, and social institutions for the 21st century. Providing critical analysis using an outwardly expansive and purposeful network, we bring together some of the best minds and most authoritative voices from across cultural and political boundaries to explore fundamental questions of our time. Our objective is enduring impact on the progress and direction of societies around the world. To date, projects inaugurated at the Berggruen Institute have helped develop a youth jobs plan for Europe, fostered a more open and constructive dialogue between Chinese leadership and the West, strengthened the ballot initiative process in California, and launched Noema, a new publication that brings thought leaders from around the world together to share ideas. In addition, the Berggruen Prize, a $1 million award, is conferred annually by an independent jury to a thinker whose ideas are shaping human self-understanding to advance humankind.
Join moderator Brian Droitcour in conversation with Amir H. Fallah, Nora N. Khan, and Kelani Nichole
Join moderator Natasha Sandmeier in conversation with Wendy W Fok, Fredrik Helburg, and Lara Lesmes
Please join us October 1st at 3PM for a walk-through of Future Sensitive with Lucy McRae and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, SFMoMA Curator of Architecture and Design. McRae and Fletcher will guide visitors through the exhibition while unpacking major themes in the films, sculptures, and installations.
LIZZIE O’SHEA: FUTURE HISTORIES
In conversation with Sam Dean
Friday, January 24, 2020 at 2:00pm
Honor Fraser Gallery
Join us for this special event where Lizzie O’Shea will discuss her recently published book Future Histories with Sam Dean from the LA Times.
Please RSVP to vestoprevents@protonmail.com
When was the last time you read a novel that so clearly, with such wit, simplicity, and imagination captured the rage, love, and absurdity of our current west coast times; a book that rides the precipice of documentary and fiction? I just did, and it’s called, I Hate the Internet by Los Angeles author, Jarett Kobek. On Saturday, February 15, 2020 at 12pm I will be in conversation with Jarett to talk about some of the images from his books and some of the images in my work on view at Honor Fraser. I hope you can make it.
– Joe Sola
Joe Sola‘s films, performances, pictures and objects have been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and fairs. His most well known work is Studio Visit, in which he jumped out of a window during studio visits. This artwork is currently on view in the YUZ Museum Shanghai as part of the exhibition In Production: Art and the Studio System.
Jarett Kobek is an internationally bestselling Turkish-American writer who lives in California. His work has been translated into nine languages and published in twelve countries. His books include ATTA, I Hate the Internet, and Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World.
Join Digital Combines curator Claudia Hart and Katie Hofstadter
Join moderator Mashinka Firunts Hakopian in Conversation with K Allado-McDowell, Jennifer Moon, and Casey Reas at Honor Fraser Gallery
Thursday October, 28th 7 pm
Follow the link below to watch the full discussion:
Between October 2021 and January 2022, Honor Fraser Gallery will host a series of conversations on the entanglement of Art and Technology. The inaugural Art and Technology Speaker Series begins with a discussion among three Los Angeles artists about the ways they’ve incorporated artificial intelligence, extended reality, spatial audio, and other emerging technologies into their practices. This roundtable will examine how they have used new media art to critically engage with urgent issues in technology, connect with audiences in unorthodox ways, and provoke meaningful discourse in a chaotic media environment.
Join moderator and Synthetic Wilderness curator Jesse Damiani and artists Nancy Baker Cahill, Jessica Brillhart, and Lauren Lee McCarthy at Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City.
Panel Series Opening Reception
October 16, 2021 at 2:00pm
Follow the link below to watch the full discussion:
Join moderator Sarah Conley Odenkirk in conversation with LaJuné McMillian, Peter Wu+, and kyt, discussing the artist possibilities of NFTs
Follow the link below to watch the full discussion:
Join moderator Nancy Baker Cahill in conversation with Cassils, Sarah Rosalena Brady, and Emma Robbins
Follow the link below to watch the full discussion:
An experimental documentary that mixes elements of political satire and horror. An excavation of the structural elements of the American media landscape and how it functions to promote capitalist nationalism. A film about a potential near future nightmare scenario where the production of propaganda and misinformation media is automated. Based on a fictional script written in collaboration with OpenAI’s GPT-3 generative language model.
Directed by Don Edler, 2020
To view film screening please follow link below: