Exhibition -

Katharine Mulherin opens Los Angeles project:

Saturday, July 11^th, 6 to 9pm

KMLA project presents

Hello, my name is…

Featuring works by:

Seth Scriver (Toronto)

Ray Fenwick (Halifax)

Eliza Griffiths (Montreal)

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline (Winnipeg)

Sandy Plotnikoff (Toronto)

the slomotion (Winnipeg)

Mike Swaney (Barcelona)

Sojourner Truth-Parsons (Toronto)

Sto (New York)

Balint Zsako (New York)

FDF (Toronto)

Michael Caines (New York)

"From the first moment that I set foot on California soil, I felt like I had found home. That was 2005, when my Toronto gallery, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, first came to LA to participate in an art fair. After talking to everyone about opening a space in LA for 4 years, I finally decided to do something about it. Seeing the recession as a potentially positive opportunity to start a project with less money, I came to Los Angeles with my family in March to do some research and check out the neighborhoods.

In April, I made contact with Naomi Hui, a business woman in Chinatown who operates AUTOMAT. One day of frenzied emailing and a crazy one-day trip from NY to LA and LA to NY in early May enabled Naomi and I to meet and decide on a collaborative project in her AUTOMAT space at 936 Chung King Road.

The KMLA project will share the beautiful 25 x 40 foot space ( with 14' ceilings!) with AUTOMAT's 3 bright red vending machines. A mixed-use space seems like a smart idea in these less than certain times, and the beautiful light-filled space allows both projects to operate together comfortably.

For KMLA's soft opening on Saturday, July 11^th, we've put together an group exhibition of works by 10 artists from Canada and the US. The exhibition, titled Hello, my name is …, is a group exhibition of gallery artists, and a small sampling of our programming."

Gallery Hours are:

Tues 12 - 6

Wed 12 -6

Thurs 12 - 6

Fri 12 - 8

Sat 12 – 8

ABout the artists and their wORKS:

The Fuck Death Foundation is an organization dedicated to the elimination of death through the generation and distribution of funds to strategically selected causes and initiatives worldwide.

Not only does the FDF effectively address the major precipitants of human demise worldwide, it also takes into consideration the most ruthlessly indiscriminate killer of all — oldness.

Fuck Death was founded by artists Simon Murphy and Dugald Stewart who gained international notoriety with The Grey Sweatsuit Revolution, a pointed attack on the fashion system. With The Fuck Death Foundation they've evolved their critique on social engagement. They live and work (at changing the world) in Toronto.

Sto came to Brooklyn via Richmond, VA back in the year 2000 when Williamsburg was a pre-9-11 post-Giuliani not nearly as gentrified place to live cheaply and make art. He lived in his friend's kitchen in a cardboard box for 6 months and then finally got a dingy warehouse of his own. Sto's recent work involves creating new realities from ones we are familiar with by using papier mache sculptures to reanimate the mundane objects and situations of our everyday lives with humor, raw textures, assemblage, color, and sometimes light and sound too. Recycling most of his materials and making "something from nothing" are essential to his process and spirit. He also makes paintings and writes a bunch, at times combining the two into a kind of 3 dimensional storytelling. He enjoys riding bikes, vegan potlucks, sewing with dental floss, and wearing costumes. He co-founded Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn and that currently keeps him pretty darn busy. See more artwork at: www.stoishere.com

Sandy Plotnikoff makes multiples, and more, in Toronto, Canada.

LOS ANGELES postcards and others are hand-printed in gold foil on top of old

picture postcards from around the world, testing possible associations

unique to each card.

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline's
 current body of work consists of a series of figurative oil paintings that take the format of classical portraiture as their point of departure. The paintings focus on the depiction of male figures and oscillate between modes of representation and abstraction.

The paintings are produced using a method close to that of collage, whereby disparate image fragments are brought together within the field of painting. These images are harvested from a variety of sources including mass media, historical painting, and private photos. The image fragments are subjected to an array of painterly processes, which are similarly borrowed from a diverse spectrum of formal languages.

By bringing found images into the material field of painting, Kaktins-Gorsline's intent is to debase said images and re-present them as malleable and incomplete. In foregrounding process and deep play, the artist intends to open up both the traditional depictions of masculine subjectivity and painterly production into a new space of possibility.

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline. b. Winnipeg, Manitoba, CANADA, 1980. Lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba,

Eliza Griffiths' artistic practice is based in figurative oil painting and is motivated by her interest in human experience and behaviour. The additive and subtractive process of painting allows her to invent characters to perform distilled tableaux on themes ranging from gender identity, power, sexuality, and relationships. Over the past number of years she has worked in thematic series, beginning each with a conceptual framework and then allowing the layered painting processes to determine the eventual form and content of the work. Examples of past bodies of work are the installation Peep: Beyond the Eye of the Beholder (1996) which addressed issues of power dynamics ; Stories of Girls which examined female adolescent experience and the development of socio-psycho-sexual identity; and the Karate Girl paintings(1996/7) which dealt with womens' negotiation of the urban environment. Ongoing has been her interest in sexuality, intimacy, and the persistance of desire in projects such as Dystopic Romances and Serial Romance Paintings.

Michael Swaney (Kimberley, 1978) lives and works in Barcelona. Recently he discovered that he is one quarter Polish and that his original surname was actually Swiatkowski. Working primarily with paper, his meticulous collages

are surreal, domestic scenarios of uncomfortable and awkward yet lighthearted situations and hypothetical

performances. Michael's work has been exhibited internationally in Barcelona, Miami, New York, Hamburg, Tokyo, Toronto and Vancouver. In September 2008 he was invited to take part in the Fountainhead Residency in Miami.

Mike has always had a really hard time writing about himself. He never mentions education because he studied

graphic design and illustration but switched to being a fine artist soon after graduating...but as a fine artist he supposes that he's self taught.

the slomotion (Shaun Morin) is a visual artist mainly rooted in painting and drawing. He uses metaphorical content to create loose narratives. The compositions are fractured, and there are juxtaposing shapes and forms that interplay with each other. Morin approaches the works with a intuitive sensitivity, attempting to capture honesty in his brush strokes and an overall balance between himself and the paint.

Morin graduated from the University of Manitoba School of Art in 2004. He has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally since 2003, including galleries such as the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Plug-In Institute of Art in Winnipeg, J Johnson Gallery in Florida, Espace Poulin in Montreal, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects and MOCCA in Toronto. His work has also been included in art fairs internationally.

Balint Zsako

hi katharine,

Im in budapest visiting relatives and dont have too much time to distill my humour, wit and charm into a fine bio and artist statement poem. if you have any spare ones lying around please just insert my name, otherwise you are welcome to be coldly factual and say i was born in budapest, schooled in toronto and currently pushing paint around in brooklyn.

thanks,

b

Michael Caines is a New York/ Toronto based artist working in drawing, painting, film and video. His work has been exhibited in commercial, public and artist run galleries in Canada, and commercial galleries in the US. He has exhibited at many international art fairs with Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, where he is represented in Canada. His films and videos have screened worldwide, including an official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2005. Caines has participated in a number of artist residencies, including the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Millay Colony, and the Banff Centre. Among other awards, he has received Avery and Chalmers Fellowships, and a grant from the Joan Mitchell foundation. He has been selected for residencies at the Bemis Center in Omaha, and Jentel in Wyoming for the coming year. A fifteen-year survey of his painting and drawing, titled "Passing Glory" will open at the Art Gallery of Peterborough and tour Canada in 2010. Caines recently completed his MFA at Parsons the New School.

Sojourner Truth Parsons, born and raised in Vancouver, attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She is currently living and working in Toronto.

These recent works reflect a long winter spent in rural Nova Scotia all alone by the sea . This is where Parsons began to create her own witchcraft, putting together elements from nature to create a sacred circle for balance and harmonies between the scraps of forest, ocean and sky. Everything can be brought back to the idea of yin and yang, burnt and wet, cream and black. Night hunter and morning stalker.

Ray Fenwick is an emerging (from the mist) Canadian artist living and working in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At one point, he was an improv comedian. At another point, he was a rave DJ in the Canadian prairies. DO those things add or take away from his art pedigree? He is not sure.

Ray is an multidisciplinary artist, but most of his work to date has been a combination of writing and drawing that reads like short experimental fiction. In the past year, however, his work has expanded to include performance, video and sound. Uniting all these approaches is a kind of uneasy existential humour that laughs one minute and cowers the next. Ray is interested in the role and meaning of comedy in society, often engaging in the frustrating practices of a) thoughtful goofing-off and b) taking the ridiculous seriously.

Ray is the author of Hall of Best Knowledge, a mostly typographic graphic novel released in 2008 by Fantagraphics. His last work was a collection of 17 unique artist's books about intimacy and alienation. He'll soon be undertaking a project that uses oral history style audio interviews as a means to collaboratively create absurdist narratives.

He is hoping to attend Grad School in 2010.

Seth Scriver, born August 23^rd 1977 and raised in downtown Toronto, received a BFA from NSCAD in 2002.

He has shown widely nationally and internationally. For his most recent show "The Hose Heads Get Unhosed" at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto, he made a full-size canoe out of one big piece of layered poster peeled from an advertisement hoarding, in the same fashion as a birch bark canoe. Also included in this show was the ongoing project of animating stories that his brother and father have told him about their experiences in the bush.

With collaborator Shayne Ehman, Scriver has been working on a double feature animation "Asphalt Watches", an epic cross-Canada true hitchhiking story, which has taken him to multiple residencies from Japan to Sackville N.B.

Currently Seth resides at his headquarters "Hassle Kastle" in Toronto Ontario.

In 2010 Drawn & Quarterly will be publishing an artist book of his work.