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Pacific Non-Standard Time

The Foundation for Art Resources presents a variation on the ongoing PST events in Los Angeles with a PNST (Pacific Non-Standard Time) contribution. This exhibition aims to celebrate the history of art production supported by FAR from 1977 to the present. FAR’s functions include supporting non-institutional venues, public education and artist-based projects. To this point, we may consider the critical interventions developed by FAR to be a genealogy that is woven within and around the more established trajectories of the Los Angeles fine art world, always injecting a heavy dose of doubt, humor, and/or innovation into artistic practice. With an emphasis on the growth of new art and ideas, as well as the development of an increasingly more diverse community of producers, FAR has been a crucial supplement to much of Los Angeles’s more established canon. As FAR has been a non-white cube, genre-bending/inventing organization since its inception, this Pacific Non-Standard Time event is a welcome response to PST’s sanitized survey format.

While this exhibition presents a thematic highlighting of some of FAR’s key moments, the majority of the selections complement FAR’s extensive involvement with music by creating a backdrop focused around sound and/or musically-driven performance, including, but not limited to, documented events of Glen Branca, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Sonic Youth, and the Swans. With the above in mind, FAR’s PNST event seeks to extend and support the trajectory of these historical instances through an evening of performances that could easily be described as de-standardized art practices.

Morgan Thomas, a founding member of FAR, described the early activities of the organization and its rampant experimentation as being in search of “an appropriate production model.” While FAR has been through a myriad of configurations since the 70s, the artists included in this exhibition exemplify this drive through a consistent re-tooling of standard practices that is anything but. This evening of performances brings together a dynamic group of artists with a similar interest in expanding the role(s) and/or perceived function of the artist as well as the exhibition space. Such a model of production poses questions about how we think about the concept of performativity in the early twenty-first century. Performance and/or theatricality have become increasingly porous as the “artist” becomes a nexus point defined by the roles of musician, composer, videographer and performer. Be it the transformation of the artist into larger than life “rock stars,” or the mutation of the traditional gallery into a makeshift club, it seems as if all of the issues surrounding performance have taken on the trappings of hyper self-reflexivity. We might even read this drive towards heightened (self-)awareness as a necessary model of production in our contemporary spectacle-driven culture because it challenges of what the condition of performance can be.

Featuring work by:
The Friendly Falcons

Performances:
Helga Fassonaki
Maya Gurantz
Fatima Hoang & Janice Gomez
Anna Oxygen

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