Wow, we’ve been around almost 4 years…mindfuck. Our next show will be in the late fall of 2009 and will feature works in a variety of media by LA based Scott Benzel. Stay tuned.

Apt. 2 is an artist-run project space. Our mission is to draw attention to important contemporary art being made in Los Angeles and to foster artistic growth by giving emerging artists curatorial and solo-exhibition opportunities in an unusual setting in and around which community dialogue can occur.

For its third exhibition, Apartment 2 presented a suite of paintings by Los Angeles artist Alex Olson entitled Exteriors, &. Here’s a snippet from our introduction to the show: “Olson’s work explores the emblematic and decorative potential of graphics. Checker board patterns, blueprints for ironwork fences and the language of theatrical posters appear on found fabrics and atop the painting’s canvas. With a concern for historic precedents set by artists such as Moira Dryer, Frank Stella, and those of the Supports/Surfaces movement of the late 1960s in France, Olson extends her interest in the duality of the graphic to the role of the painting itself—how it functions as both signifier and material reality.” Alex Olson was born in Boston, MA in 1978. She received a BA from Harvard College in 2001 and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2008.

DAWSON WEBER: BRIDGE GROUP / DEC 1, 2007 – JAN 19, 2008 / Opening DEC 1, 2007 6-8 PM / Open Saturdays and by appointment. Apartment 2 is proud to present an exhibition by Dawson Weber officially entitled “Bridge Group [She first wrote me during one of her trips abroad, telling how she liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time—those memories whose purpose seemed to be solely to leave behind memories. She considered these moments the shattered bits of solace from a world where everything was changing around her all while the day sky stayed blue.]” The exhibition consists of a small selection of collages and one painting from Weber’s ongoing series, “Bridge Group,” that furthers Weber’s exploration of the myriad ways to visually represent bridges—a space of transition between two things. Working with altered postcards of bridges over rivers, and in particular, several dating to 1938 of the Falls View Bridge over Niagara Falls, Weber explores the sub-abyss—the perceived divide between twentieth-century conceptual-art strategies that employ systems of hyper cross-referentiality (think Duchamp, Broodthaers, Stephen Prina) and post-war gestural abstraction, referenced by the single painting in the exhibition. Employing the bridge as motif (both literally through its image in historical photographs) and at its most abstract (through, in the painting, a prominent series of gestural brushstrokes that extend from one side of the canvas to the other), Weber constructs a system for navigating the wiles below. Dawson Weber was born in Maywood, Illinois in 1974. He received his BMusic in music composition from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2005. Weber lives and works in Los Angeles.

EXHIBITION: BENJAMIN LORD

EATON CANYON PHOSPHENALIA

DATES: December 1, 2006 – January 6, 2007

RECEPTION: Friday, December 1, 2006, 6 to 8 PM

Apartment 2 is pleased to launch its programming with a new photographic work by Benjamin Lord.

A phosphene is a physical sensation of light caused by something other than light: a physical pressure on the eyeball, an electrical or magnetic field, or a chance firing of cells in the visual system.

Lord’s project situates itself in the space between the eye and the mind, where the commonplace experience of sight breaks down. His suite of stereographic color photographs, presented on a table, narrates the experience of an early explorer of Eaton Canyon, an historic nature preserve at the northern tip of what is today Altadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. Exploding with false colors, retinal after-images, and hallucinatory bursts of blue light, Lord’s photographs collide the conventionalized sublimities of nature photography with the anxious confusion of a neural electrical storm, crossing the boundary between the self and the world.

Benjamin Lord was born in Santa Monica in 1974. He received his MFA from UCLA in 2002. His exhibition Three Stereographic Projects debuted at Hayworth Gallery in Los Angeles last April.

APARTMENT 2 is an artist-run project space providing unusual curatorial and exhibition opportunities to artists. Hours are 11 AM to 5 PM Friday through Saturday and by appointment.