For its next exhibition Apartment 2 presents a selection of offset prints by Cologne-based artist Owen Gump from his recent project Island Arc (2010). Building on earlier bodies of work that examined traces of social histories, Island Arc consists of large-format prints of black-and-white photographs taken in various areas in Northern California. Grouped together as assemblages, Gump’s dissimilar photographs loosely suggest associative frameworks that hint at the borders between nature, culture, the conscious and unconscious mind. A newspaper flyer containing an interview between Gump and the artist Benjamin Lord will accompany the exhibition.

Owen Gump was born in Kentfield, California in 1980. He studied at the University of Washington, Seattle, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Thomas Ruff, and the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, with Peter Piller. Recent exhibitions include Mary Mary Gallery, Glasgow; Gallery BQ, Berlin; Pied-a-terre, San Francisco and Gallery Clages, Cologne. He lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

For its next exhibition Apartment 2 presents two bodies of work, spanning two decades, by LA-based artist Eve Fowler that explore questions of sexual interiority and exteriority in relation to vanishing “bodies.” In Hustlers, a group of photographs from the mid-1990s, Fowler depicts the responses of various young men, she solicited in bars and in the streets of the West Village of New York, to her invitation to pose for the camera. In Books from “The One Institute” Fowler transforms books, from the 1970s and 80s, she picked up from the sale racks of The One National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. These two series address populations that are casually disappearing – Fowler’s hustlers often passed away or simply stopped frequenting the scene; her selection of lesbian literature represents a group of authors, and a body of knowledge, in a state of becoming obscure. In combination Fowler’s works question the complex ways that objecthood and agency can co-exist in cultures sometimes seen as disposable.

Eve Fowler lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. Her work has been featured in solo and two-person exhibitions at Horton Gallery, New York; Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; White Columns and Julie Saul Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Museum 52 and Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte, New York, NY; and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, and she is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Smithsonian Institute, and The New Museum, New York, NY. Her work has been mentioned in the The New York Times, Artnet, Out Magazine, and New York Magazine.

SCOTT BENZEL / January 10, 2010 from 5 to 7 PM with live performances at 5:30PM and 6:30 PM

Inversions I-IV: The Score and the Plan

Four string quartets played live, video, record lacquers, ephemera

At Apartment 2, in his first US solo exhibition, artist and composer Scott Benzel inverts and arranges pop songs for string quartet and video, exposing occurences of “reversal” in Los Angeles’ musical history and what might happen were the frameworks that support that history – architecture, film and industry – to be turned upside down.

The score is to a piece of music what the plan is to an architectural site. A fundamental alteration of the score’s logic necessarily produces a change in the music. Inversion is such an alteration – a compositional effect achieved by literally turning the score upside down. Familiar melodies become recognizable but strange – a musical palindrome in the melodic and harmonic structures.

Benzel pairs the string quartets with upended videos of sites tied to these histories: the Capitol Records building’s famous spire becomes a knife or a record stylus. The L.A basin at night becomes an alien mothership – reflecting the night a young Steven Spielberg lay stoned and upside down on the hood of his car looking out on the lights of Los Angeles. From his view, the city appeared as a massive spaceship, an experience that initiated conception of what would later become Close Encounters.

Finally, the mass production and distribution processes of the recording industry are “inverted.” Benzel presses recordings of the quartets into one-of-a-kind lacquers that deteriorate each time they are played.

Scott Benzel is an artist and composer living and working in Los Angeles. His visual and sound-based artwork has been shown at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (in collaboration with Sam Durant and Tom Recchion), Art Basel: Statements (in collaboration with Andrea Bowers), The Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA, The Western Front, Vancouver, BC, Track 16, Los Angeles, Mandrake, Los Angeles, and Performa 09, New York (in collaboration with Mike Kelley). He has collaborated with Mike Kelley on the soundtracks to Kelley’s installations Day is Done at Gagosian, New York, Profondeurs Vertes at the Louvre, Paris, and Kelley and Michael Smith’s A Voyage of Growth and Discovery at the Sculpture Center in New York.  MFA 2001 California Institute of the Arts, BA 1995 University of Arizona.