Drama of the Gifted Child: The Five Year Plan

Drama of the Gifted Child: The Five Year Plan June 28 - August 30, 2009 Opening reception, Saturday, June 27, 7-9 p.m. David Burns, curator The exhibition consists of new work by ten of Los Angeles’ emerging artists, all Southern California art school MFA graduates of the last five years: Dan Bayles, Spencer Douglass, John Knuth, Julie Lequin, Julie Orser, Marco Rios, Amy Robinson, Christopher Russell, Kelly Sears, and Bari Ziperstein. The exhibition is organized by David Burns, a member of the artist collective Fallen Fruit and the former Assistant Curator at the Armory. The works included examine these artists’ recent work as a process by which they explore the relationship between an often-hyped academic training and the raw demands of a career. The exhibitions consists of videos, sculptures and installations and reflects the various practices of artists trained in the new millennium, after 9/11 and after the crash of what appeared to be an unendingly growing international art market. Each of the artists selected could be characterized by the combination of their studio practice and growing exhibition record, however considered as a group, each of the projects in the exhibition generates a larger internal and external dialogue. The work is bold and experiments with its materials and messages. Representing some of the more outstanding emerging artists in Los Angeles right now, Drama of the Gifted Child: the Five Year Plan suggests the relationship of artists to career goals and academics that has fostered the opportunity for success as a contemporary artist today. Each of these artists employs a bold directness that is hard to deny. Download this exhibition’s