Punk Povera

APT artist Joaquin Segura is participating "Punk Povera". A group exhibition situating recent work in painting, drawing, sculpture and video from Los Angeles and Mexico City, in relation to two histories: Arte Povera, the Italian art movement of the late 1960s that employed radical processes using simple materials; and punk rock music, fashion and art from the UK and the US in the 1970s. Two urban artforms that eschewed the excesses of their respective mainstream contemporaries in order to challenge, disrupt, and defy constraints, both social and artistic. Although removed from each other in time and place, these two movements were founded on shared principles: a DIY aesthetic, a rejection of consumerism, the privileging of worthlessness, anti-elitism, collective experience, street theater, and a lack of material wealth.

WUHO’s location on Hollywood Boulevard between Wilcox and Schraber has also shaped this show. The street itself is a richly sedimentary trash heap of popular culture, and it has always been in the middens that past histories have been best preserved.

The strategic identifications with time and place central to this exhibition are not the province of irony, cynicism, or despair. Instead, they are an exercise in good faith and represent what Thomas Lawson calls a “last exit,” a radically transformative process in which art becomes a vehicle for subversion and a means to deconstruct the illusions of the present.

Artists:

Gina Arizpe, Steven Bankhead, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, Cristóbal Gracia, Iván Krassoievitch, Irisdan Corley and Mike Kelley, Gary Cannone, Carla Danes, Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, Bridget Kane, Jason Keller, Nicholas Kersulis, Thomas Lawson, Albert Lopez, Joaquin Segura, Manuel Solano, Sergio Torres Torres, Jason Triefenbach