Keystone studios/artists on KCET's Artbound

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Several Keystone Art Space artists and studios receive recognition on KCET's Artbound. Congratulations to all involved!

Here's an excerpt:

One will find an emerging generation of experimenters in the Blindspot Initiative exhibition at Keystone Gallery. The show features a multidisciplinary group of ten artists, designers, and architects. Eight out of ten, however, have a background in architecture. Somewhere Something, a multidisciplinary design and fabrication studio founded by Biayna Bogosian, Jason King, and Sacha Bauman, and Jose Sanchez of Plethora Project curated the show, drawing on a number of the designers and makers with studios at Keystone Art Space on San Fernando Road in Atwater Village.

"I'm glad it's not a field of objects that blink," says King of the gallery full of artworks, artifacts, videos, and installations where the designers relied on computation and advance technologies as part of the developmental process. Zachary Schoch's gooey-looking vases, for instance, are the products of a robot he built himself to create large-scale 3-D printed objects. He first developed the robot as a thesis student at SCI-Arc. Built out of sections steel tubing and electronics, a MakerBot on steroids, it's housed down the hall in his studio. For "Aluvium" (2014), filmmaker Catherine Griffiths of Isohale combined video and coding to create a memorizing loop in which ecological data is processed, visualized, animated, and overlaid on desert landscapes.

"DOT/O" (2014), Somewhere Something and Plethora's collaborative contribution, sits in the center of the gallery. An organically shaped steel armature covered in colored thread, the piece wills visitors to touch and engage the sculpture by weaving thread across the form. Inspired by game theory, there are very basic rules posted on the wall: "max span is an arm length" or "connect dots on alternate rods." The result of these simple instructions is a complex, collaborative (or crowd-sourced) sculpture.

Read the full article by Mimi Zeiger here.

Luc Bernard in Palm Springs

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If you are in the Palm Springs area this weekend for Modernist Week and the Palm Springs Art Fair, Keystone artist Luc Bernard will have works included at Heather James Fine Art's booth along its list of artists.

Palm Springs Fine Art Fair // February 13-16, 2014
Heather James Fine Art will be exhibiting at the Palm Springs Fine Art Fair - Booth 405
with works on view by:
LUC BERNARD - FERNANDO BOTERO - ALEXANDER CALDER - CARLO D’ALESSIO - BETTY GOLD - TIM HAWKINSON - ROBERT INDIANA - PAUL JENKINS - STEVE MALONEY - KAORU MANSOUR - ROBERT NATKIN - KIKI SMITH - VICTOR VASARELY - ESTEBAN VICENTE - ANDY WARHOL - TOM WESSELMANN - among many others

Create LA second Student Exhibition

Join us for Create LA's second Student Exhibition this Friday, Jan 24th!

Opening Reception Friday, January 24, 2014 5pm-8pm

"It might be big. It might be small. It might be funny. It might be ugly looking.

But it's still art." 

- Steven, Create LA Student Artist

Meet the artists, have a snack, and enjoy the show!

Create LA is a non profit organization providing visual arts education to Los Angeles youth out of Glassell Park's Keystone Art Space and other community locations. Create LA's goals are to empower youth to find their artistic voice through inquiry driven, project based visual art classes, promote the spread of specialized skill sets from artists and artisans to the next generation, and provide an engaging community space for creativity to thrive.

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Write-up of Melind McLeod show at Keystone Gallery

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The opening for Melinda McLeod was a big success, thanks to all the folks who made it to the show. Life In LA has a great review online, excerpted below. Check out the whole piece here.

Running parallel to the Metrolink in Northeast Los Angeles, San Fernando Road has been home to large factory warehouses and the occasional car lot for as long as I can remember. Serving as a thoroughfare between Burbank and Lincoln Heights, the street has never been known as a hotbed of social activity. At least not until recently. 

Neighborhoods through which San Fernando Road runs are beginning to take on a new landscape with the sudden uprising of venues such as GameHaüs Café, which offers patrons 700+ board games to play over coffee or tea. More specifically, this sudden change in atmosphere can be attributed to LA’s changing art scene, which was once centered in “the traditional Westside enclaves [and is now] in search of real estate to show larger artworks,” as suggested by the Huffington Post.

Located on San Fernando Road in the middle of Glassell Park, Keystone Art Space inhabits what once was a large warehouse. Not only does it consist of a significantly sized gallery, but it also is home to over 60 artist studios. Currently on exhibit is Melinda McLeod’s first solo show, Force of Creatures. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of Keystone Art Space and the owner of Wallspace Gallery, Valda Lake, the show’s opening reception on Saturday, January 11th, was a success.

Two collaborative events with Wallspace

Keystone's director, Melanie Mandl, will have a video installation on view at Wallspace January 9- February 6 and Wallspace artist Melinda McLeod will have a solo exhibition at the Keystone Gallery January 11-19. Please join us for the opening receptions of both of these events.

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Kickstarter for Keystone Gallery show launched

Blindspot Initiative, a group show and series of talks and workshops organized by Keystone studios Plethora Project and Somewhere Something, has launched a Kickstarter to support the installation of the show and dissemination of the all the archives and data. Two other Keystone studios are part of the show: Zach Schoch and Nicholas Hanna, along with several other young L.A. designers. Show your support for local talent and get some cool rewards while your at it. A series of workshops are being offered, poster below.

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T-shirt time

Keystone and Create LA t-shirts are now available at the excellent price of $15 a piece. A few Keystone zipper hoodies are also available for $30. For more information, see Mark Harvey in studio A4 or shoot him an email

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Open Studios in images

The Open Studios on December 7 was a tremendous night. Big thanks to the hundreds of people who came through to celebrate art and design and to all our residents who opened their studio doors to the public. Keystone photographer and designer Mark Harvey has some great pictures on his Flickr stream, check them out here.

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Biija Fine Art Studios t-shirts

Artist Biija will be selling t-shirts based on her paintings out of her Keystone Art Space studio during the Open Studios, December 7, 12-9 p.m. For more information, contact Biija.

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Luc Bernard in Palm Desert

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Featured Keystone artist Luc Bernard, shown left with one of his new paintings, will be part of the season opening exhibition at Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert.

The show features Andy Warhol and Dali, along with Norman Zammitt, Dennis Hare, Clinton Hill, Kaoru Mansour and Luc.

The gallery invites all to join the opening night reception on Saturday, November 30 from 6-8 p.m., "have a cocktail with us and explore masterpieces that span from antiquity to contemporary."

Open Studios Date Announced

Open Studios Date Announced

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Keystone Art Space is pleased to announce December 7, 2013 as the next Open Studios.  

The event will coincide with a group show in the Keystone Gallery: GIFTED, featuring our studio artists and benefitting Create LA, a non-profit organization here at Keystone that offers free after school arts education to children.

Save the date! 

 

Video of New Space

Artist/Designer Melanie Mandl created this stop motion video documentation of the construction process during our big build at the Glassell Building in August. Check it out!

Greetings from Create LA and Keystone Fine Art Studios!

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Keystone Fine Art Studios and Create LA invite you to the FIRST Group Art Show at our new facility in Glassell Park. Join us on August 24th for an evening of fun and fundraising!! Come out and enjoy refreshments, DJs, tours of our new facility, and, of course, the artwork!

Create LA is a non-profit organization dedicated to engaging the arts community via educational art classes for area youth. The organization aims to create an inclusive and stimulating environment for adults and children by also providing affordable workspace and career development opportunities for existing artists. Create LA currently shares a space in Glassell Park with Keystone Fine Art Studios.

Keystone is a Fine and Industrial Art studio space formerly located in Los Angeles's Historic Echo Park. It houses a group of artists creating sculpture, paintings, performance, public art and media installations. This August Keystone picked up and moved its studios over to Glassell Park to join Create LA in their new 50,000 square-foot home at 2558 N San Fernando Road.

We need your support!! Create LA and Keystone Studios are joining forces to tackle a HUGE project in Glassell Park. We need to raise money to build our classroom and gallery space and get FREE YOUTH ART CLASSES at Create LA up and running! Come take a look at what we are doing and see how you can help!

Exhibition announcement: Krista Machovina

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Krista Machovina
Liminal Spaces: New Paintings
June 15-24
Opening Reception June 15, 2013 6:00-8:00pm

About the Exhibit: Keystone Art Space is pleased to exhibit the work of artist Krista Machovina. Machovina’s oil on panel paintings capture the liminal spaces of no longer and not yet through the metaphor of the sea and sky.  The almost abstract images that result evoke the tonalist and color field movement, with an emotive element that makes the viewer feel they stand before a portrait a of a well studied and familiar visage.  These works are quiet, meditative spaces in which a moment of calm can be found at this gallery within the heart of bustling and industrial growing arts region of North East Los Angeles.  A portion of proceeds from sales of this exhibit will benefit Create LA andThe Art of Elysium.

 Create LA is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to engaging youth in quality arts education programming, providing the transfer of skills from this generation of artisans to the next, and to provide a community space for creativity to thrive.  The Art of Elysium is a non-profit arts organization that encourages working actors, artists, fashion designers and musicians to dedicate their time and talent to children battling serious medical conditions.

About the Artist:  Ms. Machovina earned an MA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Her work is in private and corporate collections nationwide. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

About the Venue: Keystone is a Fine and Industrial Art studio space located in Glassell Park, Los Angeles.  It houses over 40 studios of artists of varying disciplines as well as a classroom, film shoot space, and gallery .  Keystone is also the home of the community art education non-profit, CreateLA.

Dean Styers Solo Exhibition

"Preservation Through Neglect"
James Gray Gallery
February - March 2013

Opening Reception:
February 16th from 6-9pm
Bergamot Station Art Center
2525 Michigan Ave,
Building D4
Santa Monica CA 90404 

T: 310.315.9502

E: contact@jamesgraygallery.com

Tuesday-Saturday, 11am - 6pm
Sunday & Monday by Appointment

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Dean Styers 

was born in the same hospital as W.C. Fields outside of Philadelphia PA.

 From an early age he was drawn to art and music - and it was all down hill from there.

After the purgatory of high school, he moved to Boston where he attended The School of The Museum of Fine Arts. Once the impracticality of art school was revealed, he set out to actually do art. During this time he sold his first paintings, executed murals, designed posters & record cover art for bands of varying noteworthiness.  

Dean's work uses images of people or objects without clear context to elicit familiar emotions (a pretty girl, a well-dressed man, a child, an astronaut, an embracing couple) but undermines the emotions that attend these icons with text. While the subject is often attractive and comforting – eliciting feelings of nostalgia and innocence – the sentiment that overlays the image is typically bitter, or melancholic, or cynical, or even bleak- but always with the tiniest amount of hopefulness. This juxtaposition often creates a unique conflict for the viewer.

Dean's clean, precise style often misleads some to think the pieces are silk screens, but they are in fact just executed with just the ol' fashion paintbrush & acrylic paint on canvas. Early in his career Dean used bright neon colors combined with text to create an enticing candy-wrapper effect that did bode well with the pseudo-50's and 60's aesthetic that he employed. In 2001 he abandoned that technique and moved to a monochromatic grey palette that is more akin to faded photographs or stills from forgotten movies. In this way his more recent work more clearly accentuates the notions of memory and regret: memory of things lost, memory of missed opportunities & memory of things never had. Someone called his new work at that time "Bubblegum Noir" which was not without validity.

Dean's paintings have appeared in numerous galleries & museums (The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Zimmer Museum, The Tucson Museum Of Art, etc.) sharing wall space with dozens of prominent artists, including Marc Ryden, Diane Arbus, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Kruger, John Baldessari, Robert Rauschenberg, Ralph Steadman and Andy Warhol. 

In 2011 he sat on a 4 man lecture panel with Raymond Pettibon at the Tuscon Museum of art, which for him was seminal. As a youth, Pettibon (along with Warhol) was his first "art love" and also the first artist he knew that combined not only text & images but also visual art & music.

If you care about such things, he is in the collection of Steven Soderbergh, Brad Pitt, Gary Calamar, Lisa Kudrow, George Clooney, Douglas Nielsen, Harry Shearer, The Cartoon Network & many more.

He was also commissioned to execute 24 paintings for Los Angeles entertainment agency CAA (Creative Arts Agency) in 2005. He does not keep a list of galleries/museums/shows he has been in- but it is quite extensive.

Currently Dean lives & works in Los Angeles. He still has a great love for music and, with an old friend, runs a handmade, vinyl only record label with a very eclectic roster of artists. When he's not doing any of the above mentioned activities he enjoys collecting other people's art & watching scratchy black-and-white movies.

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Grand Opening

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Opening reception at the NEW LOCATION: 2558 N. SAN FERNANDO ROAD, LOS ANGELES CA 90065

Saturday November 17th, 2012 6pm - 10pm

Keystone Fine Arts invites you to an opening reception and fundraising event for the arts non-profit CREATE LA