Los Angeles, June 28, 2004 -- The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) today announced the programming for the new 2004-05 season at the Gallery at REDCAT. The season, REDCAT's second, opens in September with the group exhibition White Noise and continues in November with an exhibition of new work by Korean artists Gimhongsok and Sora Kim. The Los Angeles debut of Tokyo artist Taro Shinoda opens in February, followed in April by Facing the Music, an exhibition conceived and organized by Allan Sekula that considers the changing fabric of downtown Los Angeles. The 2004-05 season concludes next summer with MATOKIE LIVES, a survey of the works of Bay Area painter Margaret Kilgallen.

White Noise
September 9-October 31, 2004
Artist Talk: Wednesday, September 8, 6-7 p.m.
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 8, 7-9 p.m.
Curated by Assistant Curator Clara Kim

The exhibition White Noise presents works that create disruptions or interferences on our visual, sonic and structural landscape. Although "white noise" is a term commonly linked to sound frequencies, the exhibition will play with notions of what is perceptible and imperceptible in video, photography and sculptural forms. Like white light that contains all spectral colors, white noise is made up of a range of frequency waves that are not detectable by the human ear. In this context, the works in White Noise can be read as signals that disrupt what is normal. They are visual manifestations of what underlies our sensory conscience altering our perceptions about reality.

In their collaborative video From A to B (2004), artists Artemio (Aguilar) and Ruben Gutierrez excavate found footage from films and television to create a continuous cycle of absurdly repetitive gestures and fragments. Los Angeles-based artist Rodney McMillian similarly takes images from popular culture. In Untitled (an audience) (2003), McMillian manipulates a recording of Michael Jackson's anniversary concert that aired on network television. Laureana Toledo uses the static frame to make slight manipulations on the natural landscape. In Patrones Migratorios (2001), Toledo tracks the migratory patterns of birds by superimposing abstract forms onto photographic documents. San Francisco-based artist Felipe Dulzaides also manipulates the existing world, but through "real" interventions; simple, performative gestures that have a poetic resonance. In Toilet Paper Acts (2002), Dulzaides transforms one-way city streets and parking spaces by adding a temporary line of toilet paper, thereby manipulating the artificial boundaries that dictate public behavior. In Stefan Brüggemann's This is not Supposed to be Here (2004), neon letters spell out the title phrase, recalling Arte Povera materials and processes while destabilizing our understanding of location and perspective. In her recent sculptural installations, Shirley Tse melds her interest in common, synthetic materials and the architecture of electrical towers as camouflaged structures whose transmissions affect human behavior and thought. Colectivo Tercerunquinto manipulates structural forms to alter the spatial dynamics of interior and exterior spaces. For White Noise, Tercerunquinto will create a new installation that responds to the architecture of REDCAT and the implications of its unique location in downtown Los Angeles.

Gimhongsok and Sora Kim
November 18-January 16, 2005
Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 17, 2004, 6-9 p.m.
Artist Talk: Saturday, November 20, 2004, 3 p.m.The installations of Gimhongsok and Sora Kim propose a logic of transcendence in the face of rampant consumerism and today's technological regime. Gimhongsok's recent work Boat (2001-2), considers its own integral relationship to the motion, logic, and internal economy of exhibitions. Treating the project as movement, the artist began with the neutral object of a cast fiberglass rock and assigned it the title "boat." As he followed the work to different cities, the artist added local foodstuffs and necessary devices to his vessel. Equipped with laptop, music system, beer, umbrella, fishing rods and instant noodles, the resulting object is both absurdly material and slyly anti-material, suggesting the interdependency of the imagination on the physical conditions in which it is cultivated -- here the artificial economy of a traveling exhibition. Sora Kim's interactive installations such as Capitol Plus Credit Union offer provocative and necessary explorations of the subjectivity of value and consumption. In this work viewers are invited to "deposit" everyday objects in the artist's credit union for the duration of the exhibition. After an item's size, weight, use and other factors are measured and noted on a deposit slip, it begins to earn interest based on the artist's own calculation of an item's value. The calculation of value, the means of accrual of interest, and the way in which interest will be paid remain speculative.

Gimhongsok has exhibited his work at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castello, Valencia; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. Sora Kim has exhibited her work at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore; Rodin Gallery, Seoul; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; and the Gwangju Biennial. Their collaboration Chronic Historical Interpretation Syndrome (2003) was featured in Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer at the 50th Biennale di Venezia. Following a month-long residency in Los Angeles partially funded by the Korea Foundation, Gimhongsok and Sora Kim will create a new project for the Gallery at REDCAT. Both artists live and work in Seoul.

Buried Treasure: Taro Shinoda
February 3-April 3, 2005
Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 2, 2005, 6-9 p.m.
Artist Talk: Saturday, February 5, 2005, 3 p.m.

Taro Shinoda's works often engage issues of science, adaptation, and desire. His work was first exhibited in the United States in 2003 in the group exhibition Time After Time: Asia and Our Moment at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (co-curated by REDCAT Gallery Director and Curator Eungie Joo). The exhibition featured two installations by Shinoda: the kinetic light installation Milk (1995, 2003), a reflection pool that plays off of the artist's training in traditional Japanese landscape; and the installation PSP or Personal Satellite Project (2002), a consideration of the humanistic and personal applications of technology through an installation of videos and hand sculpted miniature satellite models on chrome computer bases that considers ownership and access to airspace. Shinoda's recent works continue a kind of existentialist exploration of the technological age. In God Hand (2002), a giant propeller wing connected to a jet engine suggests a dangerous yet fascinating manipulation of space through velocity and energy. Helicopter (2003) was developed during a residency in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While there, the artist saw helicopters used as a normal mode of transportation for wealthy citizens for whom automobile traffic afforded an unnecessary risk of kidnapping. Shinoda was surprised by the fantastical and violent implications of this mode of transportation and reminded of a favorite toy helicopter from childhood. In the work, the audience operates a radio-controlled helicopter, "saving" colorful plastic figures by picking them up and dropping them off around the gallery metropolis. While the interactive, game-like quality of the work is playful, its implications are by no means transparent.

Born in 1964, Taro Shinoda emerged as a practicing artist at the age of 30. He has participated in a number of major group exhibitions such as the 2001 Yokohama Triennial, Under Construction: New Dimensions in Contemporary Asian Art at Artspace Ima in Seoul and Tokyo Opera City Gallery (2001-2), the 2002 Lithuanian Biennial, and Rroppongi Crossing (2004) at the Mori Art Museum. Shinoda's project will follow his three-month residency in Los Angeles funded by the Asian Cultural Council.

Facing the Music
April 13 - May 29, 2005
Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 6, 2005, 6-9pm
Artists Talk: Saturday, April 9, 2005, 3pm
Guest curated by Allan Sekula

Facing the Music is a collaborative project initiated in 1999 to investigate the urban fabric of downtown Los Angeles in the wake of the construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Five participating artists -- James Baker, Anthony Hernandez, Karin Apollonia Müller, Allan Sekula and Billy Woodberry - have been working outward from the main entrance of the Concert Hall at the corner of First Street and Grand Avenue. This urban street corner can be understood as an intersection of the new axis of culture and official spirituality and the older axis of government and official media in Los Angeles. The lines drawn by this exhibition stretch from the new, but abandoned Belmont High School complex to the recently demolished housing project at Aliso Village, two sites well beyond the reach and remedy of today's downtown boosterism. Work in the exhibition will include photography, new media, and video projection. A catalogue and lecture series will accompany the exhibition.

Facing the Music is organized by Allan Sekula and made possible by a grant from The J. Paul Getty Trust.

MATOKIE LIVES
June 16 - August 21, 2005
Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 15, 6-9pm

MATOKIE LIVES is a survey of the works of the highly influential Bay Area painter Margaret Kilgallen. Kilgallen devoured old-time sources with an insatiable ear and respectful eye: Appalachian music, hand-painted signage, letterpress printing, hobo train writing and all host of religious and decorative arts. With an elegant hand, Kilgallen meticulously copied letterforms and numbers in long forgotten scripts, revisiting the now forgotten pace of craftsmanship and the personal tales buried beneath official history. Kilgallen's unique re-sourcing of sweetly familiar and non-hierarchical everyday places, markings and people found throughout California was in large part inspired by the wandering culture of immigrants, railway workers and dreamers.

Kilgallen was especially interested in evidence of a maker's hand -- in seeing traces of the maker in her work. The artist explained: