Nathan Anderson, Christopher Bales, Howard Hallis, & Gea*

June 2 – July 2, 2017

Opening Reception: Friday, June 2nd, 8-11 PM

La Luz De Jesus Gallery presents the first feature exhibition for Nathan Anderson whose pop culture parody portraits are always among the first to sell in our Coaster Show. He’s in good company with Gea* whose first Los Angeles feature here last year was eagerly snatched up by hungry collectors–none of whom bought just one of her deliriously debased drawings of nymphs gone naughty.

It’s hard to believe that our last Howard Hallis show was 2011’s The Picture of Everything, which was the unveiling of a fifteen foot tall and twelve foot wide mixed-illustrated-media drawing of every pop culture reference imaginable up to that point, and which took thirteen years to complete. With the explosion of memes in the past six years you can expect this exhibition of Howard’s trademark lenticular collages to be both timely and timeless. And who better to pair with a wizard of three dimensions than Christopher Bales, whose own (actually) three-dimensional assemblages breathe new rococo life into rare and discarded fixtures, trophies, and even text books.

Nathan Anderson

Nathan Anderson is an artist and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Nathan is a graduate of The Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has his BFA in Filmmaking and has been exhibited in galleries all over the US and Canada.

His recent projects include the web series Northbound and following feature film Northstar and contributing designs for the trading card series based on Cartoon Network’s popular Adventure Time. His mural to LA Writer Charles Bukowski in the Los Feliz neighborhood of California is a go-to public art destination in a city renown for its murals.

Nathan regularly exhibits at Gallery 1988, Hero Complex Gallery, Creature Features Gallery, Gabba Gallery, and La Luz De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, California.

 

Howard Hallis

After graduating from UCLA in 1994, Howard Hallis worked as a personal assistant to professor Timothy Leary, collaborating with him on the book Surfing the Conscious Nets: A Graphic Novel. Hallis went on to create a tarot card deck based on the movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Howard’s parody of Jack Chick religious pamphlets, Who Will Be Eaten First?, based upon the H. P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos, prompted Chick Publications to issue him a cease and desist letter, and his groundbreaking The Picture of Everything–a fifteen foot tall drawing that references all things Pop Culture, cemented Hallis’ reputation with the Wired crowd.

Howard helped to create websites for the animation studio Klasky Csupo, and produced the live-streaming death of Dr. Timothy Leary–at the cultural icon’s request.  He was a yidcore pioneer as the vocalist of GefilteFuck.  He has written articles for the alternative zine Ben Is Dead and the San Francisco Herald, self-published comics (Alien Man) and collaborated on publications for DC & Marvel. Howard is considered to be one of the foremost authorities on the character Doctor Strange and the process of lenticulation, which provides the medium for this exhibition–including a 22×28″ lenticular of The Picture of Everything.

 

Christopher Bales

It seems cheap to pigeonhole assemblage artist Christopher Bales’ work as merely steampunk: his aesthetic is older than that. Although he sometimes uses antique and vintage materials associated with the genre, such as metal cogs, the final product often looks more like an altar constructed from the rubble of a pre-Victorian cathedral.

Bales, who has been assembling these intricate sculptures since 1989, said he sources “an enormous amount of objects”—like broken wooden boxes, dolls, clocks, picture frames, figurines—from his weekly visits to flea markets and thrift stores.

When he starts a new piece, he says he doesn’t have a preconceived notion of what the end result will be, but following his intuition when layering cutouts of classic paintings over etchings with skulls and religious imagery creates enough detail for the viewer to stay engaged but not overwhelmed. –Sacramento Bee

Hope, Fear and the Journey to Earth is Christopher Bales third feature exhibition at La Luz de Jesus Gallery.

Gea*

Gea* is a chilean-born, multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Her unique work encompasses drawing, painting, illustration, digital arts and media, photography, film and animation. An autodidact, she has exhibited solo and in group shows in New York, Los Angeles, Santiago, Zurich, and Toronto and collaborated creatively with Momus, JG Thirlwell and Jeffrey Bützer.

Her delightfully kinky drawings of girls in various degrees of distress, dominance and depravity draw on influences from Trevor Brown and Stu Mead to Suehiro Maruo and Francis Bacon, but with an informed femininity that makes her work unique and even obsession-worthy.

This is her second feature exhibition at La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and if the last show was any indication of her popularity in Los Angeles, would-be collectors are advised to get in touch ASAP.

 

Contact Gallery Director Matthew Gardocki for purchase info:
info@laluzdejesus.com  (323)666-7667