Current Exhibit

In the Main Gallery at SPACE, we welcome:

“The Hours: Reflections on an Ephemeral World” The Photography of Natalie Franco.

About the Show:

Raw, dark, invigorating, and swimming in a chimerical reality, the work of Natalie Franco is a migrating timeline of cinematic inspired imagery that spans over three continents. Humans and environments become an unveiling fusion of isolated moments in time. Places emerge into collective testaments reflecting the ephemeral nature of the world. Transitioning into a sequence of dreamlike incidents, Franco’s imagery takes on a visual never-ending waking dream.

The subconscious is reminiscent to how a camera operates. It takes snapshots of what is visible to our peripheral spectrum and stores them away in our infinite filing memory banks. Franco confounds this idea to emulate the subconscious’s retrieval of still images for the use of continuous stories that play out in our dreams and nightmares. Re-creating these scenes from her own, Franco introduces the viewer on an intuitive journey through childhood, wonder, seclusion and the haunting atmospheres that influence the human conditioning.

I am merely a visceral preserver of time governed by curiosity. -Natalie M Franco 2013

Artist Bio:

Natalie Franco is a Mexican-American fine art photographer based in the United States. Franco’s work features a dreamlike approach that explores humans and enigmatic environments from various locations around the world. Noted for her trademark available lighting and intensely dark prints,

In 2006, Natalie made her artist debut in CMYK Magazine’s “top 21 fresh artists” in the U.S and Canada. The reaction to her work has been encouraging—Since then Natalie’s work has been notably recognized in several magazines and articles. Natalie’s photography has garnered recognition from the International Photography Awards and the Prix de la Photographie in Paris. In 2012, she was recently awarded by the City of Los Angeles for her contributing work in an exhibition at the Pico House Gallery in the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument. Natalie has participated in over twenty collective exhibitions in the United States and Europe including, Art House Tacheles (Germany), Bergamot Station, Forest Lawn Museum, Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture, and SMASHBOX Studios (MOPLA).

Natalie is currently working on a new series of work about the modern day Middle East.

In backSPACE Gallery we are proud to present:

“High Life for a Low Life” The works of Jaime FLAN Munoz.

FLAN is a painter who paints images that reflect his experience growing up in Southern California. Some of the main concepts that he focuses on in his work revolve around the common issues within cultural identity, painting as a form of technology, childhood experiences, and the saturated media. FLAN focuses on these points because these concepts he believes are what formed and continue to form the identity of who he is today and in the future. In his paintings he articulates these concepts through the exploration of textile designs, symbols collected from religious experiences, and symbols collected from the various people and environments that he grew up in, particularly environments with graffiti and local gangs. Some of these symbols include, the cross, the three dotted, “mi vida loca” (my crazy life), and the symbols and patterns that were commonly scribbled on school desks and class tests of any “average” kid that he grew up with. FLAN uses the cartoon charter as a major reference point to his childhood and his career as an “artist”.  He then focuses on other issues such as the saturated media or cultural identity that can then tie into the character that he chooses for the painting. For example, in the painting of the bear baker titled “Bimbo”, FLAN explores his relationship to his culture through a Mexican product. This logo that he was so familiar with through the experiences of going with his mother to to super markets that marketed towards latinos, and products that marketed towards kids, were some of his earliest memories where he really identified with his culture in an environment outside of my home or the spanish speaking hour at the closest church or the ESL group at school.  By countering the corporations marketing strategy he enjoys de-idealizing the logo of the cute bear baker dressed in bright white.  FLAN does so by adding stains to his clothes, socially unacceptable hair on his chest, and an unprofessional tattoo on his arm while at the same time referencing the Loony-Toons face card with Porky pig saying at the end of every show,”da da dats ol folks”.