5-6pm: Sandow Birk and Elyse Pignolet will discuss their current exhibition, The 99 Names of God
Sandow Birk and Elyse Pignolet’s collaborative project, The 99 Names of God, is a series of illustrations depicting the five airports and departure gates involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001. The 99 Most Perfect Names of God are the names of God in the Qur’an and in the Hadith. The 99 names vary, and they often appear in elaborate calligraphy and with extensive decorations. The motifs adorning the texts and the drawings are derived from ornamentation found in historical, hand-illuminated Qur’ans.
Sandow Birk, a California native, is known for his use of social issues in his artwork. Frequent subjects of his past work have included barrio life, inner-city violence, warfare, graffiti and imprisonment. Often merging fact and fiction, Birk creates salient and humorous works that invoke notions of justice. In the past several years, Birk’s work has been included in more than ten museum exhibitions and twenty-five solo shows; he has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Getty Fellowship, and a City of Los Angeles Fellowship. Two of Birk’s major projects, “In Smog and Thunder” and “Incarcerated: Vision of California in the 21st Century,” were published by Chronicle Books in 2004, as monographs by Last Gasp, and Birk’s version of Dante’s Inferno. Sandow Birk is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, California, Koplin del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles, and P.P.O.W Gallery in New York.
Born in Oakland, CA, Elyse Pignolet lives and works in Los Angeles. Primarily working in ceramics, her work has dealt with various themes including social issues, urban themes, and topics from contemporary news articles. Other artistic projects and drawings reference the world around us, dealing with formal concerns of art while blurring the line between figuration and abstraction. Her drawings begin with the deconstruction of city grids, maps, architectural plans, which are reorganized in multilayered semi-abstract compositions. These drawings attempt to process the many layers of information observed in her contemporary environment, compressing time, space, and place. Her works have been featured in several publications including the La Weekly, Juxtapoz Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
