Visiting Artist Lectures: Brian Porray, Kyla Hansen, Thursday May 11th
We are excited to welcome Brian Porray and Kyla Hansen, both Los Angeles based artists, to join our Culmination and Senior Seminar classes this week to lecture about their respective work. Please plan to meet in Rood 51 on Thursday May 11th, at 7:30pm to learn more about Brian and Kyla. After the lectures, the artists will be available to meet with students for studio visits. (Please let me or Joe know if you are interested in having a studio visit with either Brian or Kyla ASAP!)
Brian Porray employs elements of Futurism and Op art to create explosive compositions that are part painting, part collage. Applying paint, printed paper, and tape to large-scale canvases and panels, the artist conjures a mash-up of dizzying patterns and colorful forms that often radiate from a central compositional point. He draws from his background in graffiti art to produce architectural landscapes that resemble computer graphics and include spray-painted details. “My paintings aren’t really abstract at all,” Porray says, “but more like psychedelic landscapes filled with broken technological assemblages.”
Brian Porray lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his MFA in 2010 from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally, most recently: Plant People, GAR Gallery in Galveston TX, NOW-ism: Abstraction Today, Pizzuti Collection in Columbus OH, Everyday Abstraction: Contemporary Abstract Painting, Drake University in Des Moines IA, Dazed and Confused, Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton NY. This fall he will be included in Abstracted Visions: Information Mapping; from Mystic Diagrams to Data Visualizations, at Cerritos College Art Gallery in Norwalk CA. His work has been written about in Modern Painters magazine, The Los Angeles Times, ArtPulse magazine, Las Vegas Weekly, New American Paintings, and numerous online blogs. He is a 2010 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA award and was a 2012 fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE. His work is held in many public and private collections including the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles CA and The Pizzuti Collection in Columbus OH.
Kyla Hansen traces the migration of meaning, mashing up cultural signifiers of place to create absurd objects and physical spaces that employ the hazy nature of belief, memory, and nostalgia. Hansen is interested in the exportability and malleability of experiences both culturally (through objects in movies, music, and media) and personally (through memories that change over time). Her sculptures explore the elusiveness of realness, creating slippery spaces, where the real and fake overlap, and certainty and uncertainty intermingle.
Kyla Hansen is a Los Angeles‐based sculptor who combines found objects, handcrafts, and Hollywood prop-‐house materials in a scrappy language from desert suburbia. She received her Masters of Fine Art from Claremont Graduate University in 2012 and her Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2009. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Greater Los Angeles Area, including Five Car Garage, Western Project, Torrance Art Museum, WEEKEND Space, the University of California, Long Beach, Raid Projects, UCLA New Wight Gallery. She was included in the exhibition Bloody Red Sun Fantastic LA, a survey exhibition of emerging Los Angeles based artists at Piasa Auction House, Paris France. Her work has been recognized in several publications including Modern Painters Magazine’s 24 Artists to Watch in 2013. Hansen lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Kyla and Brian also collaborate on a business project incorporating functional ceramic objects and exotic xerophytic plants. Read more about the unique pairings of ceramics and plants in this bit of press on the project from last year. Check out grogclayco!
