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Erica Shires, Nikola

AGENT OF ORDINARY PLEASURES | September 2020 

In partnership with Maiden LA, VC Projects presents,

A group exhibition pop up show, on view at The Lodge gallery, Hollywood

1024 N. Western Ave. Los Angeles Ca. 90029. From September 10 - 24th, 2020 (two weeks only) By appointment only. | Contact: victoria@vcprojects.art | Event details below

A selection of works on paper, mixed media, and photography exploring intimacy and sense of self. Participating artists, Brandy Eve Allen, Nils Benson, Yuri Boyko, Shane Guffogg, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Julio Panisello-Huguet, Sean Leech, Randi Matushevitz, Abtin Mozaffari, Erica Shires, L. Mikelle Standbridge and Martyn Thompson.

Los Angeles-based curator Victoria Chapman proudly presents Agent of Ordinary Pleasures, a group exhibition making its debut in Los Angeles this September in partnership with Maiden LA and the Lodge gallery (where it can be viewed as a pop-up exclusively from September 10 -24th - by appointment).

"The artwork presented explores intimacy and a sense of self," explains Chapman. Through the selection of sublime fine art, including works on paper, mixed media, and photography, the exhibition "seeks to examine how we live our lives and what connections we may find to reach simple ordinary pleasures."

For the curator, the events of 2020, a general climate of information overload, and a recent reintroduction into the thoughts of seminal philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant, provided the genesis of the experiment. 

The immersive exhibition will be staged in a visionary, salon-style environment where installed works will best showcase the artists' sense of intimacy as well as the rawness of interpersonal emotions and relationships to matter and space.

The majority of the works are small in scale with a handful of drawings on paper medium-sized. They were explicitly selected or created in black and white; a considered, monochromatic palette that informs critical principals without the additional influence of color.  

Agent of Ordinary Pleasures is grounded in age-old art principles whilst quietly responding to urgent questions of our times.  "We all are apt to find a recognizable truth within," says Chapman. "Seeking pleasure, understanding identity, and affirming existence. What kind of relationship do we have with our skin and bones? Does self-reliance exist?" 

About the artists:

Across a broad scope of mediums, the artists who have informed the show all bring forth the key tenets of Agent of Ordinary Pleasures.

Brandy Eve Allen, foremost inspired by an exploration of transgression, going beyond limits, whether societal, emotional or gravitational. Her images of bubbles floating, as if frozen in space and time, provoke questions about connection and existence - her portraiture achieves the same hypnotic effect. 

Nils Benson's paintings and grisaille works on paper are inspired by the play of light on objects and space. His works speak to his life in Los Angeles but also draw inspiration and technique from the classical world. Taken together, this juxtaposition is imbued with a kinetic allure.

Yuri Boyko’s pigment print series, Desideratum, was one of the core works that helped shape my vision for this show. The artist’s compositions reveal juxtaposition of wanted vs needed or, in other words, a struggle of human unsubstantiated desire to have versus actual necessity of a possession. The works employ the elegance of human forms, exploring not only space but identity and wrestle with the archetypes that define the human experience. 

Aaron Coyes, Amsterdam based, and one half bandmember of Peaking Lights, Coyes has a long history in music and art, orignally from California. His piece “Score for Intimacy” was the perfect touch to add to the exhibition, involving music, art, text and an improvized interpretation of all three.

Shane Guffogg works in a variety of mediums from oil paintings, pastels, watercolor to glass sculpture. Since the 80s he has been working on a self-portrait series that is constantly evolving in tandem with his lived experience. I was able to reference his pursuit of ‘inner reflection’ and invite him to create some intimate ink drawings for the exhibition. 

Michael Lindsay-Hogg, needs little introduction: known for his art, writing, directing rock n’ roll videos, memoir and more. Michael views his drawing as a two-person dialogue. In his words, the picture is ‘‘like a conversation two people might be having on a Sunday morning, as old friends might.’

Julio Panisello-Huguet’s charcoal and pastel drawings on gray tonal paper bring forth a relationship with intimacy and pleasure; his drawings evoke feelings of the Freudian gaze and the fetishization of the body. His close-ups of quiet gestures are stripped of context allowing the viewer to indulge in their pure physicality.

Sean Leech “I am a poet, I am also in an art collect called G.G.T or Go Getter Tribe. I am currently a student at Santa Monica community college. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, my art work is inspired by what I have experience in my area.”


Randi Matushevitz’s mixed-media drawings reveal the haunting existence of what lies within our deepest truths. I was very excited to invite Randi to create a few new drawings based on a combination of her Urban Dilemmas and Ugly Portraits series. 

Abtin Mozaffari is born in 1980 Bachelor of Cinema at Tehran Soureh University Film Director, Animator, Film Editor, Supervisor of Visual Effects, Sound Designer, and Script Writer I have presented 4 feature film project which has been rejected by Iran’s culture department. In Iran, you have to get permission from the government in order to make a feature film. And the government is not interested in people like me. So I am on my way to make self-funded films without any help.

Erica Shires’ dreamy prints are from her Collodion wet plate series. Erica states: “I am never interested in portraying anything in a literal sense. I am looking for some deeper resonance, that liminal space that touches on our vulnerability and mortality. This wet-plate series examines our fleeting time in this world and the way sorrow changes us.”

L. Mikelle Standbridge is a photography-based mixed media artist, exhibiting one-of-a-kind "photo-sculptures" from her series, "Photo-Bodies: In Between the Edge of a Stitched Soul. Her work is about the relationship between bodies and photographs, searching for synergism between the subject photographed and the physical representation of it.

Martyn Thompson is a multidisciplinary artist embracing an aesthetic anchored in the touch of the hand. A visual push me/ pull me between nostalgia and the here and now. I thought his landscapes would add another dimension on the subjects of intimacy and pleasure. For me, these images tap into a type of yearning and connection; two pieces of a puzzle we’re all still figuring out.

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Short film (11: 48 mins) by Abtin Mozaffari

2003 Ctrl+Alt+Del (2002) - Nominated in Tehran Short Film Fes:val 2003 - Nominated in Kish Short Film Fes:val 2003

Link to watch film: https://vimeo.com/236338844

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Peaking Lights

E S C A P E (featured album)

With their first LP in over three years, Californian psych-dub duo Peaking Lights offer an outlet from the mundane with a kaleidoscopic collection of lo-fi, escapist-electronic pop. Over their illustrious twelve-year-plus career, the husband and wife duo of Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis have set themselves apart with their characteristic dreamy, and melancholic sound that blends together elements of dub, and delicate-but-quirky electronics. E S C A P E, Peaking Light’s sixth album, and first for Dekmantel, finds them at their finest, replete with atmospheric landscapes crafted out of homemade-percussive loops, that sit alongside wondrous electronic pop and krautrock-like hooks, all tied together by Indra Dunis’ composed and hypnotic vocal charm. 

Now based out in Amsterdam, and having firmly established themselves on Dekmantel with their 2018 EP Sea of Sand, Coyes and Dunis’ unique brand of indie-synthwave yet further explores their ongoing delve into transcendental, psychedelic music. With E S C A P E, the production duo illustrate their pragmatic use of instrumentation and dubbing to create more heady and celestial avant-pop. From the very outset on opening track ‘Dharma’, the band’s iconic retro-dub aesthetic kicks in, before being accompanied by a litany of drum machines, sweeping compressed effects, and Dunis’... 

Released May 11, 2020

Link to acquire the album: https://peakinglights.bandcamp.com/album/e-s-c-a-p-e

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About The Lodge

The Lodge is a contemporary art gallery based in East Hollywood, Los Angeles. Since opening in early 2015, the gallery has brought a singular, kinetic perspective to the city’s rapidly growing cultural landscape.

COVID Safe Social Event: Saturday, September 12th, 2020 from 3 pm to 7 pm. The Lodge - 1024 N. Western Ave. Los Angeles Ca. 90029 Masks required, limited to 2 people to enter the space at a time

Contact: Victoria@vcprojects.art

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