POTLUCK    Jul 9 - Aug 29, 2009

Country Club is proud to present POTLUCK, a summer group exhibition showcasing work by Fritz Chesnut, Alison Frey, Chad Marsh, Jason Meadows, and Mark Verabioff. Curated by Christine Nichols, POTLUCK presents work from five Los Angeles-based artists. As a curatorial construct, POTLUCK was casually initiated and is organized much like an invite amongst friends to a summer barbeque where everyone brings their own dish. The idea of POTLUCK is to present an exhibition as a communal act where participants are linked together by sharing ideas and space.

Fritz Chesnut is well known for a dynamic series of photo-realist paintings of crowd scenes. The inclusion of Cannonball and Wave of Mutilation (2009) in this exhibition marks Chesnut’s recent investigations into abstraction painted since his move to Los Angeles from New York this past year. Chesnut received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995 and his MFA from Rutgers University in 1997. Starstruck, his first solo exhibition, was presented at Bellwether in May of 2002. Chesnut has been included in exhibitions with White Columns (NY), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (NY), the Dumbo Arts Center (NY) as well as Marella Arte Contemporanea (Milan) to name a few. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Out NY and Flash Art among other publications.

Alison Frey’s Rug (2009) offers up an object that belies its own materiality. Frey employs painterly constructs and techniques including knotted, woven, stitched and stretched strips of canvas to create works that straddle the definitions of painting and sculpture. Frey received her BA from University of Oregon in 1995 and an MFA in Painting from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Frey previously exhibited at Pierce College and produced a collaborative work with This American Life host Ira Glass for the Poetry Center in Chicago in 2007.

Chad Marsh’s work is informed by the pragmatic application of intuition within a critical discourse on traditional painting. For this exhibition, Marsh is presenting a selection of drawings on magazine pages which parallel the silhouettes and objects used in his paintings highlighting the “built-in” departure points of critical and visual theory. Marsh completed his MFA in Painting from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002.

For POTLUCK, Jason Meadows will be contributing his second series of Lamps (2009), continuing his interest in utility, fabrication and a specific approach to handmade geometric design/formalism. Meadows received his MFA from UCLA in 1998 and exhibits with Marc Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York.

Mark Verabioff began using W magazine as a source material for his ‘page tear’ works on paper in 2006. Since the mid 80s, his practice has been in a highly committed relationship with the critical interrogation of form and its social-political capabilities. Moving in and out of logic, absurdity, provocation and seduction, Verabioff undermines linguistically constructed notions of sexual difference, ethnicity, and gender in both high and low cultural spheres - fusing text, works on paper, sound, video, installations, and actions that examine the rhetoric of celebrity, politics, authorship and contemporary art. Verabioff will be staging the performance Outward Model at Eighth Veil at 7174 Sunset Boulevard on Friday, July 10th at 9pm.

Christine Nichols is an independent curator based in Los Angeles. Nichols previously owned and operated works on paper inc., of Los Angeles from 1998–2003.