Kayla Tange: Soft Sell Sept 12-Oct 25
Sept 12- Oct 12 2025
Curated by Kene J. Rosa
Last Projects is pleased to present Soft Sell, a solo show by LA-based artist Kayla Tange, whose work spans video, installation, sculpture, performance and image making. Tange examines systems of power, bodily autonomy, invisible labor, and the corrosive aftermath of silence. Her work explores how the wellness industry, like other systems, instrumentalizes affect and agency, and leverages precarity to maximize profits. Her use of materiality highlights the demands made on bodies framed as ornamental, which are utilized as spectacle, both in vulnerability and as protection through the lens of display.
Adopted by a Japanese American family that survived internment at the hands of the United States government, Tange reclaims personal and collective histories through archival practices, found materials, and text to explore themes of belonging, displacement, and transformation.
By focusing on her lived experience as a Korean adoptee, sex worker, and chronically ill person, this show explores modalities of making that are intentionally both less taxing and toxic, and were made at a time of reckoning with the possibility of having to give up her career as a performer due to the conditions exacerbating her declining health.
Ceramics molded into metallic pasties, discarded dance costumes conceived as flesh-like sculptures, and sky-high heels rendered in saturated, electric hues bring us fully into Tange's vivid world of performance as a form of survival. Each work serves as an altar of evidence, an offering which marks the underlying detriment of accumulation while suggesting that acknowledging one's bodily history can transform it into a potent site of reclamation and resistance.
Soft Sell interrogates the commodification of bodies under the intentional design of systems, where aesthetics of care and altruism obscure structures of coercion. Tange's work does not succumb to despondency, but instead transmutes it into objects imbued with deep resonance and a quiet defiance, an insistence on life itself.
Press release written by Se Young Au
Kayla Tange (b. South Korea) is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist working in video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Adopted into a Japanese American family, her work reclaims personal and collective histories through archival practices, found materials, and text, exploring themes of belonging, displacement, permanence and transformation.
Performing as Coco Ono, Tange addresses spectatorship, labor, and bodily autonomy, using dark humor and satire to confront the commodification of emotional and physical labor. Her work frequently blurs the line between art, performance, and social practice, as seen in co-created shows Stripper Co-op, Cyber Clown Girls, Sacred Wounds, Hwa Records and Private Practices: AAPI Artist and Sex Worker Collection at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Collaboration and community-building are central to her practice, transforming stories of shame into symbolic value.
Tange’s work has been presented at Human Resources, Highways Performance Space and Angels Gate Cultural Center, with performances and screenings at REDCAT, OUTFEST, Asian Pacific Film Festival, and Performance Studies International, Melbourne. Her work has been supported by the California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AHL Korean Foundation, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries. Her practice has been featured in PAPER, LA Times, LA Weekly, Artillery and X-TRA
The Monotypic Mirror
Yola Monakhov Stockton
LAST PROJECTS LOS ANGELES
March 15 – April 12, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, March 15, 7-11pm
LAST PROJECTS LOS ANGELES March 15 – April 12, 2024 Opening Reception: Friday, March 15, 7-11pm Water observes no political boundary or manmade border. It is neither pure nor clear in meaning or intent. Along the sloped depths of the Laurentian Great Lakes lies a story whose ambiguous protagonist, the invasive bivalve, dreissena bugensis, has reached a level of success beyond our wildest dreams. Displacing the straight-edged zebra, its nearest rival, the round and brassy quagga mussel commands the bottom stratum of the lakes, the benthos, in what has been called an “unprecedented invasion”1 of North America. The quagga first entered this ecologically naïve and vast freshwater system, a lake connected unto itself, in th
e ballast water of transatlantic commercial ships through manmade canals. Within several years of its first sighting, the quagga dominated the ecosystems of all the Great Lakes except Superior. Hitching rides on boat trailers and currents, it soon lounged in California and the Gulf Coast. In such hospitable domains, the filter feeder ably competes for resources at the expense of fish and other species and against the best efforts of departments of water resources and bureaus of reclamation to control it. Its medium, the water where it lives, has achieved a deathly clarity. “They will be big players for probably hundreds of years,”2 says Alexander Karatayev, head of the Great Lakes Center’s monitoring program, whose quintennial survey of Lake Ontario, the lowest lake in the Laurentian system, was joined by the artist
PATRICK JAMES DONOVAN
MAN IN A RING MOLD
April thru May 7 2023
Opening Reception:
Sat April 8th 6-10pm
Sat + Sun 1-6pm and by appt.
Man in a Ring Mold, oil on panel, 20” x 16”, shipping palette
For Immediate Release:
Man in a Ring Mold, a premiere solo exhibition of paintings by Patrick James Donovan, reveals the artist as a playful jester taking artifice to heart; trompe l’oeil and subject matter fuses his socio self-awareness and musings on the institutional. Donovan writes, “The self-consciousness of these paintings presents themselves as the object of reality, rather than what is represented.” Man in a Ring Mold shows an oeuvre of paintings in various styles showcasing differing techniques and forms explored by Donovan.
Shirtless men, Amazon packages, surveillance, laboring bodies, a baby wearing a VR headset, old ladies, homelessness, and 60’s inspired space age furniture are all rendered in studied representations with a palette of hues that diffuses the potentially polemic. The way a soft focus reduces sharpness, the colors of pinks, grays, light blues, yellows, and light greens transform these 21st century concerns. Man in a Ring Mold isn’t offering platitudes, instead it represents the pursuit of enjoyment in what painting can do when relational aesthetics smash into each other. What appears as a documentation of an outward curiosity also veritably defines a painter painting themselves. - Nilay Lawson, Artist
Read Nilay Lawson's essay Man In A Ring Mold
Born in Washington DC, and raised in Alexandria VA, Donovan had an inherent skill and interest with drawing and painting. Donovan spent much of his life on the east coast, attending college in Boston, pursuing a white collar career without a dedicated art practice. Donovan kept up-to-date on matters regarding Art by visiting museums, galleries, and private collections as well as occasional courses. Donovan currently lives and works in downtown Los Angeles with an art studio in walking distance from his residence, getting into the studio twice a day with a lunch break at home in-between. This life is filled with a studious daily structure and unadulterated engagement with all things Art including attendance in group exhibitions, gallery openings, artist-run events, museum exhibitions, and studio visits and solo exhibitions. A 75 year old emerging artist Donovan has previously shown work in Los Angeles at Blackstone Gallery, Lava Projects, the Queer Biennial 2018, SoLA Contemporary, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and Last Projects; in Sacramento at the Crocker Art Museum; and in San Francisco at Paolo Meija Projects. His work was included in New American Painting, Pacific Coast Edition (2013). He has a BA (1971) in philosophy from Brandeis University and an MFA (2012) in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.
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INTERFLUG : Kulturpalast Wedding International +Wolf Galentz present 10 Artists From Berlin
B-LA-Exchange at LAST Projects
July 8 - July 23
LAST Projects,
Los Angeles
206 S Ave 20, CA 90031
gallery hours Fri+Sat 3-7pm + by appt.
For appts contact : info@kulturpalastwedding.com
Interflug is a group exhibition of artists from the Berlin based
project spaces Wolf & Galentz and Kulturpalast Wedding
International. Both art spaces are located in close proximity to the
former Berlin Wall and explore in different ways the peculiarities
and differences of Eastern and Western European art.
While Wolf & Galentz focus on the presentation of 20th century
artists from East and West Berlin, Kulturpalast Wedding
International mainly feature performance, actions and artistic
interventions in public space.
The exhibition in Los Angeles shows a selection of works by artists
closely associated with the project spaces: drawings, prints and
excerpts from street actions and video documentaries, e. g. about
the almost forgotten American singer and actor Dean Reed, who
lived in the GDR by his own choice and died in a small lake in East
Berlin.
For the opening at LAST PROJECTS the Berlin based artists Line Wasner and Henrik Jacob will present a plasticine disco.
Participating artists:
Andreas Kotulla
Maarja Nuurk
Henrik Jacob
Line Wasner
Archi Galentz
Andreas Wolf
Gisa Hausmann
Ed Dickman
Jürgen Peters
Stefanie Rumpler (photos)
www.b-la-connect.org
www.wolf-galentz.de
www.kulturpalastwedding.com
Gallery Hour Thurs-Sun 1-6pm
Closing Sat March 1, 2022 1 to 6pm
Ernest Rosenthal arrives at Tin Flats at 2pm
Music at 4pm with Eric Landmark & friends, Nora Vanuhy Keys,
& Joe Baiza
Visit ernestrosenthal.com for more info and images
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Marval A Rex: MARVAL A F//K A Solo Exhibition of Marval A Rex
February 7 - March 6 2020
CLOSING FUNERAL: MARCH 6 2020 7-10pm
Fugue Performance at 8:00pm
M A R V A L A F / / K is the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles for the interdisciplinary provocateur known as MARVAL A REX. Paintings, ceramics, and other unreasonable slippages will occur in a mad pursuit by Rex to destroy the ontogenesis of Rex through self-iteration. Basically, the fake-boy will fuck himself to death. . . and then some! Come watch.
Line Starts Here: Alexis Branger and Devin Andersen
Friday Oct 25 209 thru Nov 22 2019 extended by appt thru Dec 9
with additional works from Jackie Perez
PERFORMING ABSTRACTION
September 13th 2019 – October 11th 2019
Opening Reception and Performance with Marval A. Rex
Friday Sept 13th 7-11pm
Video + Performance Night Fri Sept 27th 8pm
Page Person, Christopher Anthony Velasco, Tara Jane O'Neil and others TBA
Hours: Fri + Sat 2-6pm or by appointment
Participating artists include:
Gianni Arone
Ciriza
Daniel Leland Crook
Katelyn Dorroh
Paul Donald
Luka Fisher
Coffee Kang
Peter Kalisch
Machine
Tara Jane O'Neal
Page Person
Marval A. Rex
Kayla Tange
Christopher Anthony Velasco
For Immediate Release::
PERFORMING ABSTRACTION presents sculptures and paintings by artists who traverse the boundaries of performance and object making via painting and sculpture.
Art found in galleries (and its presentation) is a performance, too--and many of the artists in this group show engage with their object making in a performative or ritualistic manner. The performance of abstraction and of mark making in PERFORMING ABSTRACTION is a means to both conceal and reveal the artists’ relationships to embodiment, sensuality, erotics, magic, narcissism, gender identity, immigration, and gentrification, and economics realities among a bevy of concerns.
Abstraction is a means of survival. We reduce objects/signs/marks to their simplest forms to make sense of the world--Or, we use this reduction (counterintuitively) to complicate, to hide meaning amidst the chaos. The artists presented in PERFORMING ABSTRACTION engage a range of strategies reflected in this group show’s selections.Some artists in this show split the difference, while others consider painting (specifically abstract painting) as a “polite” way to perform anger and absurdity.
Performances, video screenings, and ice cream socials will bookend this critical exhibition curated by Ilona Berger and Luka Fisher.
