Think Tank Gallery, Los Angeles is an urban art gallery in a city that is realizing its post-street art potential. The gallery focuses on integration and progression with each show, and serves as a place to inspire with each event and exhibition shared within the historic part of Downtown LA it inhabits.
VIDEO RECAP - YOU ARE HERE II: SHOOT A COP OPENING NIGHT
After months of work and much-appreciated volunteer hours leading up to the event, our latest exhibition YOU ARE HERE II: Shoot a Cop - A Celebration of Our Boys in Blue finally opened last week to a humbling response. Having LAPD come to the show and enjoy it, many of them making appointments to bring friends and family to see the exhibit again, we couldn’t be happier with the reception the show has gotten from the community.
In what could have been a not-so-rewarding experience, we would like to think that our show - with its name that caused many artists to drop out and its piggy model performance piece that could have been taken poorly by the police that showed up - got its message across in a serious yet light-hearted way. If you didn’t get to come to the exhibit, we hope this video will inspire you to make your way out during our operating hours this month. Details below.
YOU ARE HERE II: Shoot a Cop - A Celebration of Our Boys in Blue Think Tank Gallery 939 Maple Ave Second Floor Los Angeles, CA 90015
Show Runs: February 14th-March 2nd
Gallery hours Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 12-4PM
Whole Beast Rag, whose two founders are resident artists at the Think Tank, host Mondays on the Think Tank blog. Their audience flirts with fringe, and you can find a link to their editorial at the bottom.
You’d think after a week of doing nothing but making art (the cutting, the hanging, and let’s not forget, the choosing of what is “best”) I’d be stretched thin. The truth is that yes: I finally broke down and bought concealer to cover the circles under my eyes. But the reality is this: I would have it no other way.
Living in Los Angeles is a lesson in extremes. Eccentrics and celebrities live here along with a million other lives some might describe as “normal” or boring. Standing on the fire escape the other night with one of my partners-in-crime we looked at the lights burning across the alley way. I would hate that life, she said, meaning the one chained to a desk. And for what? I ask myself this all the time. But I laughed, trying to see the other side. That is our life, I reminded her, pointing to the fact that after this cigarette we were going inside to hash out more details about this or that project. The only difference I see is how we describe our jobs, in that we do ours in the pursuit of art.
It’s not about definitions. I think that is the opposite of the point. But when I am still - like so many and despite all effort to the contrary - otherwise officially “unemployed,” honoring what I choose to do in response (make art) means I must reframe. At Zinefest this weekend, I picked up a new postcard from the rad people at Dum Dum and on the front it says “Punk was born from failure.” I am amused by all this beauty born from debris, from the wealth rising from the raw. Try and see this next time you are out in the streets: where the other side is and what it has to say. What you can learn from what you think is wrong. I promise it will be worth your time.
YOU ARE HERE II: SHOOT A COP - OPENING NIGHT PHOTO RECAP
The sequel to our photography experiment YOU ARE HERE couldn’t have come at a more interesting time, with its goal to Shoot a Cop being a hot topic during the tail end of the Dorner debacle. Fending off some harsh criticisms, our photographers and all of the people hard at work on the exhibit came through to gather support for a show that is as much about the media’s perpetuating of a negative light on LAPD as a whole as it was about cops and their primarily just but sometimes impatient ways.
Many police officers have visited the exhibition since, and we are proud to say that the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
The opening was a large event, with hundreds of people drinking coffee and eating warm donuts provided by SK’s Donuts and Croissants and Krispy Kreme, and handed out by our wonderful piggy models Anastasia and Jasmine, who were done up by celebrity special effects makeup artist Eric Fox. Brandon Muñoz also killed it like usual with his modern take on the “pen is mightier than the sword” conversation.
Tag pictures of your friends at the event on our Facebook page, and like it to be up to date on all of our future events, including the closing event that will likely be held on March 2nd.
And make sure to visit the show if you haven’t yet during our new business hours, listed below!
YOU ARE HERE II: Shoot a Cop - A Celebration of Our Boys in Blue Think Tank Gallery 939 Maple Ave Second Floor Los Angeles, CA 90015
Show Runs: February 14th-March 2nd
Gallery hours Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 12-4PM
SHOOT A COP OPENS TONIGHT AT THINK TANK GALLERY - TEASER
YOU ARE HERE II opens tonight at Think Tank Gallery during the Downtown Art Walk.
After over a month of shooting and many dropouts due to the controversial subject matter, a large handful of photographers are ready to show the fruits of their labor after meditating on and following LAPD around an area outlined by LA riot culture. The month has proven to many of the photographers that what they thought about Los Angeles law enforcement was simply wrong, and many of them have become friends with officers along the way. Also along the way, Christopher Dorner rocked our world when he began what many falsely assumed to be a calculated strike against a corrupt aspect of our government. In the end, it was proven that he was in over his head, but Los Angeles got completely swept up in the wildfire of this story.
Our photography experiment had already been running for weeks at the time, but of course that didn’t stop people from criticizing the show for exploiting this tragedy. No matter what you thought of Dorner and his manifesto, there is something for you to learn at our show tonight through the wide variety of opinions on LAPD, expressed visually through artists’ lenses. We hope to see you there.
YOU ARE HERE II: Shoot a Cop - A Celebration of Our Boys in Blue Think Tank Gallery 939 Maple Ave Second Floor LA, CA 90015
Show opens: February 14th, 2013 5PM-11PM
Show runs: February 14-March 2, 2013 (open by appointment)
Coming from a job observing the patterns of what is bought vs. what is passed over, regular trade show attendee and home gift catalog designer Kate Bingaman-Burt began a long road of consumption-focused work. After beginning with tedious hand drawings of credit card statements, Kate moved onto drawing every single object he has purchased. For six years she has been doing this, no matter how mundane the purchase. Not only is she more aware of her own purchases, but she is also continuing her meditation on consumption - her series is called Obsessive Consumption - and in the meantime she is learning to draw objects from life just a bit better each day.
Check out more of her work and what she has to say about it over at OddityCentral.
I know I did a lot of damage, but I’m in a cell with a guy doing half the time for attempted murder. I’m like, ‘Wow, I better be nice, or he’ll try to kill me, too.’ - SIGHT
Los Angeles has an interesting paradigm in its art scene. On the one hand, it is the geographical location that institutionalized graffiti, and on the other, it is the world’s toughest place to express oneself on the streets. With some of the biggest graffiti punishments in the history of graff culture - Revok was sentenced to 180 days in jail and infamously ended up moving to Detroit in disgust - people who have changed the world and inspired millions are seen as enemies of the state by a government that likes to put artists, like SIGHT, in their place. What that usually means is that if you can’t figure out or afford to get onto the walls of a major gallery, that place is probably going to be jail after you find a wall that is more easily accessed.
In a piece by LA Weekly writer Simone Wilson, this culture is laid out as a horrifying landscape of felonies and loss of opportunities, which is the way many artists have seen it. Even artists that have made it to the top and are changing the way art is perceived - like the Shepard Faireys and SABERs of the world - have felt LA’s wrath.
It is changing, but the change is slow coming. If you’re considering making your way into the LA graff scene, check out this article to get an idea of what you’re up against.
THE DUALITY OF WHAT DORNER REPRESENTS TO ANGELENOS - WBR
Whole Beast Rag, whose two founders just became resident artists at the Think Tank, will be hosting Mondays on the Think Tank blog. Their audience flirts with fringe, and this week Grace picks up where Kat left off. Find a link to her and her partner’s editorial at the bottom.
The screenplay is probably already being written, with a hulking, malevolent male lead to scare the masses into theaters. He’ll bear a sweaty, grotesque, muscled physique, with no emotion to be seen in his dull, black eyes.
But every picture I see of Christopher Dorner has him smiling—the only picture of him not smiling is from a hotel he went to after he’d killed that girl and her fiancé. He looks normal, though. Like a guy, doing his thing, walking for some nuts or ice down the hall or something. He does not look concerned, or, conversely: he looks sane, conscious and alert (but not violent). I have a hard time believing this guy wrote the manifesto Jacob referred to a couple of posts ago.
As cliché as it is to say now, the slew of horrifying, gun-shrouded killings that have happened over the past year is almost too disorienting to process. I thought before that perhaps watching violent things on television, in movies, etc. was incidentally related to violent behavior. Not as directly as some people would like you to believe, but maybe it’d be a contributing factor. As I try to think about Christopher Dorner’s actions and his “reasons” for executing them, I find myself incapable of disliking him as a person for what he’s done. By immersing myself into finding every detail I can about his life, the people he addresses in the manifesto, and so on, I train myself into believing he’s more of a hero—or antihero—than any uniformed officers I see in the street.
This is difficult for me to grasp.
I consider myself a rational, serious (unless I’m around Kat), conscientious person. Truthfully, I don’t have much against the police, the government, and most other institutions in the United States that aren’t perfect but that aren’t fascist, either. A lot of my family is in the military, most of them in the Navy, and I grew up respecting that. I was no angel as a child, as a teenager, and afterward, but I knew how to talk to those in positions of power.
The way Dorner talks to those in positions of power within his manifesto is very striking to me, mostly because, before I’d read it, I’d so impractically constructed his character. At some point it becomes more obvious that he never said anything like this to these people in person, and he tries to stave off this vibe by overexerting his masculinity, unnaturally. The media has extracted mostly these moments in the text to introduce or reinforce an idea of Christopher Dorner. It is in my nature, as a former newspaper reporter, an editor and as a consumer of media, to question these representations. To process them, discuss them, write about them.
It is in these ways that I question authority, and thus embrace those who question (and who also, at some point, have held and exhibited the values and traditions of those whom they’re questioning).
Now the federal government supposedly has drones seeking Dorner. He’s toast. I wonder how he ever thought it’d be that easy (that he’d avoid the wrath of the most top-secret death ray of all time). He says he’s ready to die (he cites it as a reason it’ll be “futile” for anyone to find him and kill him—that sounds like really terrible reverse-psychology to me), but I don’t know. I think he wants everyone to think he’s a good guy. I don’t think he anticipated being the first human on U.S. soil to be disintegrated by unmanned aircraft. He didn’t want to be known as the tattletale Naval officer who got kicked out of the LAPD.
George W. has always been a bold dude. And he applies the same sense of brazen naivety to painting as he has to other vocations, much to his own credit. Recently hacked was a series of emails from the former President, some describing the state of his also-former-President-father’s health, and others passing along some self portraits in various locations around his bathroom requiring nudity. The paintings are no technical marvel - the reflection in the mirror is an impossible one and there are various perspective issues - but to jump straight to portraiture and painting water falls in line with the boldness of the man.
Asked if the hacker is worried about the impending FBI investigation, The Smoking Gun reports that he has this to say:
The hacker contends that “The feds” began investigating him a “long time ago,” and that he has hacked “hundreds of accounts.” Asked if he was concerned about the FBI/Secret Service investigation that will no doubt follow shortly, he replied crytically, “i have an old game with the fucking bastards inside, this is just another chapter in the game.”
DORNER, THE MEDIA, LAPD, AND THINK TANK GALLERY’S “SHOOT A COP”
With the current “massive” manhunt in full effect, and with media latching onto this story as they very well should while they simultaneously continue patterns of sensationalism, I figured it time to write a piece on our upcoming show. Ex-officer Christopher Dorner rocketed into the lives of Angelenos today when the story broke of his slaughter through the ranks of LAPD. A press conference held by Chief Charlie Beck - who is at once responsible for the rapid decline in crime in Los Angeles as well as a target of Dorner’s ongoing tirade against the corruption of our law enforcement - outlined a lack of empathy for the murderer’s case.
Dorner is a homicidal maniac. At this point, he has proven so through a lengthy manifesto describing his goals to murder the families of those he felt have done him wrong, as well as through his actions that have already demonstrated such murderous determination. But to completely ignore his motives and the reasoning behind these actions only serves to enforce the negative depiction of LAPD laid out in said manifesto. When Beck states - in front of a JOINLAPD.COM red carpet-like backdrop and with a smirk and some dramatic head movements - that “you’re talking about a homicide (laughs) suspect that’s committed atrocious crimes and if you want to give any attribution to his ramblings (laughs) on the internet, go right ahead,” it only adds fuel to a fire that has long been felt by many people, particularly of Dorner’s ethnic background.
But what Beck has to say, especially from where he stands (ignoring the Hollywood-style advertising behind him), is best stated as he did. It is an open case, and there isn’t time to introspectively explore what it is that Dorner deems unjust until Dorner is apprehended and has stopped killing innocent police in the name of martial law. So when the police chief stands in front of reporters and says that they will catch the criminal and not comply with unruly demands to clear Dorner’s name publicly, he is doing only what is 100% admirable in the name of American justice. The problem lies more in America’s search for a story.
Dorner knew this when he wrote his manifesto as he did, and he came from the perfect upbringing to know it. One paragraph from the writing sums it up perfectly:
I’m not an aspiring rapper, I’m not a gang member, I’m not a dope dealer, I don’t have multiple babies momma’s. I am an American by choice, I am a son, I am a brother, I am a military service member, I am a man who has lost complete faith in the system, when the system betrayed, slandered, and libeled me. I lived a good life and though not a religious man I always stuck to my own personal code of ethics, ethos and always stuck to my shoreline and true North. I didn’t need the US Navy to instill Honor, Courage, and Commitment in me but I thank them for re-enforcing it. It’s in my DNA.
There is a perception problem between the LAPD and its people. It is alluded to only more precisely by the scene laid out immediately following the press conference by KTTV’s field reporter Chris Blatchford (I happened to catch the conference on the notorious FOX11). After viewers have just seen the police chief speak, and witnessed a very calm and collected desire to solve the problem at hand, an altered direction was injected into the scene to provide the extra juice of sympathy.
When Blatchford states, starting with “it’s not what he said as much as what he didn’t say,” that the multiple TV shows and movies written about this “legendary agency” are on Beck’s shoulders and that the embarrassing, scary, “Dirty Harry movie”-like situation of a rogue cop killing other cops is “not a movie… this is the real thing,” we get a taste of LA’s tried and true sensationalist nature.
It is true to form of the inspiration behind our upcoming photo exhibition. These stories are big because they rarely happen. We have had photographers documenting LAPD for weeks now. Photographers have gotten shots of officers calmly talking to suspected criminals while said criminal tries to escape, operating with extreme empathy. Photographers have gotten right up next to police apprehending felons with guns and drugs and not received even a harsh word. They have even staked out police funerals without so much as a dirty look. LAPD is a supremely patient and upstanding example of the American justice system. Most of the time.
But what Shoot a Cop aims to illustrate is the phenomenon that is this combination of one of the world’s biggest law enforcement agencies and the world’s most exploitative media. Los Angeles is an interesting funnel of drama that spins faster and faster until it focuses to a steady stream of exploitation on one particular story. Right now that story is Dorner.
We hope, when people walk through our gallery on February 14th, that they will see dozens of photos of police doing what police do, and create their own opinions of what this may mean. We don’t aim to portray the LAPD in any particular light. We will allow them to portray themselves, and our photographers to document them. While the photogs themselves may have opinions they wish to express, it is only after a full month of meditation on Los Angeles police culture that they are doing so.
YOU ARE HERE II: Shoot a Cop is as much about Los Angeles, fame culture, and the media as it is about cops. And Dorner will soon prove that these things are quite possibly more powerful than a position in law enforcement, as he exploits the media from a place where he has lost this position.
-Jacob Patterson Gallerist for YOU ARE HERE II
Find out more about Shoot a Cop in our press release.
ART GAME PROVIDES YOU WITH THE STRESS OF MAKING ART FOR A LIVING
Art Game is a piece by artist and 8-bit game maker Pippin Barr. The piece provides players with the some of the feelings present in the lives of SoHo’s finest up-and-coming artists. When tasked with preparing some work for an upcoming show at MOMA (who just placed video games permanently into their collection), players choose between one of three art styles to be present in the show.
Cicero Sassoon is a glorified minimalist painter whose process plays out like a game of Snake. Alexandra Tertanov may have the funnest process as you take a game of Tetris and turn it into a pile of pieces for her latest abstract sculpture, and the duo William Edge and Susan Needle play Space War to create video art.
When all is said and done, the MOMA curator will randomly disgrace many of your works until she finds some that she is into, and then you will go listen to under-appreciative art patrons speak about your work at the opening. It is an interesting game, and satirizes this glorified world quite well. Barr has this to say:
I think it’s possible to feel proud about the work you make. I think it’s possible to feel angry with the curator for not selecting a particularly excellent example of your oeuvre. I think it’s possible to feel indignant when someone in the gallery takes a cheap-shot at one of your painting. I think it’s possible to feel elated when you’re on the cover of Artforum. And I hope it’s possible for the game to serve as a platform for people to muse about the whole weird games and art business, too. And the art and games business, for that matter. Most of all, I think it’s possible to express yourself as an artist and to invest in that and not have the game let you down too much.
