Now’s the time to dive head first into all the things you enjoy and let them inspire you… like Thinkspace Projects’ exciting June exhibition lineup! Don’t miss three distinct collections; Scott Listfield “This Is America”, McKenzie Fisk “Good Luck Don’t Die”, and Sean Banister “A Tourist At Home”, on view through June 20th. From surreal landscapes to engaging narratives, join them in celebration of these inspiring bodies of work!
Thinkspace Projects has a full schedule of online events for all exhibitions, including virtual tours, live streaming, interviews and much more… so be sure to follow their blog Sour Harvest to stay updated! If you’re looking to add to your budding collection of art, take a moment and visit their store to view available inventory. All original artworks are 25% off!
Thinkspace Projects
6009 Washington Blvd. | Culver City, CA 90232
thinkspaceprojects.com
SCOTT LISTFIELD “This Is America“
“It’s 2020 and we’re living in the future. We can’t go outside and there’s no more toilet paper. This is America.
In 2018 I had my last show at Thinkspace Projects in Los Angeles. It was titled 1984 and was a reimagining of George Orwell’s haunting book, which had recently spiked to the top of the Amazon best seller’s list because it was suddenly, and alarmingly, relevant again. But I set each piece in a fluorescent colored version of Los Angeles in the 80’s, filled with Rubik’s Cubes, vintage Lamborghini’s, and Phil Collins. Things in America were looking dark but I wanted the paintings to feel almost impossibly light in contrast to their dark overtones.
It’s 2020 and an election is looming. Like a lot of people I’ve been wondering if this is a turning point in American history. But which way are we turning?
In 2018, after living most of my life in Boston, I moved across the United States to Los Angeles. I’ve been thinking about the long divide between my old life which I left behind and the new city I’ve just arrived in. I’ve never felt the vastness of America as much as I do now. All the widely varied places, people, and landscapes that lie between the places I’ve lived. I wanted to make paintings about the open expanses, the purple mountains, the Grand Canyon, the monuments we’ve built on purpose and by accident to the history of our nation.
It’s 2020 and, like a lot of Americans, I worry about the future. Unlike a lot of Americans, I make paintings about the future. I’m inspired by scenes of dystopian movies and novels, and I’m always curious why we’re so drawn to the end of things. Why do we have that dark impulse to see our civilization washed away by tidal waves, by asteroids, by terminators, by apes in clothes, by Thanos? Often enough those scenes feel like nothing more than CGI. But other times it’s hard to shake the feeing that we’re inevitably crashing towards the future that we’ve already predicted. That we have no real control over it, like the extras in a Godzilla movie watching helplessly as a giant monster tears down our city.
In 2018, after my 1984 show wrapped up, Andrew Hosner, the co-founder of Thinkspace Projects, reached out to me and pitched an idea for my next show – national parks. This seemed like a good idea – the astronaut in my work can, after all, go anywhere, and I liked the idea of exploring the natural beauty here in America. Of doing my take on a landscape show. At the time, the president was talking about selling off parts of the national park system and it seemed an apt metaphor for the way we were trading the most visible and beautiful parts of our country for short term profits. As I started working on the paintings that would become this show, though, it quickly grew to something beyond national parks. I started thinking about the landscapes and monuments of America and what they represent, to the believers and to the cynics. To the people this country has helped in so many ways, and to the many it has pushed aside or displaced. I thought about the endless scenes from movies where our recognizable landmarks are washed away or blown up. I thought about the Hudson River school and Edward Hopper and the countless other American artists over the years who have painted the American landscape in a way which said something about the times they lived in. I thought about being part of that long tradition.
It’s 2020 and we’re awaiting a pandemic to pass us by. I’ve been thinking about this show for two years now and it never occurred to me that when it arrived, it would do so silently and quietly, all of us hunkered away at home, looking at my story of America on screens. All those movies, all those novels, all of my paintings depicting a lost and empty future suddenly feel a bit too real.
In 2018 Donald Glover, under his musical alias Childish Gambino, released a video for his song titled This is America. It’s cinematic. It’s a beautiful and deeply scathing indictment of violence and race in our country. It feels chaotic and and claustrophobic and weirdly, confusingly, beautiful. It’s also thickly layered with cultural references, with everything from Jim Crow era imagery to Michael Jackson videos. There’s a sense of menace in it that feels hard to escape.
It’s 2020 I’m not sure I recognize the America I live in. There’s a sense of menace in this country that feels hard to escape. And yet despite that feeling, the future is not yet written. It’s not over for us. We still live in an endlessly beautiful country. We’ve chipped away at it, through deliberate efforts and our own carelessness. But it’s still there. It’s not to late to do something and I wanted to capture that sense of hope amidst some dark times.
It’s 2020. Welcome to the dystopia of your choosing. This Is America.” – Scott Listfield
MCKENZIE FISK “Good Luck Don’t Die“
McKenzie Fisk is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Fisk paints children and animals together through the lens of pop surrealism to represent a raw and unfiltered view of the childhood experience. Fisk believes that animals encounter new things with the same innocence as a child would due to not having a verbal language or any social obligations to the world around them. This is what makes animals the perfect subject to place in the same setting as her child protagonists. As her paintings help to illustrate, animals share the same sense of curiosity, joy, and silliness that children do.
Life can be stressful. Bogged down by responsibility and a seemingly unending list of daily tasks. Being happy is not a given. Life is hard, and it damages every one of us in some way as we enter adulthood. But we can be mended. The secret lies in active participation in these small, everyday moments that we have forgotten to enjoy. Ultimately that’s what Fisk’s work is all about, a reminder that those little moments are always there.
The juxtaposition of the strong, larger-than-life wild animal alongside the curious, seemingly fearless child opens many questions to the viewer. There is defined darkness here, a sense of immediate danger, but in light of that danger there is the fearlessness and gusto with which we should consciously engage in life. The use of geometric shapes along with bright and exaggerated colors lend a feeling of warped memory. The slight brokenness and pieced figures add motion, the disassembling and reassembling of themselves.
The artist adds, “As kids, we are unencumbered by physical limitations and largely unclouded by preconceived thoughts about the world. Most experiences are new, we lived those moments in the present, and simple things brought us the most joy.”
SEAN BANISTER “A Tourist At Home“
Sean Banister calls Riverside, California his home and we’re excited to offer him his first major solo showcase in Los Angeles. His is the classic tale of a creative who went the route of doing graphic design to pay his bills and lost site of his true love of drawing and painting. We’re thrilled to be able to help him make his original art his main priority again and are looking forward to watching Banister carve out his niche in the SoCal scene, and the world over.
Recently featured in the iconic “Everything But The Kitschen Sync” annual group show at La Luz De Jesus Gallery and already featured in some very prominent collections, Banister is an artist to watch.
