OPEN STUDIO
Adam Beris, Mike Nesbit Jerry Peña, Daniel Paul Schubert, 2022
Los Angeles, CA
"Her example taught me: you don't bracket yourself; you can do whatever you want to do, and you don't let anyone tell you that you make art of a certain kind, or in certain materials or of a certain kind.”
- Tracey Emin, "Tracey Emin on the iconic Louise Bourgeois: 'Working with her was like holding hands with history'", Evening Standard, 31 January 2022.
How do you build a foundation? You start with a site, you question its context, you question its boundaries, you question its program, and you question its community engagement at various scales. Then you start to dig, the higher you want to go up, the further you must dig down. The key with a proper foundation is that it is all connected, as every piece of rebar interlocks with its neighbor and the foundation gives support and interdependence to walls that shape space. The walls have a practical use as they provide certain levels of comfort from the outside environment. Openings and voids within the walls are chosen strategically to orchestrate and embrace the landscape, its light and shadow, its warmth and breeze. The walls also bring pause for reflection at a time of stillness, where we can appreciate the moment before complete enclosure. A vulnerable moment within the process with many unknowns ahead, a moment that can question direction and our own internal judgment; an optimistic presence of limitless opportunity for moving forward, standing still, or looking back. Let us take this time to celebrate.
Adam Beris, Mike Nesbit Jerry Peña, Daniel Paul Schubert, 2022
Los Angeles, CA
"Her example taught me: you don't bracket yourself; you can do whatever you want to do, and you don't let anyone tell you that you make art of a certain kind, or in certain materials or of a certain kind.”
- Tracey Emin, "Tracey Emin on the iconic Louise Bourgeois: 'Working with her was like holding hands with history'", Evening Standard, 31 January 2022.
How do you build a foundation? You start with a site, you question its context, you question its boundaries, you question its program, and you question its community engagement at various scales. Then you start to dig, the higher you want to go up, the further you must dig down. The key with a proper foundation is that it is all connected, as every piece of rebar interlocks with its neighbor and the foundation gives support and interdependence to walls that shape space. The walls have a practical use as they provide certain levels of comfort from the outside environment. Openings and voids within the walls are chosen strategically to orchestrate and embrace the landscape, its light and shadow, its warmth and breeze. The walls also bring pause for reflection at a time of stillness, where we can appreciate the moment before complete enclosure. A vulnerable moment within the process with many unknowns ahead, a moment that can question direction and our own internal judgment; an optimistic presence of limitless opportunity for moving forward, standing still, or looking back. Let us take this time to celebrate.
Photos Courtesy of Taiyo Watanabe
Video Courtesy of Mike Nesbit
Photos Courtesy of Mike Nesbit
Daniel Paul Schubert Performance:
Video Courtesy of Michael Rollins
About the Artists:
Adam Beris has created his own unique hieroglyphic language of distilled imagery often constructed with paint straight from the tube. Routinely aligned in a grid-like fashion, his compositions of objects and heads in profile conversely embody both a strictly scientific study and a loose informal rendering. Beheaded profiles float across a gradient orange canvas next to a cactus, some glasses, and a hashtag; how each item relates to the next is left up to interpretation. Because of this, even in abstract blobs of paint, the viewer learns to see characters and still-lifes, and even his looser compositions hold symbolism in their layered paint globules.
Born in Milwaukee, WI in 1987, Adam received a dual degree in Painting and Creative Writing from Kansas City Art Institute in 2009. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad including at Over the Influence, Hong Kong (2019), Guerrero Gallery , San Francisco (2019), Y53, Los Angeles (2018); Fabien Castanier Gallery Los Angeles (2017); The Late Show, Kansas City (2011). Beris was also included in the exhibition Bounding Boundaries at the MCC Longview Cultural Center in Lee’s Summit, MO (2013). Adam currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
www.instagram.com/adamberis
Mike Nesbit is a fine artist based in Los Angeles. With a background in architecture, his multidisciplinary trajectory greatly informs his artwork, allowing Nesbit to explore areas between art and architecture with a focus on technique, repetition, and representation. Nesbit has participated in solo and group shows throughout the United States. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and played four years of professional baseball with the Seattle Mariners.
www.mikenesbit.com
From North Long Beach California, Jerry Peña explores what defines his cultural identity as a first generation Mexican American in his work. Jerry incorporates materials rooted in the manual labor jobs his parents have held since arriving in the country. Along with these materials Jerry also integrates found objects from flea markets and swap meets as well as items collected from his daily scavenging around the city of Los Angeles. These items stem from the various subcultures that have shaped his upbringing. American nostalgia, Kustom Kulture, and the Chicano experience all come together in conversation with art movements like Minimalism, Rasquachismo, and Abstract Expressionism to engulf the viewer in texture, color, and imagery that feel specific to a certain place and context.
www.jerryalexispena.com
Daniel Paul Schubert is an artist based out of Los Angeles California near where he was born. His time is divided between working in his home studio, professionally over the road as a truck driver, and on an undeveloped piece of family land, called blue-ridge, where he works with the land and builds site specific pieces. Schubert considers all of this to be part of his practice, whether it’s moving along the land and road, restoring old hand tools, maintaining land, vehicles, and home; it all leads back and reflects in the studio. He is a collector and gatherer, a fan of fallen and salvaged material, often time, through time, these things become something else that last, or else they are used up until they can no longer serve a purpose. Notable exhibitions include The Shed Echo Park, Arvia Los Angeles, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection Chicago, and Garash Galleria CDMX.
www.danielpaulschubert.com
Adam Beris has created his own unique hieroglyphic language of distilled imagery often constructed with paint straight from the tube. Routinely aligned in a grid-like fashion, his compositions of objects and heads in profile conversely embody both a strictly scientific study and a loose informal rendering. Beheaded profiles float across a gradient orange canvas next to a cactus, some glasses, and a hashtag; how each item relates to the next is left up to interpretation. Because of this, even in abstract blobs of paint, the viewer learns to see characters and still-lifes, and even his looser compositions hold symbolism in their layered paint globules.
Born in Milwaukee, WI in 1987, Adam received a dual degree in Painting and Creative Writing from Kansas City Art Institute in 2009. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad including at Over the Influence, Hong Kong (2019), Guerrero Gallery , San Francisco (2019), Y53, Los Angeles (2018); Fabien Castanier Gallery Los Angeles (2017); The Late Show, Kansas City (2011). Beris was also included in the exhibition Bounding Boundaries at the MCC Longview Cultural Center in Lee’s Summit, MO (2013). Adam currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
www.instagram.com/adamberis
Mike Nesbit is a fine artist based in Los Angeles. With a background in architecture, his multidisciplinary trajectory greatly informs his artwork, allowing Nesbit to explore areas between art and architecture with a focus on technique, repetition, and representation. Nesbit has participated in solo and group shows throughout the United States. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and played four years of professional baseball with the Seattle Mariners.
www.mikenesbit.com
From North Long Beach California, Jerry Peña explores what defines his cultural identity as a first generation Mexican American in his work. Jerry incorporates materials rooted in the manual labor jobs his parents have held since arriving in the country. Along with these materials Jerry also integrates found objects from flea markets and swap meets as well as items collected from his daily scavenging around the city of Los Angeles. These items stem from the various subcultures that have shaped his upbringing. American nostalgia, Kustom Kulture, and the Chicano experience all come together in conversation with art movements like Minimalism, Rasquachismo, and Abstract Expressionism to engulf the viewer in texture, color, and imagery that feel specific to a certain place and context.
www.jerryalexispena.com
Daniel Paul Schubert is an artist based out of Los Angeles California near where he was born. His time is divided between working in his home studio, professionally over the road as a truck driver, and on an undeveloped piece of family land, called blue-ridge, where he works with the land and builds site specific pieces. Schubert considers all of this to be part of his practice, whether it’s moving along the land and road, restoring old hand tools, maintaining land, vehicles, and home; it all leads back and reflects in the studio. He is a collector and gatherer, a fan of fallen and salvaged material, often time, through time, these things become something else that last, or else they are used up until they can no longer serve a purpose. Notable exhibitions include The Shed Echo Park, Arvia Los Angeles, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection Chicago, and Garash Galleria CDMX.
www.danielpaulschubert.com