Rick Bahto

October 26, 2013 – November 30, 2013
Opening Saturday, October 26th, 6-9pm
Screenings:
Sunday, October 27th 7pm
Friday, November 15th 7pm
Friday, November 29th 7pm

Jancar Jones is pleased to announce an exhibit of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Rick Bahto. The exhibit will include a selection of photographs and two accompanying 16mm films that will be screened at scheduled times throughout the run of the show.

In his recent work Bahto has become primarily concerned with the intuitive exploration of large collections of material as a way of generating performances, films, and photographs. The processes of photography are central in every stage of these works, which often involve many layers of contact printing, re-photography, enlargement, or projection.

This exhibit will focus on a selection of works from the series Compositions, which is comprised of 16mm films, 35mm slides, and C-prints. The project began with hundreds of 35mm snapshots of found “still lifes” that Bahto photographed on the side of the road around Los Angeles over the course of a year and a half. Prints of these images were then treated as objects in spontaneous arrangements determined by simple chance procedures, producing work in a variety of formats that, while presenting similar formal compositions, were created through distinctly different series of events.

The dichotomy between the casual and the controlled highlights the various phases in the objecthood of the found subjects Bahto photographs and the resulting works that are produced. While the choice of image content creates a method, the subjects themselves are randomly encountered. How the photographs are subsequently re-photographed or re-presented is similarly split between process and accident. The printed photographs may mimic the subjects, but that subject can also become secondary to the shapes and forms the arranged, re-photographed prints create.

To coincide with his exhibit of photographs looking at photographs, Bahto will also curate a program of windows looking at windows. For a couple of nights, a looped program of short films (the subject in each of these being windows) by Pablo Valencia will be projected onto the storefront window of the gallery. The screenings will start at dusk and run continuously for approximately 2.5 hours, perhaps beginning on Sunday, November 10th and ending around Tuesday, November 12th.

Rick Bahto (b. New Jersey, 1981) lives and works in Los Angeles and has exhibited his work at a variety of museums, galleries, microcinemas, film festivals, conferences, alternative spaces, and scenic locations across several continents. He was commissioned to create a new work for Monday Evening Concerts’ 2010-11 series, was artist-in-residence in Echo Park Film Center’s LA AIR program in 2011, and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award in 2012. He has collaborated on live performance works with composers Casey Anderson, Luciano Chessa, Julia Holter, and Mark So, and has participated in performances of works by these and other composers. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and has himself taught at the Echo Park Film Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Otis College of Art and Design.

For more information please email us or visit jancarjones.com.
Jancar Jones Gallery is located at 1031 N. Broadway in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

1031 N. BROADWAY

LOS ANGELES, CA 90012
http://www.jancarjones.com