a partipatory project artist

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fertile creatures (series)
drawing
composting diaper
sapphire pacifier
onesie armor
infant vampire formula

photos
belly back
boob shoulder
crows
c-section cut path

preditorXtreme (series)
sculpture
fox gun
baby quail grenades

drawings
coyote sight
fox guns
prairie dog revolver
baby quail grenades

the dead garden (series)
Winter Shack, Brooklyn, NY
High Desert Test Sites, CA

the portable forest (series)
Dumbo Arts Center & Festival, NYC
The Armory Center for the Arts, CA
The San Deigo Museum of Art
Monte Vista Projects, LA
Sunset Blvd. Art Concert, LA
Human Resources, LA
Washington Blvd. Art Concert, LA
Woodbury Hollywood Exhibitions
Sea and Space Explorations, LA

participatory
you are the largest thing on Earth
art of exchange
primal scream painting booth
we
miss
wish

sculpture/installation
data planter
yard
search
loop
blue kiss
island of misfit toys

concept paintings
student waste painting
portal paintings
black holes
LED Paintings

videos
Periphery Murder Mystery
Paradigm Shifts Frighten Small...
A Flat Ontology
born free

performative
Digital Improvisational Ensemble

public art places
organizer, curator, director
sea and space explorations, LA
tree and space, LA
sound in space Festival, LA
100 person solo show, LA

 
Lara Bank

Sea and Space ExplorationsLara Bank
Director & Founder
participatory project • place artwork • 501(c)(3) non-profit art gallery
Los Angeles, CA
June 2007 - August 2010
seaandspace.org

What is/was Sea and Space?
An artwork. A gallery. A place.

Sea and Space is a gallery Bank founded in June 2007 that operates as an artwork. Bank considers it a Place Artwork, which she defined as a spatial location to be occupied by the artwork, statements, and thoughts of others. In this case, the others were artists, guest curators, lecturers, and collaborators. Bank's role can be described as Director of the gallery and Context Developer of this artwork. Bank carefully crafted the mission, the format, and the operations from its inception and then refined much of this with the advice from our Board of Directors over time. From 2007 - 2010 this was a solo project with the support of a board of five, which formed after the first year.

Programmatically, Bank ran this project under a simple theory that if you represent challenging projects where the people that make them live and work, then it will draw in others who also make strong work, who can then be shown. This continued to compound and appeared to be limitless. Bank chose to operate on an alternate model to a commercial art space. Her goal was to foster, through appreciation and support, artistic practices that are dependent upon alternate means for visibility. She did so with the certainty that without such forms of support, artists who make work that is not marketable due to conceptual, political, formal, or social differences will remain culturally undervalued.Lara Bank
Sea and Space by Lara Bank, facade, 2008.


Press:

Mayer, Anna, “Letter from Los Angeles,” Proximity, #6, Winter 2009-2010, pp.131-132.

Calvin, "QUEER TERRITORIES at Sea and Space Explorations," The New Gay, April 13, 2010, online publication - PDF

Herbst, Robby, “A Map for An Other LA,”
The LLano Del Rio working group, Dec 2009.

"What to Do This Weekend,"
Daily Candy Los Angeles, Culture section, Aug 2009, online. - HTML

Ward, Alie, “Gallery on a Shoestring,”
Brand X: The LA Times (Vol. 12, No. 21, week of August 26, 2009) Interview. - JPG (327KB)

Ward, Alie, “The Little Gallery Doing Big Weird Things,”
Metromix: The LA Times (Vol. 2, Iss. 6, Feb. 11-17, 2009), cover story & interview - PDF

Denny, Drew, “Sound in Space 2,”
L.A. Record, pg. 15 (Vol. 3, Issue 12, Feb. 2009). - PDF (986KB) (interview)

Szupinska, Joanna, "The Other LA Art Scene: Part I,"
FlashArt Online Issue (March/April 2008). - PDF

Bargar, Lesley, "Buzz - At Your Service: Street Smart,"
LA Magazine, pg. 66 ( March 2008).- JPG (592K)

Villafane, Andie, "artspotting: gallery (p)reviews," Citizen LA, Issue Feb 2008 - JPG (300K)

Zolghadr, Tirdad, "How German is it?"
Frieze Magazine, Issue 111 (Nov-Dec 2007) - PDF

Marcoux, Patrick, "Conspiracy and Economy: Chris Bassett @ Sea and Space Explorations, LA,"
Noah Becker's White Hot Magazine of Contemporary Art (October 2007).- PDF
 
 
Lara Bank
Sea and Space Three Hour Tour by Lara Bank at the Torrance Art Museum, 2010.

Sea and Space was presented as an artwork in the form of historical photo documentation with curated performances, presentations, and previous participants artworks.
 
Lara Bank
Lara Bank


MISSION STATEMENT

The sea and space are uninhabitable and inhospitable regions, yet they are essential to life. We navigate these environments using technology that provides only a dim understanding of what is both familiar and unfamiliar, easy to see but impossible to fathom. They are targets for conquest whose expansiveness resists us.

These two spheres bracket us, literally and metaphorically as representatives of worlds beyond, portholes into what we have yet to discover about ourselves. They are grounds for exploration and intense risk-taking; we rewrite and restructure our world with what we find.

Sea and Space Explorations strives to create a hiccough beyond the binaries of good and bad, market constraints, and notions of progress, where artists who are genuinely engaged in the specificities of their own practice can come to take the risks that are entirely their own. This space will primarily be dedicated to artwork that has historically been termed "conceptual," "theoretical," "political" or "alternative," terms that are loose and applicable to all media. Sea and Space vigorously supports the autonomy of artists, lecturers, guest curators, and collaborators, especially with regard to the presentation of their work.

GOALS

1. To steer towards work that resists capitalization as the gallery operates as a capitalist critique of sorts.

2. We seek works that are either relational, collaborative, large scale, ephemeral, video, performance, neo-conceptual, or in traditional mediums that would have a really hard time fitting into a commercial gallery.

3. We aim to support work that is marginal and not as supported due to content, scale, longevity, or conceptual reasons.

4.We are deeply committed to work that has strong content with little visibility.

5. We support artists and their endeavors over objects. The space is more of an exploratorium or experience for artists engaging within their practice than it is a gallery.

© 2024 L. Bank