Poem for E.L.
New Installation and Performance series by Maya Gurantz
October 21st- November 19th, 2023
LA Artcore, 120 Judge John Aiso St, LA, CA – 90012
Open Thursday – Sunday 12:00 – 4:00 PM
EVENTS:
Exhibition Opens: October 21, from 6 – 8 pm, inaugural performance by the Artist
Reception for the artist: November 4, from 5 – 8 pm, with the Artist’s performance world premiere: “3 for E.L.”
Performance starts at 6:00 PM
Every Sunday, “Excavations” from 1:00 to 2:00 pm, with the artist performing live in the gallery.
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Prospect Art presents, “Poem for E.L.,” an immersive installation and performance series by Maya Gurantz at LA Artcore, challenging the narratives surrounding a haunting moment in the city’s history through dance performance, video, and expanded cinema works. Maya Gurantz is the first recipient of what has now become Prospect Art’s yearly NEW WORK: Focus on Los Angeles Grant. Prospect Art is dedicated to breaking down barriers and fostering the exchange of information and expertise to advance artists’ careers while forming strong partnerships within the community. Our approach involves active collaboration with like-minded not-for-profit organizations. For this exhibition we are proud to unite with LA Artcore, a nonprofit art institution committed to nurturing creativity, encouraging exploration, and amplifying the voices of both local and global residents. LA Artcore also plays a pivotal role in championing established and emerging contemporary artists.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In 2013, surveillance footage of a woman, taken hours before her death in a downtown Los Angeles rooftop water tank, was released to the public by the LAPD to identify her body. The footage instantly went viral, becoming fodder for online conspiracy theories, schlock horror shows, and true crime documentaries.
In Poem for E.L., a body of work in dance and video, artist Maya Gurantz uses the body and surrealist and speculative filmmaking to undermine the violence of the narratives imposed on this woman's story as it proliferated in media culture. As the inaugural recipient of Prospect Art's NEW WORK: FOCUS ON LOS ANGELES award, the complete body of work will premiere as an immersive installation this November at LA Artcore.
When Gurantz first encountered the story on the news, she predicted how it would be compressed into genres of unsolved mystery, horror, and true crime—all storytelling forms in which patriarchal order, threatened by monstrous chaos, ultimately becomes restored.
In response, Gurantz was moved to learn the physical movements from the surveillance video, second-by-second, as precisely and directly as possible. This began an eight-year process of working like a somatic detective, choreographically and cinematographically. The resulting sequence of performances, and videos in shot and manipulated found footage elevates the inchoate intelligence of the body, striving not to "solve the mystery” but to leave the artist and viewer more alert to the limits of not-knowing.
In so doing, Gurantz provides an alternative to the capitalist and misogynistic exploitation of E.L.'s story and the reductive analysis of mental illness and spiritual experience to which people so readily default when they aren't willing to face the limits of what they cannot understand.
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Maya Gurantz is an LA-based artist and writer who interrogates social imaginaries of American culture, and how constructions of gender, race, class, and progress operate in our shared myths, public rituals, and private desires. She's shown her videos, performances, installations, and social practice projects at the MCA Denver, Grand Central Art Center, Catharine Clark Gallery, MoCA Utah, Oakland Museum of California, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, Navel LA, Art Center College of Design, Goat Farm Atlanta, Great Wall of Oakland, High Desert Test Sites, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. She was a recipient of the inaugural Pieter Performance Grant for Dancemakers and an Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation. Maya is a regular contributor to The LA Review of Books (where her essay, Kompromat, was the most-read article of 2019), and has written for This American Life, East of Borneo, The Frame at KPCC, The Awl, Notes on Looking, Avidly, Acid-Free, and an anthology, CRuDE, published by the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges. ———————————————————————
LA Artcore is a non-profit art space dedicated to the creative exploration, discovery, and expression of Los Angeles and global residents while supporting the careers of established and emerging contemporary artists. Artcore reflects the global perspectives of Los Angeles by engaging contemporary artists as the visual and performing conduits of and for the residents and communities in which they live, work and serve. Since 1979, LA Artcore has mounted twenty-four exhibits in the two gallery spaces as well as supporting programs.———————————————————————
Prospect Art would like to acknowledge Yev Kozachuk, CFP® - Financial Advisor at Edward Jones (PH: 847-768-5407) for his generous sponsorship of this exhibition.