Kevin Lucero Less
Canoga Park
Los Angeles
Culver City
Hollywood Nocturne
Hollywood Nocturne
Hollywood Nocturne
re-en-act-ment
re-en-act-ment
re-en-act-ment
Editor Note: Kevin and Nathan have shown together while undergrad students at the University of Arizona. Britko Arts is proud to have them show together again. nb
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Los Angeles is a kind of anti-New York, void of art and soul, a city that has no real center and is a series of neighborhoods on route to some highway by the sea. It's anonymous, amorphous, full of camouflage, so that we can hide in plain sight and become our very own chameleon. Los Angeles and its suburbs by the sea, are emblematic of modern life, where places become "no place", and where psyche has to define itself against a void, an invisible culture in which faces disappear and then reappear in some different landscape. Hollywood is a place where white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy can keep inventing itself, its the new plantation, getting more chic with the times. This dystopia is a corporate kingdom that's a bit like the Emerald City of Oz, where a bunch of frightened wizards hold on to their bad taste and bag of tricks, trying to feed the entire planet some ideal of a homogenized America, a planet Hollywood.
When Hollywood calls, they come, they crest the hills; smog creates a vertiginous gap between the two landscapes, establishing an unsettling connection between the dreamy, if fraught, narratives of national expansion and the dream palaces of Hollywood itself-L.A. as natural extension of the American frontier, L.A. as bizarre alternative universe, a shimmering America beyond America, and everything that is wrong with America. Palm trees finger the sky, and there's enough sunshine to lay some off on Chicago. But that's all on top. L.A., truth to tell, is not much different than a pretty girl with the clap, or worse. Los Angeles is essentially deracinated, without center, without roots; coming to rest on a beach in California, and the colonizing, westward expansion literally running out of land. Fordism fed consumerism, and L.A. is the city that has been most influenced in its developement and design by the existence of the car, the geography of L.A. was decided long before the introduction of the automobile, it remains extremely cut off without wheels, binding the consumer to Fordisim consumerism, and war laden oil.
You think you know Southern California, you've seen the pictures: palm trees, sunsets, swimming pools, oceans and mountain springs. The first five hours-five and a half-you are treated to the worlds most barren desolation. The Mojave Desert. Telephone poles are stuck in a big hunk of asphalt to hold them upright. The asphalt is boiling. You think: this is Southern California, who does the public relations on this place! This is the state I'm in. California. So much is true here, so much is open; so much is honest and so much is impossible to admit.
Kevin Lucero Less's works address L.A. memories and cultural truths, by implementing L.A. practices of camouflage, cryptic myth making, counterfeit commerce culture, and selling of the City of Angels as homogenized America.
BIOGRAPHY
EDUCATION
The University of Arizona BFA summa cum laude honors 2003,
The American Academy of Dramatic Arts BA company 1999,
The National Holistic Institute CMT with distinction 2001.
COLLECTIONS
Tucson Museum of Art, Iowa Biennial Print Archives, Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Americas Biennial Research Archives, University of Arizona, Cook Collection, and American Medical Response Corporation.
SELECTIVE SHOWS
Albuquerque Museum of Art, Sundance Film Festival, Tucson Museum of Art, Tribeca Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Sundance Institute at Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Art Institute Chicago, Evanston Art Center, Cool Globes at Field Museum Chicago, Mesa Contemporary Arts, Plus Gallery, Lessedra Gallery, Lionel Rombach Gallery, Brooks Barrow Gallery, Anne Loucks Gallery, L.A. International Film Festival, Reno Film Festival, Dixie Film Festival, TGAFP Austin Film Festival, Silver Lake Film Festival, Cine Vegas Film Festival, Eurasian Film Festival, and The Art Center Highland Park.
PUBLISHED ARTICLES
New American Paintings, Travel + Leisure Magazine, Shade Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Sundance Channel, Independent Film Channel, Apple iTunes, Studio Visit Magazine, and Tucson Home Magazine