Following a successful Thomas Lawson exhibition produced by LA><ART at Participant Inc in New York in 2009, Participant Inc in turn presents solo exhibitions by Laura Parnes and Lovett/Codagnone as part of a continued exchange. This collaboration between the two non-profit galleries highlights the role that these organizations play in their respective cities, offering an alternative voice and a set of production conditions determined by experimentation and innovation. 

The exhibition in Gallery One will debut a new video installation by Laura Parnes, entitled County Down. As with many of her past projects, Parnes aims to blur the lines between conventions of storytelling, integrating video art and narrative. Laura Parnes’ County Down is a cross-platform, episodic, single-channel video that explores an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community that coincides with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug. Mirroring rave culture and the unbridled optimism in technology of the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically embraces its own destruction. The film’s protagonist is an adolescent girl who develops a designer drug with potentially apocalyptic side effects. The cast of County Down features a diverse group of multi-generational, New York-based artists and performers.

The exhibition in Gallery Two, Lovett/Codagnone: Make Anarchy and Disorder Your Trademarks, further elaborates a consistent evolution in Lovett/Codagnone’s work, tracing a trajectory from the use of self-reflexive strategies, to specifically address issues of collective identity and the absorption of underground tactics of resistance. In the gallery, a group of performative objects, including bullhorns and a convex mirror, imply a fetishization of power in relation to a collective that must be controlled. The objects insinuate both protest and apathy, or an urgent yet futile proposal to act. The ubiquitous circled “A” forming the Anarchy symbol, already drained by repetition in the public sphere, is further deprived of its public history, in the form of a domesticated quilt. 

Outside, (on view facing north on La Cienega Blvd. in between Washington and Venice), a billboard depicts a fallen American flag (April 30–May 27).