Saturday, November 27, 2010
Preview 6-8pm
Performance at 7 pm

For his performance Talking About My Drawings with Escorts, Los Angeles based artist Joe Sola will perform a walk-through of his roughly rendered coloured pencil drawings on paper with two hired escorts in tow. The escorts, not having seen the work prior to this first encounter will pose questions to the artist about his works with titles including Totally Fucked Button, Inmates Waiting for Visitation, and Take Me to Your Gay Bar. The artist's and escorts' conversation will create a specialized discourse around art making, process and the pleasure of the dissemination of meaning. Continuing his mining of the apocalyptic nature of masculinity as it is constructed through Hollywood, Sola’s drawings of perverse puritan hats, tic-tac-toe with cocks and balls, and a land mover shoveling art history into a ditch, seem to suggest that we are all ‘totally fucked’.
For his last solo show in London Sola filled a gallery with shirtless male fashion models whom he hired to make conceptual art. Given only the instruction to use all of the materials available and to work for a prescribed period of time, the content of the work-within-the-work was devised entirely by the models themselves, who thus became artists, while still maintaining their status of eroticized object in front of the viewers gaze.
When it comes to the work of Sola, the audience is subject to a bolt from the blue. Whether Sola is leaping out of his studio window mid conversation or being tackled by audience members and hung by his underwear on a hook in the gallery wall, his work induces in the viewer a jubilant yet uncomfortable laughter.
Joe Sola’s recent solo exhibitions include I found some Bic pens by the railroad tracks at The Happy Lion, Los Angeles (2010), Male Fashion Models Make Conceptual Art at Hilary Crisp Gallery, London (2008) and New York Mega Millions and other work, at Bespoke Gallery (2008), New York, Taking a Bullet, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles (2005). Sola’s work has been included in Hard Targets: Masculinity and American Sport at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH(2010), Vancouver Biennale, Vancouver, BC, Canada(2009-2011), Dark Mirror: Artists Videos at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007), Reckless Behavior at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2006), and The California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach(2002).