Press Release

Where The Girls Are
Launa Bacon, Beth Dubber, Tiffany Trenda and Lisa Wiscombe
July 10th-31st, 2008

Opening Thursday, July 10th, 7-9:30pm, performance Death of an Icon by Tiffany Trenda at 8:30pm, and open from noon during the Downtown Art Walk
Location The Continental Bldg, 408 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013
Open 12-4pm, Friday-Saturday or by appointment
Contact 213-385-5871 info@launabacon.com

Where The Girls Are, a group show featuring the work of Launa Bacon, Beth Dubber, Tiffany Trenda and Lisa Wiscombe, appropriates its title from Susan J. Douglas's book, Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media.  Douglas states:

            "Along with our parents, the mass media raised us, socialized us, entertained us, comforted, deceived us, disciplined us, told us what we could do and told us what we couldn't.  And they played a key role in turning each of us into not one woman but many women – a pastiche of all the good women and bad women that come to us through the printing presses, projectors, and airwaves of America.  This has been one of the mass media's most important legacies for female consciousness:  the erosion of anything resembling a unified self" (New York: Times Books, 1994, p.13).

All four artists (in photography, painting, sculpture, video, and performance) examine, imitate and confront assorted representational tropes, exploring and utilizing the myriad of ways in which women and the body are depicted.

Launa Bacon examines the presupposed construct of culture's visual landscape and explores the psychic states that frequently remain unnoticed in daily life primarily through painting, installation and video.  She graduated from Skidmore College, New York and earned her MFA from Goldsmiths, London. She has shown at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), McNish Gallery at Oxnard College (Oxnard, CA), NY Studio Gallery (New York City), Gerborgen Kamers, The Hague (Netherlands), and Andreas Binder Gallery (Munich).  Her paintings will be on view this summer at Brigitte Henninger Gallery (Munich). http://launabacon.com/

Beth Dubber's photographs capture both the subtle intimacies and absurdities of contemporary life, coyly commenting on the effects of pop culture and mass media on the human psyche. Her early influences stemmed from the late artist Masumi Hayashi in Cleveland, Ohio, and Rio Helmi in Bali, Indonesia, both of whom she studied under in the mid 1990's. Dubber's photographic series have taken her from Edgewater Beach in Cleveland to a rice-farming village in Bali and most recently to the streets of Los Angeles where she currently resides. In LA she works as a unit set photographer for the motion picture industry as well as shooting editorials for various magazines. http://bethdubber.com/

Tiffany Trenda's work is an investigation of body, space and technology. She questions how the body is interpreted and redefined through the machine.  She remarks, “We are all bodies of flesh and a network of information.”  Trenda is a graduate of Art Center College of Design and is based out of Malibu, CA.  She works with performance, video installation, and photography. She has exhibited at Robert Berman Gallery, Farmani Gallery, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Track 16, Photo San Francisco and is a Finalist of London International Creative Competition. Trenda is scheduled to perform at this year’s, Photo LA.  http://www.tiffanytrenda.com/

Lisa Wiscombe“Desire and experiment will find what it is looking for: the beautiful solution.” After completing her BA in Studio Art at UC Irvine, Wiscombe expanded formal methods of art making into digital media.  She spent several years in Vienna, Austria, returning to LA as a creative director in commercial design.  Her work has been featured in +Rosebud series “Blindtext” and “Action” (Ralf Herms, Gestalten Verlag, Berlin) and published in GRAFUCK 3 (Peter Vattanatham, Me, Me Los Angeles). She has shown at The Gallery of Functional Art and Lois Lambert Gallery (Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA), Thinkspace (Los Angeles), The Erotic Museum of Art (Hollywood, CA), SoHo Gallery (Studio City, CA) and Cartelle Gallery (Marina del Rey, CA).  http://www.lisawiscombe.com/