For this exhibition artists have created predominantly all white works, a choice which creates visual unity and evokes a sense of harmony, weightlessness, and freedom. However when examined on closer level it is apparent that all these works have contradictory elements working within and amongst each other that push and pull the viewer in opposing directions. These works are investigations of where states of being, matter, air and light cross over.

"It's an incredibly loaded subject- this diaphanous soup we live in…It feels primeval- there's a sense of the undifferentiated, the non hierarchical  It’s not exactly a dramatic light. In fact, ‘dramatic’ is exactly what it’s not. If anything it’s meditative. And there's something really peculiar about it… you get confronted with a strong contrasting duality: illumination and opacity. But when you have the kind of veiled light we get here more regularly you become aware of a sort of multiplicity – not illumination so much as luminosity. Southern California glows… the opacity melts away into translucency, and even transparency."

- Coy Howard, Architect, as quoted by Lawrence Weschler in "LA Glows",
  The New Yorker, Feb. 23rd 1998.

Peter Wu is honored to be nominated for The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Los Angeles Emerging Artists Grant.

Make sure to pick up the current copy of Fabrik Magazine, which features the second installment of 5790projects' "Emergent Presence: 8 LA Artists You Should Know," written by Matthew Gardocki and Catlin Moore. The column features LIz Craft, Natalie Labriola, Annie Lapin, Annelie McKenzie, Dylan Palmer, April Street, Peter Wu, and Eric Yahnker.

Greene Exhibitions proudly presents Shed No Tears for Broken Nails, its first solo exhibition with the artist Peter Wu. The artist will feature new works from his FFF and Zzyzx Rd. series, as well as introduce a new body of sound and sculpture works, Substantia Alba.

Beginning with his latest series, Substantia Alba (in medical parlance: the name for white nerve tissue that connects the brain and spinal cord), the artist creates an excavation site for his memory. Fragments of the past break free from the plaster like a Pompeian villa: the walls from his family-run restaurant, beloved tchotchkes, and other shapes are intermingled amongst the structure. Some are clear; others have lost much of their profile, or have been disfigured through the impacts that expose them. 

Accompanying the central excavation/sculpture is the sound of Wu's voice, recorded in 1998, recounting a memory from his childhood that frames the tone of the entire exhibition. The hero of the story, Wu’s father, passes along a small but significant trinket to the artist. Even though the years and several moves across the continent have claimed the object itself, the memory’s effect is undiminished. The interplay between the central work and the story emanates across the entire gallery, raising questions about the difference in meaning between objects that are and are not present. 

The latest updates to the Zzyzx Rd. series emerge from the playfulness and puns of the previous series to focus on the poetics of Wu’s arrangements. There are fewer identifiable moves, but each gesture is a bolder commitment to the object’s integrity. This preservation of the elements advances Wu's investigations into how memories can be both reimagined and reconstructed. 

The latest additions to the FFF series completes the artist’s dialectic of memory and material. The works succinctly state key elements of the entire exhibition: fragments of memory, familiar shapes of the past, and the passage of time that robs the past of its authentic detail. In “Shed No Tears for Broken Nails”, Wu renews the objects of the past, giving them a new life to haunt the present.

For more information please contact the gallery at + 1 323 876 0532 or info@greene-exhibitions.com

In Greene Park Gallery's first exhibition, Charnel House Scraps, we looked at the theoretical distance between an object's genesis and its new meaning and influence in both the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. The following exhibition, The Unfinished, focused on the artistic transition from the source material to the artist's creation of the newly-possible. Because the works still begged an action to bring about completion, the new extent of what was possible in the work was yet undefined, extending the new possibilities into the viewer's hands. Looking through the lens of the previous exhibitions, Raw Materials draws a course back to the inception of the artist's decision to alter or capitalize the original object or sign.

Eduardo Consuegra’s two artworks in Raw Materials bookend the range of work in this exhibition. Beginning with meticulously-chosen magazine advertisements that create new interplays from the artist's earliest memories, ads from vintage Colombian magazines for American products are carefully joined in collage to invent a déjà vu. Consuegra's other work is the symbolic counterpoint, pairing mass-produced paper stock with precisely color-matched, mass-produced domestic paint to create works that explore painting as a mechanical procedure combining two matching materials.

Michael Decker demonstrates how a specific material can offer innumerable permutations of signs. In Untitled (muffin tops), 2011, Decker amasses a collection of just under a dozen found wooden cutting boards in various novelty shapes. Then, in this the first of several unique installations of the cutting boards, he begins exploring the potential of this group by responding to the architecture and conditions in which they are shown. Still giving the appearance of ready-mades, the boards' found condition has been preserved under coats of polyurethane, leaving the work's raw state seemingly one step removed from their castoff status. Decker's interest in the mailability of material is expressed by treating the boards as a repeated mantra, whereby the meaning changes as the individual parts are explored for both their formal and narrative potential with the group.

Hearkening to the architectural themes that have informed her work, Rachel Foullon's Knot Drawing (Manger), 2011, and Rural Action (Wringing), 2010, wall-mounted sculptures made of wood and canvas, bestow industrial qualities to domestic materials. Their inherent softness and delicacy is frozen away by their tense arrangement: wood girding canvas caught in an act of labor and industry. There is no overt attempt made at obscuring the fact that these are two very basic substances mingling together, but Foullon's fixed twists and folds transform the expectations of the materials presented.

Jason Hwang's photographs construct a bridge between the literal and the figurative exploration of raw materials as artworks. In his triptych Speed (1994), 2010, Hwang's repeated images of a laserdisc of the film Speed mimic a work in a recent group exhibition at JB Jurve that featured the vibrating frames of the film paused in the middle of a climactic scene. When compared with his Negative Reconstruction, Visual Models series, the objects in both series assume greater formal possibilities as Hwang creates moments in light as material that exist in his dimension-defying staging.

Acting as the milepost between this and the first exhibition, Peter Wu presents new works from his Zzyzx Rd. series of sculptures. In the early works in the series, where he utilizes an excess of sense, Wu obscured the meanings of the objects he selected. Still searching to create new meanings and possibilities through the curated curios, Wu explores the interplay between objects that arises when his decisions in juxtapositions and alterations are minimized in order to capitalize on the original source object. Whether the artifacts of that past are authentic or Wu's subtle fiction, greater possibilities can play out between the histories of the objects on display.

Join us, True Believers, on the cloud-tainted, towering twelfth floor terror of the L.A. Mart (home of the Art Platform art fair), waaay above the reeling confusion and spiraling dizziness of the streets below, in order to contemplate our inability to grasp the ‘real’ in a culture of radical re-mediation...

Vertigo presents a mix of artists with radically disparate interests. Moving between different forms of pictorial iconography, this survey seeks to expand the proper confines of what a group show is ‘about’. Oblique references, fluid relationships between connections and overlapping moments or 'sets' of layered meaning encourage active cross pollination of ideas and intersecting areas of mutual intent. Mixing interests about abstraction, myth, comics, music, reportage and history into a single venue provides a fleeting snapshot of our understanding of the contemporary moment. 

This heady mix of established and emerging artists presents us with a wide view of what is going on in the bustling art world of LA today. As such, this exhibition is aimed at privileging multiple and incongruous readings of the possible connections between works while highlighting transitory moments of 'stable' meaning that issue from the play of intertextual and interpictorial allusions.