Exhibition

Charles LaBelle

Exhibition by Charles LaBelle

December 17th,2011 - January 25th, 2012

Number 1 Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Charles LaBelle, with an ambitious architecturally inspired drawing installation by American artist Charles LaBelle. 

Begun fourteen years ago, Buildings Entered is an ongoing, lifetime project in which LaBelle documents every building he physically enters.  Currently, there are over thirteen thousand buildings in the archive, with additional buildings being added almost daily.  Conceptual in nature, the project is both a diary and a historical document in which the artist’s own life and the space of the world intersect.

Recorded photographically, with the photos themselves never exhibited, LaBelle selects certain buildings to render in watercolor pencil atop gesso painted pages torn from a relevant theoretical tome.  These public drawings are incidental to the individual physical and philosophical encounter between the artist and the penetrated space, be it a famous landmark or a conspicuous 7-11. Asides from obvious profiles to specific urban geographies, indicative architectural nuances, and concurrent cultural characteristics, LaBelle’s art reflects personal behaviour patterns, as well as approaches to process, time-based, and performance art. 

For his first solo project in Thailand, the Hong Kong-based artist will present two bodies of drawings, the 200-composite sketches in the body focused Corpus, alongside the newly created site-responsive series of 100 drawings, A Kind of Counter Sublime (Bangkok Selects 2008 | 2010 \ 2011). Highlighted in a newly published book, the Corpus drawings focus on buildings associated with the human body, such as massage parlors, hospitals, beauty salons, and tattoo studios.  

Presented as single moments in a larger continuous narrative that is never actually told, A Kind of Counter Sublime (Bangkok Selects 2008 | 2010 \ 2011), is both a celebration and critique of what Walter Benjamin called the "phantasmagoria of the modern metropolis".  A parallel to the structural aesthetics of city outside, the installation comprises a parasitic wooden structure that creates a new environment within the gallery. 

LaBelle received his undergraduate degree from UCLA where, in the early-1980s, he studied with artists Charles Ray, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, among others.  He later went on to do graduate work at the prestigious UCLA film school before leaving to pursue art full time in 1990. He has exhibited in numerous international spaces including the Neuberger Museum in New York; Para/Site in Hong Kong; Art Pace in San Antonio, Texas; Chisenhale Gallery in London; and the recent Singapore Biennale. His work is housed in several institutional and corporate collections, such as The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; The Berkeley Art Museum; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Deutsche Bank Collection; and The Microsoft Collection.

---

---