The work of Ree Morton continues to inspire many artists since her untimely death in 1977 at the age of 41. Join Los Angeles-based artists Jade Gordon, Katie Grinnan, and Evan Holloway for an online Zoom conversation about Morton and her legacy. Moderated by ICA LA Goodworks Executive Director Anne Ellegood.

Pre-registration required. Please RSVP.

The exhibition Ree Morton: The Plant That Heals May Also Poison can be viewed online at Virtual ICA LA.

About the artists:
Jade Gordon (b. 1975, Santa Rosa, CA) is a founding member of the art collective, My Barbarian. Her collaborative work uses performance to theatricalize social problems and imagine ways of being together. Exploring the legacies of feminist theory, performance art history, political theater and social movements, Gordon makes plays, costumes, masks, puppets, and videos. She has a concurrent collaborative practice with Megan Whitmarsh, creating videos, performances, installation and events which engage the community.

Gordon has presented work as part of My Barbarian in many museums including MoMA, New York, NY, USA; MoCA LA, Los Angeles, CA, USA; and SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA, USA; and in festivals, galleries and public spaces, along with projects at the New Museum, New York, NY, USA; and Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, USA. My Barbarian was included in two Performa Biennials, two California Biennials, the Biennale de Montréal, and the Whitney Biennial. They have received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Creative Capital, Art Matters, and the City of LA, and were the recipient of the 2018 United States Artists Fellowship. Whitmarsh’s collaboration with Jade Gordon “OURCHETYPES” was recently included in the 2018 Made in L.A. exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA. My Barbarian will be presenting a 20-year survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2021. Gordon holds an M.A. in Applied Theater Arts from USC. She is also a practitioner of Theater of the Oppressed techniques.

Evan Holloway (b. 1967, Whittier, CA) has identified with Los Angeles since the beginning of his career integrating a distinct West Coast art-historical tradition. His hands-on approach to sculpture evolved when the dominant discourse in art had moved away from presenting objects in space as a site of aesthetic investigation. What he describes as an “analog counterrevolution” is a one-man paean to the belief that stand-alone sculpture can be both conceptually complex and accessible to a general audience. Holloway creates objects suffused with a prickly beauty that is both personal and universal.

Evan Holloway has been featured in numerous institutional exhibitions, including The Sculpture Park, Madhavendra Palace, Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, India (2017); Los Angeles - a fiction, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017) and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2016); Don’t Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA, The Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles (2016); Lightness of Being, Public Art Fund, City Hall Park, New York (2013); All of this and nothing, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011); the 2008 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2008); The Uncertainty of Objects & Ideas, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2006); and Whitney Biennial 2002, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Public collections include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Holloway holds an MFA from UCLA.

Katie Grinnan (b. 1970, Richmond, Virginia) makes work that stems from the body, specifically the relationship between visual, kinesthetic and cognitive experience, and the way these different knowledge systems affect one’s perception of reality and sense of self. Most recently her focus has incorporated various states of consciousness such as meditation and dreaming. Many of her sculptures use performed gestures as a system of movement. These mapped motion systems are often in conversation with mapped data systems from different ideological frameworks, ranging from astrology charts to EEG diagrams. These diagrams are translated into instruments, sounds, scores, and choreographies favoring experiential and somatic interpretations of the information.

She has had solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, ACME gallery, Brennan and Griffin gallery, Diverse Works, the Hammer Museum, LAXART and most recently at Commonwealth and Council. Group exhibitions include the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Real World: The Dissolving Space of Experience at Modern Art Oxford, The Artist Museum at MOCA and People at Deitch Los Angeles. Public collections include MOCA, the Hammer Museum, and LACMA. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Grant, California Community Foundation Fellowship and most recently a COLA Fellowship in 2019. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and is an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach. Grinnan holds an MFA from UCLA.