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Exhibitions:

"Strong Winds Ahead" Francois Ghebaly Los Angeles July 29, 2023-September 9, 2023 Curated by Lekha Jandhyala-Carlos Agredano – Monira Al Qadiri – Farah Al Qasimi – Ragini Bhow – Sayre Gomez – Camille Henrot – Shana Hoehn – iris yirei hu – Rindon Johnson – Maia Ruth Lee – Vijay Masharani – Harold Mendez – Eli Ping – Edgar Ramirez – Molly Segal – Andrew Sendor – April Street –
Gray Wielebinski

 

"All The Lonely People"Travelling exhibition, BerlinSeptember 25–October 10, 2021 and LAXART December 4, 2021- January 22,2022 Los Angeles-Curated by Nana Bahlmann for Villa Aurora/Thomas Mann House Saâdane Afif, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Louisa Clement, Lauren Halsey, Johnston Marklee, Annika Kahrs, Susan Philipsz, Anri Sala, April Street, Thomas Struth, Kaari Upson, Andrea Zittel

 

 

July 25, 2020-August 14, 2020 April Street Solo exhibition "Circling the Drain, Works on Paper" OVR at Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects Los Angeles CA. “Circling the Drain” it features 12 watercolors which are related to her recent exhibition at the gallery and translate the artist’s relief-style painting onto a flattened plane. Lines of braids and plump shapes mimic meandering vines and overripe fruit - root vegetables and flowers in vibrant utopian settings appear cracked or bitten. These still-lifes and fanged landscape portals were created over the past several months while in quarantine, this body of work juxtaposes Street’s painterly practice which is influenced by specific art historical contexts with the uncertainty and turbulence of this pandemic.

 

November 16, 2019- January 12, 2020 April Street solo exhibition, " The Lady of Shalott" at Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects Los Angeles CA

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present The Lady of Shalott, April Street's second solo exhibition at the gallery. Comprised of 16 fabric-relief paintings, the works in the exhibition meld landscapes with corporeal elements to create portrait-like vignettes where waterfalls cascade into braids and hair extensions, surreal forms and voluminous lines define space and hyper-sexualized otherworldly elements rise inside and throughout her multi-dimensional surfaces.

Street's paintings are physically topographical, stuffed with fabric, morphing figuration and abstraction into hybrids of body and land. Embracing the material experimentation found in the feminist art practices of the 60s and 70s, Street uses nylon hosiery to push the physical bounds of painting while simultaneously intertwining historical and literary narratives. Street's Lady of Shalott recalls and conflates in imaginative ways the idealized "World Landscapes" of the Flemish Renaissance with the rewrite of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Lady of Shalott," which inspired Pre-Raphaelite painters.

In the poem, Tennyson's Lady is imprisoned on the island of Shalott. Cursed to view the world through a mirror, weaving only what she sees reflected – Lady of Shalott chooses to look out the window at reality, provoked by the beauty of Sir Lancelot in her mirror – which she knows will cause her own death. Street takes the rewrite of the poem as a metaphor to reflect on relationships between nature, feminism, and painting. Ultimately these works are a place for Street to ruminate upon and expose culturally imposed distinctions between the monumental and the intimate, masculine and feminine, convention and inspiration.

April Street lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied bronze casting in central Italy and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Maccarone, LA; Kinman Gallery, London, UK; Various Small Fires, LA; Carter & Citizen, LA; and The Underground Museum, Los Angeles. She is a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her solo shows have been reviewed by Artforum, Art in America, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, ArtReview and The Los Angeles Times

 

Recent:

April Street: The Mariners' Grand Staircase (Armoured Stars and Flying Clouds)

Santa Barbara Museum of Art

August 18, 2018 – Feb. 13, 2019

Los Angeles-based artist, April Street kicks off the series with a multi-media installation inspired by the historic voyage of Navigator Eleanor Creesy and Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy in the clipper ship Flying Cloud, which in 1851 set a record by sailing from New York to San Francisco (traveling around Cape Horn in South America) in only 89 days. The installation is comprised of 13 three-dimensional fabric paintings referencing nautical navigation, mythology, and art history installed salon-style on a painted background, and is accompanied by a sound piece depicting a fictional conversation between two fictional Mariners. Street reimagines the Park Project wall as a portrait wall of a grand staircase in the Mariners' home and uses her seafaring couple as stand-ins for the way an artist navigates time through pictures, creating a parallel between artist and place with the characters and their memories.

Presented in coincidence with the artist's residency at the Ridley-Tree Education Center at McCormick House apartment, and a series of interactive projects and environment designed by the artist called "Deep Sky Objects made visible for Everyone" outside of the Family Resource Center.

Pussy, King of the Pirates- group show at Maccarone - Los Angeles
July 14 - September 8, 2018
Opening: Saturday, July 14, 4-6PM

Works by: Eleanor Antin, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Sadie Barnette, Vanessa Beecroft, Amy Bessone, Polly Borland, Rebecca Campbell, Gracie DeVito, Trulee Hall, Sharon Lockhart, Monica Majoli, Heather Rasmussen, Alison Saar, Blair Saxon-Hill, Melanie Schiff, Lara Schnitger, Lauren Seiden, April Street, Samantha Thomas, Jennifer West

 

January 20, 2018-Feburary 24, 2018 April Street solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects Los Angeles CA

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist, April Street. Street's focused presentation at the gallery will include 9 new fabric-relief paintings that use artifacts of body-imprinted nylons that spring forth, in three dimensions, from hand-painted frames or are suspended from bronze nails. Street's new paintings recall and combine the material experimentation of 1960s/70s feminist practices with references to the theatricality, palette, and illusionism of 17th century Dutch still-life painting. April Street continuously repurposes her paintings' material parts with displaced objects, personal narratives, and art historical references to ignite a conversation between viewer and the works about representation, duration and absence.

Street's relief paintings emphasize an embodied process. Works in this series begin with a sequence of scripted positions for the body: she imprints her hosiery-fabric covered body into pools of acrylic paint. The paint-stained remnants of these choreographed performances are then stuffed, twisted, and re-painted; distilling the large swaths of fabric into three-dimensional paintings in a format many times smaller than their original yardage.

In Street's work, nothing is as it seems. She constructs dialogues within these not-so-still-lifes that simultaneously allude to the human body and celestial bodies. Their material illusionism suggesting first fabric, then food or objects on a table, then a figure in a landscape.

The relief paintings are a direct evolution from Street's previous series titled Wandering Limbs. Where those previous paintings explored the absence of the body, her new work insists upon physicality and presence; some semblance of its own embodied psychological awareness. Rich color traverses the swelling protuberances of the relief paintings, urging a renewed exploration of painting's physical manifestation in space.

April Street lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied bronze casting in central Italy and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Kinman Gallery, London, UK; Various Small Fires, LA; Carter & Citizen, LA; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, LA; Five Car Garage, Santa Monica; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and The Underground Museum, Los Angeles. She is a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her solo shows have been reviewed by ArtForum, Art in America, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic and The Los Angeles Times. This is her first exhibition at the gallery.
6006 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California 90232. (310) 837-2117 vielmetter.com

-October 3-November 13, 2016-
April Street's debut London solo exhibition Cassiopeia loves Grimaldi at Kinman gallery London UK

Cassiopeia loves Grimaldi
April Street

LA based artist April Street explores notions of fiction and absence within her debut London solo exhibition Cassiopeia loves Grimaldi. Street constructs fictional relationships that consider both the tragic and the comic whilst making reference to mythology, theatrical performance and the history of painting. The exhibition lends its title from the constellation 'Cassiopeia', which is rooted with Greek mythology and the British actor / comedian Joseph Grimaldi, who became one of the most renowned entertainers of the Regency era in the United Kingdom.

The constructed dialogues within the exhibition allude towards the absent characters; a large celestial mural occupies a substantial proportion of the gallery, whilst cast bronze ruff collars suggest regal and thematic references. Street has produced a number of relief paintings, which are deeply embodied within ideas of performativity; works from this series manifest from a sequence of scripted positions, where Street imprints her body into pools of acrylic paint, whilst being partially wrapped in yards of hosiery fabric. The residue of these choreographed performances are then reworked via stuffing, twisting and painting to produce vivid abstract wall reliefs, which recalls the feminist practices of the 60's and 70's as well as the theatrical nature of Chiaroscuro from the Baroque and Renaissance masters.

Cassiopeia loves Grimaldi is comprised of layering artefacts and objects, which nod towards a choreographed past. Whilst making stark references to prominent points within art history, Street has developed a body of work that is purposely sheafed in ambiguity, leaving a margin for play and interpretation.

April Street lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied bronze casting in central Italy and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Various Small Fires, LA; Carter & Citizen, LA; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, LA; Five Car Garage, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Underground Museum, Los Angeles. She is a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her solo shows have been reviewed by ArtForum, Art in America, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic and The Los Angeles Times.

KINMAN
BETHNAL GREEN RD
SHOREDITCH
E1 6JU
London

- April 5, 2016-- The Good the bad and the ugly part 3 curated by Andreas Reiter Raabe at Gesso Artspace
Donaufelderstrasse 73 - 79
1210 Vienna Austria

 

October 30, 2015 - December 12, 2015 |April Street| Jesper Just | at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles CA

Lay Down Your Arms
April Street

October 30 2015 - December 12, 2015 at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles CA

VSF is pleased to present Lay Down Your Arms, Los Angeles-based artist April Street's first solo exhibition at Various Small Fires. Street uses three spaces of the gallery to weave a dialog between a sound work, a sculptural installation and performative paintings. The exhibition is an environmental menagerie of objects and sounds severed from their original habitats, to re-form as one body in the throws of readjustment, surrender and transcendence.

The exhibition begins in the Sound Corridor with Two Mallards, a five-channel sound piece in which the artist and a stranger play out romantic scenarios through bird and cat calls. The two strangers fight, fall in love, sing, and compete for attention. Two Mallards serves and an introductory dialog between the artist and the audience, and acts as the 'visitor's welcome' as prelude to the Courtyard installation.

In the Courtyard, Street's Portrait of a Barn: 1840-2015 (2015) reconstructs the facade of a found image of an Appalachian cantilevered barn typical of the vernacular architecture of her childhood region of Virginia. The 15-foot barn facade, constructed in antique Appalachian wood, is accompanied by a 'painted shadow' resting on the Courtyard's ground, transposing this sculpture back to the world of images.

As is typical of Street's painting practice, the barn's painted shadow is made from stretched yards of hosiery and is an artifact of a private performative act. Through a series of scripted body positions, Street slowly imprints quasi-photographic imagery into pools of wet acrylic paint on canvas, her body wrapped in hosiery, an indexical gesture that recalls feminist performances of the 60′s and 70′s.

In the Viewing Room is Wandering Limb #14 (2015), a hosiery painting stretched onto a frame, removed from its canvas and stretched like an exotic hide, or spun into a suspended rope. An accompanying wooden floor sculpture, the missing structural peak of the outdoor barn, is also a carrying case for the painting.

Recent:

-----January 24 2015- March 12, 2015 Nothing Lasts Forever New project by April Street at Emma Gray's 5 Car Garage for images http://emmagrayhq.com/2014/now/april-street-january-march-2015

----- DECEMBER - 2014 "Remove Clothes " curated by René-Julien PRAZ
ARTISTS RALLY AGAINST AIDES
c/o PIASA 118 rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré 75008 PARIS FR

-----October 4-November 22 2014 My Self is An Other Kendell Carter, Alexandra Grant, Rives Granade, Dennis Koch, April Street curated by Claressinka Anderson and Sonny Ruscha Granade at The Underground Museum 3508 W. Washington Blvd Los Angeles, CA

-----Left Coast: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art - Santa Barbara Museum of Art
May 25 – September 14, 2014 --Opening reception May 31, 5pm-7pm
Since it opened its doors in 1941, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art has consistently been dedicated to collecting—an activity that has contributed to the growth of the permanent collection in significant ways. Art produced on the West Coast is a major part of this endeavor-The exhibition is comprised of works from artists such as Amy Adler, Uta Barth, Russell Crotty, Carlee Fernandez, Llyn Foulkes, Jack Goldstein, Lyle Ashton Harris, Richard Jackson, Kim Jones, Mike Kelley, Elad Lassry, Kori Newkirk, Steve Roden, April Street, Mario Ybarra Jr., and many others. We invite you to become acquainted with these works, which have recently joined the collection to ensure the continued relevance and significance of the Museum.

-----May 24 2014-July 5, 2014 April Street's Runner and Kelly Kleinstrodt's Murmelte Instrumente at Andrew Rafacz Gallery Chicago IL

-----April 5, 2014- May 22, 2014 Veils, a Group Exhibition at The Underground Museum 3508 West Washington Blvd. Los Angeles opening reception April 5, 2014 7pm-11pm

-----January 11, 2014 – February 15, 2014. A Vulgar Proof. April Street at Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles CA opening reception this Saturday January 11, 2014. 6-9pm

April Street / A Vulgar Proof

January 11 – February 15, 2014
Reception for the artist: Saturday, January 11, 6-9pm

Los Angeles, CA - Carter & Citizen is proud to present A Vulgar Proof, April Street?s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition opens January 11th and closes February 15, 2014. The gallery will host a reception for the artists on Saturday, January 11, from 6 to 9pm.

At first glance, the paintings and objects included in A Vulgar Proof, are like elements out of a science fiction novel. The black nylon paintings with puncture holes that cover layers of painted hosiery appear to be portraits of stars in a night sky. The Bronze Elizabethan collars protruding from the wall are like futuristic weapons, and a graceful floor-to-ceiling installation of 100 cast bronze birthday candles suspended by polished soap stones, bronze meat hooks and waxed silk seems like the curious device that holds the key to saving the hero's world at the end of that novel. Like Street's previous work, here there is a tension where things are not always what they seem. For this body of work Street punctures holes revealing the gestures' capability to adapt to and manipulate to our interpretation, folding the suspension of disbelief back on itself while opening up the surface of painting to reveal its inner workings.

The Black Hole Paintings are named after stars whose names have frequently appeared in fiction; they are fantastic, psychedelic time capsules holding clues to the history of painting and the personal movements of the artist. Each painting is wrapped in black nylon with holes cut or punched through revealing layers of painted hosiery. These hosiery layers are artifacts of a private performative act in which the artist wraps herself in hosiery material to enact a series of precise body positions (which she recorded while sleeping) into pools of acrylic paint on a canvas. The impression made by this act creates a positive and a negative and her mark making appears photographic. The negative on the hosiery is then reassembled onto stretchers and the artist considers them to be portraits of the paintings themselves. Street's gravitational configurations of painted hosiery inside black veils of nylon evoke ideas of masking, deception, sexuality, duration, and adaptation, but these objects of action also point to the act of peering through a camera's eye piece—cropping and editing out the unnecessary to get to the heart of being a maker.

The bronze Collars hinge on the ability of the same exact object to transform human interpretation with the slightest altering of a gesture. When tilted up at the height of the viewer, the collar acts as a stand in for the power of a leader when unaltered and flat the collar is clown- like. The installation, Carving 100 now 6 in my bed, with all of its tension and emotional bravado is a risky and tenuous sculpture that points to the duration of painting. The soapstone rocks that hold 100 bronze candles have a history of form and function; they were once used to carve jewelry and weapons by the Cherokee Indians in the Appalachian Mountains where the artist grew up.

A Vulgar Proof in Elizabethan English means a common experience. All the objects in the show are filled with the gestures of making, masking and revealing. We, as the audience, feel familiarity— even in the strangest moments. The work ignites a conversation with eccentric abstraction, feminism, the performative and the informel, while occupying a new space. These paintings and sculptures are psychologically charged vestiges of personal narratives and painting tricks that create a visceral empathy where the tension between object, narrative, and illusion come together in a cohesive, yet mysterious experience for Street?s audience.

 

Recent Press:

7 Not-to-Miss Artworks Under $20,000 at the Armory 2019

Tucked away in the corner of this champagne bar-adjacent booth, this small, dark painting was holding court with all sorts of Armory opening visitors. April Street’s fabric reliefs recall both bodily and cerebral considerations. This body-imprinted nylon piece springs forth in three dimensions from a hand-painted frame, harkening back to the experimental lexis of ‘70s feminist material explorations while retaining a distinctly contemporary sensibility. In a rare, amber-fast reification of feeling, Cloud Formation drinks from the compositional font of Golden Age Dutch still-life to create an augural juncture, a marked departure from her large-scale, ambitious installation that just went down at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Street has shown all over the world, including recent exhibitions at Kinman Gallery in London and Five Car Garage in Santa Monica, CA, and we are all excited to bear witness to the future of this caustic, affecting series.

Lumartzine review by Noelle Barr https://www.lumartzine.com/articles/april-street-the-mariners-grand-staircase

ArtReview review by LindsayPreston Zappas April Street: The Shoulder and the Bow at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles ProjectsApril 2018

Hyperallergic Review by A. Will Brown http://hyperallergic.com/259459/a-deconstructed-hunting-cabin-filled-with-fabricated-memories/

Contemporary Arts Review LA review by Catherine Wagley

Los Angeles Times- review- David Pagel. January 23, 2014 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-art-review-april-street-a-vulgar-proof-at-carter-citizen

San Francisco Arts Quarterly- review- Gladys-Katherina Hernando. http://www.sfaqonline.com/2014/01/sfaq-review-a-vulgar-proof-solo-exhibition-by-april-street-at-carter-citizen-los-angeles/

Artillery Review- by Carol Cheh http://artillerymag.com/april-street/

Art In America-review by Danielle Sommer. December 2012 print issue. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/april-street/

Art Forum-critics pick by Annie Buckley http://artforum.com/picks/section=la&mode=past#picks34603

LA Weekly-5 Artsy Things to do by Catherine Wagley- 1. Intimacy Issues http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2012/09/carter_citizen_jancar_gallery.php

Huffington Post- Art and the Feminine Mystique: this artweek October 1 2012- by Bill Bush http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-bush/this-artweekla-october-1_b_1936567.html

LA Weekly- quoted- by Catherine Wagley-http://www.laweekly.com/2012-10-04/art-books/paul-schimmel-moca-destroy-the-picture/

Artweek.LA- weekly pick- by Bill Bush http://artweek.la/issue/october-1-2012/article/april-street-portraits-and-ropes

Fabrik Magazine- LA Emergent- Caitlin Moore, Matthew Gardocki. 2013. http://fabrik.la/april-street/

The Miami Rail http://miamirail.org/reviews/catherine-czackiapril-street/

past exhibitions:

-----October 16-November 16 2013. Catherine Czacki / April Street, Emerson Dorsch Gallery Miami FL-----

-----October 19 2013-November 23, 2013. Heroes. John Byam, Patricia Fernandez, Joanne Greenbaum, Julia Haft-Candell, David Ireland, Kelly Kleinschrodt, David McDonald, Jessica Rath, Steve Roden, April Street, Bill Walton, Philadelphia Wirema, Bari Zipperstein. Group show-Curated by David Mcdonald and Whitney Carter. Carter & Citizen Los Angeles CA-

-----July 17 2013 7-9pm Managing Modality curated by Jonathaton Hornedo. Post Los Angeles CA

-----May 17, 2013 - June 8, 2013 Object implied Emerson Dorcsh Galler Miami, FL
Kris Chatterson/Dave Hardy /Ryan Roa/April Street/ Robert Thiele/ Odalis Valdivieso

-----May 25th-June 22, 2013 A point of view of a Cat Animatron Los Angeles CA

-----February 15-May 31 2013 Millenial Abstraction Group Exhibition curated by Patricia Watts. Marin Community Foundation, Novato, CA

-----January 12- February 23 2013 Forms of Abstraction. Irvine Fine Art Center. Irvine CA 92604

-----September 8, 2012-October 20, 2012. April Street. Portraits and Ropes.Carter & Citizen. Los Angeles, CA 9003

Carter & Citizen is proud to present April Street Portraits and Ropes, the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will take place on September 8, 2012 from 6 pm until 9 pm. The exhibition runs through October 13, 2012.

The paintings included in Portraits and Ropes are a fictional familial construct that overlap, rebel against, and conform to their relatives and their imagined lovers through body language, compositions of movement, and color deposits that create a "generational aesthetic". The gravitational configurations evoke ideas of skin and duration, posturing and adaptation, packaging and labor, as well as action paintings' relationship to feminism. Street's palette is plucked from fantasy art and impressionist landscapes combined with skin mimicking textiles as the paintings drape and extend onto the walls of the gallery via corsage pins and copper tacks. Some paintings within the exhibition are spun into ropes ending in cast bronze knots where they meet the wall, These spun paintings act as strands of DNA that would unravel without the weight of their fixtures.

The paintings begin with a performative act we are not allowed to witness, wherein the artist wraps herself in hosiery materials to enact a series of body positions (recorded while sleeping) into pools of paint on canvas. The impression made by this act is rinsed away while the paint is still wet, where then the memory of the gesture is painstakingly repainted by the artist. The result is the intuitive stippling of her ideal fantasy of what happened in the original. Street's labor and fantasy life then create yet another fiction when it is physically covered. The hosiery, once used as the brush in the beginning of her process, is now the subject in control of its own history. Hidden underneath the folds of hosiery is an image that Street only teases us with knowing fully. These veils of fabric become their sole identity inside the gallery space and outside the protective world of the studio. What begins with the artist's private performances ends with the psychological construction of public image.

The work within the exhibition addresses adaptation of an intimate activity placed in a public space. Posturing and social awkwardness, sexual identity and the hiding of labor to feed particular social longings are all tied up in the painting's reactions to each other. Street alludes to the shifting relationships between objects of action, while acknowledging the identity shifts and role-play that occur when one takes their art from private to public. This tension between object, narrative, and illusion is a constant in Portraits and Ropes. The paintings reverse and reconnect their roles in their ultimate incarnation for the gallery, as a community of gestures, packaged for their public moment.

Carter & Citizen . Los Angeles CA
Whitney Carter director

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feb 12 - Mar 12. 2011
Patrick Nickell & April Street. Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Santa Monica. CA. Opening reception Feb. 12. 2011. 5-7pm.

-----April 7 - May 12, 2007 The Dominant Planets Of
High Energy Constructs in Chinatown Los Angeles presents The Dominant Planets Of - a group exhibition of paintings and drawings by Searcy Benson, Kadar Brock, Kent Hammond, Paola Ochoa, and April Street.

 

Art In America-review by Danielle Sommer. December 2012 print issue. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/april-street/