Stream of Consciousness presents the work of eight Los Angeles artists in the early stages of their careers. Amy Adler, Jeff Burton, Steven Criqui, Todd Gray, Joe Mama-Nitzberg, Dave Muller, Monique Prieto, and Frances Stark all make striking and powerful pictures that blend formal innovation, conceptual complexity, and charged subject matter. "Stream of consciousness" aptly describes how these artists interpose elements from different categories of experience and transgress boundaries of medium, style, genre, and meaning. The artists in this show seek contradictions, splicing together symbols from mass culture with ideas from cultural criticism and psychoanalytic theory. They fuse the mundane and the lofty, the solemn and the scatological, the popular and the obscure. They assume that established hierarchies reinforce the status quo, that acquired wisdom is to be questioned, and that boundaries exist to be violated.

Among the categories dismantled by the artists in Stream of Consciousness are medium and style. Whether making marks on paper, wielding oil or acrylic paints, or producing images photographically, they create work that resists being fit into a category of "painting," "drawing," or "photography." Instead, they exploit photography's aptitude for appropriation, painting's deeply affective compositions, and drawing's intimacy. Similarly, disregarding the neat progression of modern art from one stylistic "ism" to the next, they quote features from Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Appropriation and the high-production media-based work of the 1980s, among many other touchstones in the history of art.

These eight artists typify the vitality of current art production in southern California. Most characteristic is their seamless combination of mass culture and high art, including numerous references to rock music and famous movies. Deeply informed by aesthetic and critical theories, they wear their learning lightly. Many viewers will find the pictures in this exhibition astonishingly pleasurable, beautiful, and fun, whether despite the work's intellectual complexity or because of it.

Elizabeth A. Brown, Curator