Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to announce Reality Is Canceled, a program of moving image works streaming on the gallery’s website April 3 - May 1, 2020. This online exhibition brings together four recent videos which examine the network of forces shaping consensus reality in the contemporary world: corporations, media, markets, politics. 

Nina Sarnelle’s Big Opening Event (2019) disentangles the complex relationship between politics and economic development that underwrites the voracious - and nearly unregulated - “Megadeals” struck between corporations and governments. Set against a history of excess and naïveté in mass celebratory spectacle, the work draws connections between failed balloon drop celebrations and the omnipresent doorstep delivery of Amazon boxes. In the film’s final scene, 500 Amazon Smile boxes rain from the ceiling of a warehouse like empty promises, deflating the fanfare around large commercial development projects. Big Opening Event is a multifaceted and nuanced reflection of expectation, failure, and desire. 

Jessica Manafort (2018) is a video essay by Maura Brewer which explores the relationship between Jessica Manafort, a filmmaker, and her father, Paul Manafort, political operative and campaign manager to Donald Trump from June – August 2016. In 2007, Jessica Manafort wrote and directed her first feature-length film, a teen drama called Remember the Daze. According to reports, Paul Manafort invested millions in its production. Combining footage from the original film with Youtube clips, archival video, hacked text messages and video games, Brewer reimagines Remember the Daze as a film about money laundering. In Jessica Manafort, Hollywood narrative, production values and beautiful actresses cover up the underlying economic realities that govern creative expression. The teen coming-of-age story is rewritten to reveal the financial transaction at its heart: the transfer of money from father to daughter.

Don Edler’s The Production of Information (2019) is a hybrid of experimental documentary and political satire. Focusing on the language of political persuasion, Edler created a group of scripts appropriated from a diverse range of texts selected from across the political spectrum. These scripts were then performed in cold readings by professional actors in a commercial casting call staged by the artist. Intercutting between different actors interpreting the same scripts, the language becomes decontextualized, allowing the voice and affect of the performers to highlight the roles of context and representation in the packaging of ideology. Through this, we experience in real time how subconscious and overt biases affect our interpretation of information based on who is delivering it and how it is being delivered. Text is superimposed over image, implicating the viewer as they read each script in tandem with the actor in a kind of ideological karaoke. Careening from the earnest to the ridiculous, The Production of Information eerily reflects a media environment in which distraction, sensationalism, entertainment value and corporate interests spin and obfuscate facts.

Using the economic and social disparity of Los Angeles as a point of departure, Nicolas Grenier’s Vertically Integrated Socialism (2017)* imagines a fictional housing concept that integrates all social classes in a single building — a closed architectural, economic and social environment. The housing concept combines an inclusive socialist system with a libertarian free-market economy, creating a paradoxical dynamic that encourages ruthless competition for upward mobility.  The video, both descriptive and narrative, is at once keynote presentation, architectural animation and audiobook. A voiceover narration reads a story in the second person, and brings "you" into an increasingly peculiar moral order. 

* Vertically Integrated Socialism(2017) courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Nina Sarnelle is an artist and musician living in Los Angeles. She is a founding member of two collectives, Institute for New Feeling, and dadpranks. Her work has shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Istanbul Modern (Turkey), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), NADA (Miami), Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (Lisbon), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Black Cube (Denver), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Recess (NY), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), Jardin Essential (Brussels), UNSW Galleries (Sydney), Project 88 (Mumbai), Kevin Space (Vienna), Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum (Genova), Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe), Mwoods (Beijing), MoCA Cleveland, Human Resources (LA), Borscht Festival (Miami), SPACES (Cleveland), Threewalls (Chicago), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Miller Gallery (Pittsburgh); and been featured in Frieze, Art in America, Vogue Italy, Huffington Post, SFMoMA, Creators Project, FlashArt, and Hyperallergic.

Maura Brewer’s work in video, performance and experimental fashion design explores the construction of female subjects in mass culture. Her video essays combine footage from Hollywood films, television and Internet subcultures to question the ways that popular culture mimes the language of feminism in the service of patriarchal capitalism. Brewer was a Whitney Independent Study Program fellow from 2014-2015, and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2011. Her projects, videos and performances have been shown at MoMA, New York; MCA, Chicago, MUMOK, Vienna and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Her work has been the subject of solo projects at the University of California, Irvine; Art in General, New York; and Queens, Los Angeles. She is a 2017 California Community Foundation Fellow, and a 2016 and 2018 Creative Economic Development Fund grantee. Her video work is included in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Brewer is a founding member of the Rational Dress Society, a counter-fashion collective, and Arts Research Cooperative, an experimental art school. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Don Edler was born in Bremen, Germany and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Edler attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received an MFA in Studio Art from New York University, as well as a BFA in Sculpture from University of Florida, Gainesville FL. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Two Minutes To Midnight, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2019); 6871 California Ave, Five Car Garage, Los Angeles (2018); The Father The Sun and The Holy Road, San Diego Art Institute, San Diego CA (2016); COBRA DESTROYER, Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles CA (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Ecoshamanism curated by Ian James, Leroy’s Happy Place, Los Angeles CA (2018); Mile To Mile, Roger’s Office, Los Angeles CA (2018); To Have or To Be, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles CA (2018); Corpus Alienum, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles CA (2017); The Useful and The Decorative, The Landing, Los Angeles CA (2017); Memory Room curated by Andrew Ross, Outpost Artist Resources, Queens, NY (2016). Don Edler is also the founder and curator of ELEVATOR MONDAYS, a social exhibition space in Los Angeles founded in 2017.   

Nicolas Grenier's work explores the poetics of structural change through different approaches, from visual representation to practical experiments that test social and economic dynamics. Grenier holds a BFA from Concordia University, an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and attended several residency programs, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Saas-Fee Summer institute of Art in Berlin and the Banff Center. His work has been exhibited in venues such as the Power Plant (Toronto), the Musée Nationale des Beaux-Arts du Québec (Québec), gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Galerie Bradley Ertaskiran (Montréal), Gagosian Gallery (Athens), Denny Dimin Gallery (Hong Kong), the Bruges Triennial of Art and Architecture (Belgium), the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Commonwealth & Council (Los Angeles) and Union Gallery (London). His work is collected by the Musée Nationale des Beaux-Arts du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Royal Bank of Canada, the National Bank of Canada, the Caisse de Dépôt du Québec, the Progressive Art Collection and others. Grenier won the Prix Pierre-Ayot from the City of Montreal (2016), and was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award (2019). He lives and works in Montreal and Los Angeles, and is represented by Galerie Bradley Ertaskiran and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.