Press Release

Monte Vista Projects is proud to present “Relief,” a new series of sculptural works by Los Angeles-based artist David Weldzius.

Since moving to Southern California in 2005, Weldzius has taken specific interest in the relay between vernacular architecture and popular narrative in shaping putative social history, particularly evident in sites within close proximity to his home which is walking distance from Monte Vista Projects on LA's northeast side. For his project “Relief,” Weldzius will examine a local network of civic structures built in the 1930s and 40s under the auspices of the Work Progress Administration—diligently translating a series of marks inscribed in wet concrete by provisional Federal workers into plaster volumes that will enmesh with the interior architecture of the gallery. With his first sculpture-based project to date, Weldzius hopes to provoke a broad range of inquiries regarding prolonged economic austerity and the amplified role of independently-run project spaces amidst restrained funding for contemporary art initiatives.

Weldzius has exhibited extensively in the US, showing at LACE, MAK Center, and David Kordansky Gallery among other venues. In 2012, Weldzius was awarded fellowship with the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France. Concurrent with “Relief,” Weldzius will commence a second solo project hosted by Otis College of Design’s Department of Photography, and participate in a faculty exhibition at Occidental College's Weingart Gallery.

Screening announcement (9.29.2013):

In conjunction with his exhibition “Relief,” David Weldzius will screen a selection of short film and video-works that either document or dramatize topics surrounding labor and capital—speculation, welfare, boredom, solidarity, and globalization, among other themes.

Weldzius will begin by revisiting and revising an epistemic valuation which has never been accurately cited but is routinely attributed to American pragmatist, John Dewey:

Anyone who has begun to think <consume> places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Encompassing nearly one hundred years of moving-picture history, Weldzius’ investigation will start on the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange at the beginning of the twentieth century, and end at an international-export production facility in China at the beginning of the twenty-first. Acknowledging that global commerce presents a fluid, often improvisational, set of bureaucratic relations that complicate traditional photographic depictions of labor, Weldzius will reflect on the camera’s revised role in defining, codifying, or perverting relations between workers and managers, speculators and consumers, image-makers and goods-makers—paying specific mind to where cameras have been permitted and restricted within an, increasingly broadly defined, “work place.”

Please join David at Monte Vista Projects on Thursday, October 3rd 2013 at 7pm (screening and discussion will last approximately 90 minutes).