Milieu : Erin Harmon, Devon Tsuno

About

October 6th – October 27th, 2018

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, Oct 6, 6-9pm

RSVP Essential to: rsvp@launchla.org

Launch LA is proud to present “Milieu”, a two person show featuring Erin Harmon and Devon Tsuno.

Erin Harmon’s work dwells in the twilight zone between painting and sculpture. Filled with longing for places that do not actually exist, contradictions flourish with invocations of both the animated and the arrested, the joyful and the staid, the high and the low. Material and processes become sites for fantasy and illusion and the interplay between flat and not-flat. The work in MILIEU tinkers with scale to produce environments that we can project ourselves into as landscapes, even while confronting their qualities of un-nature. Erin’s work is influenced by a love of science fiction, fairytale, mysticism and the desire to escape into such worlds, as well as the disorienting experience of failing to spiritually connect with actual nature.

Los Angeles native Devon Tsuno’s spray paint and acrylic paintings, prints, and installations stem from his interests in access to public space, fishing and urban bodies of water in the Los Angeles. Influenced by Japanese 19th century Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and fabric, Tsuno’s work in MILIEU presents the LA watershed as abstract, wild and layered — creating an in immersive space that is both natural and synthetic.

Erin Harmon was raised in the suburbs of Southern California where the natural desert was sated by hundreds of miles of aqueducts to produce obsessively groomed lawns. After graduating from San Diego State University with a BA in Studio Art, she received her MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Erin currently lives in the verdant and fecund Tennessee Delta where kudzu and coal sludge can swallow everything in their path and where she is Associate Professor of Art at Rhodes College. Erin has exhibited her work nationally in both group and solo exhibitions in venues including Field Projects. NY; the Sarah Doyle Gallery, Providence RI; Atlanta Artists Center & Gallery, GA; the Parthenon Museum, Nashville, TN; and The Brooks Museum, Memphis, TN. She was included in the book Remixing and Drawing: Sources, Influences, Styles (Mueller, Ellen; Routledge Press, 2018). In 2014 she debuted her first theatrical set design for Ballet Memphis’ River Project: Moving Currents which profoundly influenced the work she is making today. Erin is a founding member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles.

Tsuno’s long-term interest in issues of water in the LA area has been central to his work with the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Theodore Payne Foundation, Music Center, Descanso Gardens and the grantLOVE Project.  Tsuno is a 2017 Santa Fe Art Institute Water Rights Artist-In-Residence, is the 2016 SPArt Community Grantee and was awarded a 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Art. Tsuno has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad at the Hammer Museum Venice Beach Biennial, Current: LA Water Public Art Biennial, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Denk Gallery, U.S. Embassy in New Zealand, and Gallery Lara in Tokyo.  His work has been featured in Artillery Magazine, X-TRA Journal and Notes on Looking. He received an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2005 and a BFA from California State University Long Beach in 2003.  Tsuno is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Dominguez Hills.