Last Ditch was founded by Hana Nue Ødegaard in 2020 in Los Angeles as an artist’s collective, to create exhibition opportunities and provide mutual support. Scroll down for projects beginning with the most recent.
Felled: Artist Unknown for Wright Contemporary Project Room / 27 Paseo Del Pueblo Sur, Taos, NM 87571 / June 10 - July 23, 2023
Felled: Artist Unknown was inspired by the 2023 discovery of an altered dead Douglas Fir in the woods near Pecos, NM. The tree was more than 100 feet tall and four feet in diameter and had been cut by a chainsaw and left up on the felling hinge and lower limbs so that it skims the steep terrain, leaving space between tree and earth. The limbs on the upper surface were removed and stairs carved in with removed chunks left fallen along the hill. The stairs allow one to slightly hover above the wilds, to traverse and view them with ease from a paradigmatic human perspective, achieved by power of abstraction. The viewer/climber experiences a raw material inquiry into the roots of transcendence, literally “climbing beyond”. The Project Space installation pays tribute to this anonymous gift of land art via video documentation, a sculptural arrangement from cut wood remnants and a US Geological Survey topographical map with the site location marked so that those who wish may explore the site themselves.
Perhaps As a Way of Starting Again: Ira Wright Notebooks at Wright Contemporary Project Room / 27 Paseo Del Pueblo Sur, Taos, NM 87571 April 22-May 28, 2023
This installation of 80-plus drawings from Wright’s notebooks offer a privileged candid view into a theatre of the mind revealing itself with wit and sensitivity. The nervous system flows into a vast repertoire of marks in which projects are outlined, feelings purged, obsessions limned and trivia jotted. Mastery of academic life drawing, commercial art techniques and art history underlies even an apparent scribble. However the notebooks are not intended as grand statements for bright lights and strange eyes. Instead they appear as an un-ending search maybe unresolved or inscrutable, but questing questing.
Ira has been a designer, teacher, single father, four times married, and a survivor of challenging health crises, continuously responding in his art. Cartoon characters, couples and violence are ubiquitous as are literary references to the Bible, the Greeks, and poets. This canon is not predictable - Miley Cyrus might burst on stage twerking or Death send a text message.
Reflecting source notebooks these gallery selections appear in related groups.The artist’s self-published literary works, which include novels, memoirs, and an opera are also presented in casual notebook form.
Stages and Scenes, Andy Holtin and Sascha Appelhoff @b_la_connect, Bendix Building, Los Angeles, July 9, 2022
