As a closing event for Waxing the Bud, please join us among an assortment of nosegays for a humble incantation of poetry on blossoms, both bodily and floral. The computerized reading will include poems by Olga Broumas, Mark Doty, Patricia Hampl, Marsden Hartley, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, César Moro, Chase Twichell, May Swenson, James L. White, Dean Young, and others.

 

Waxing the Bud is an exhibition organized by Erich Bollmann that features work by Deanna Erdmann, Esmeralda Montes, Orlando Tirado, and Paul Waddell. Through a selection of works that presage an idyllic land both fictive and ordinary; Waxing the Bud channels a pastoral rhythm that is routine for Los Angeles, where paradisaical profusions bloom in stark contrast to the built environment. Wantonly reeking of copulation, the exhibition evokes the flower’s stamen and pistil, as well as the reproductive features of the human body. The artists use disparate strategies to reveal the shape of splendor; reframing sex, ourselves, and nature in their act.

 

Deanna Erdmann presents a kaleidoscopic vision of flesh in her video, “COLT.” Sex is presented through mantra like repetition as vintage erotic films collapse into one continuous barrage. Erdmann examines rote acts in a dazzling parade of bodies on hammocks, under waterfalls, and inside each other. Each split second clip keeps its original audio track to jolt the viewer with a frenetic auditory collage that includes a smattering of bird chirps and guttural moans.

 

Casting from an amorphous and perverse family of subjects, Esmeralda Montes contributes a new painting from her most recent body of work. Montes' figures populate a vivid landscape redolent with mutating bodies, where legs sprout from mountainsides, and flora adorns flesh in comic scenarios set on a lush field of marks.

Orlando Tirado examines the eroticism that blossoms in the gaps between stucco and debris in a new sculpture that amalgamates the city and our bodies. Tirado presents an image of flesh and adornment in a work both detailed and austere. His sculpture takes cues from the verdant artifice of 18th century brautkronen -German wedding crowns- and the jaded tenderness of hustler culture.

 

Paul Waddell proffers an abstract rejoinder to the other glimpses of ecstasy on display in a new painting that traces coy and debased silhouettes. His fervid shapes over lurid color suggest a Los Angeles both more mundane and more mythic than itself: timeless like Eden, yet soiled, hybridized, ever envigored. Waxing the Bud alludes to this Los Angeles, land of furtive embraces and public exposures, imagined selves within dense, dense foliage; a collaborative daydream enlivened by in the warm, warm sun.

 

Deanna Erdmann is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. She received her MFA (2008) from University of California, San Diego, where she was a Russel Grant recipient, and her BA (2002) from UC Irvine. Her work has been included exhibitions and screenings at the Hammer Museum, Luis De Jesus, Patrick Painter, REDCAT, Angels Gate Cultural Center, LACE, Kavi Gupta Berlin, Sundown Salon, Lui Velasquez, Honor Fraser, compactspace and The New Children’s Museum San Diego. In 2012, she received the Center for Cultural Innovation Artist Resource Completion Grant. Upcoming her work will be included at Images Festival, Toronto Canada and Move In at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles.

 

Esmeralda Montes is an artist whose work examines personal family history, online dating sites, and film to generate characters, events, and non-sequential narratives. Her work has been exhibited in Rome, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles; most recently in the group show Paradox Maintenance Technicians at the Torrance Art Museum. Montes received her BFA (2007) from California State University Long Beach, and her MFA (2010) from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

 

Orlando Tirado is a writer, artist, and award-winning filmmaker. His work has exhibited in the US and abroad, including at Commonwealth & Council, REDCAT, and Cirrus (LA), Pre-teen (Mexico City), and The Photographer's Gallery (London), among others. He has collaborated with Margaret Haines, Math Bass, Vaginal Davis, and OneOhTrixPointNever. His first short film Wunderkammer (2008) directed by Andrea Pallaoro, screened internationally; his first feature Medeas is set to premiere this year. Orlando was named a 2013 MacDowell Fellow and a 2012 Fellow by the California Association of Museums. He lives and works in Los Angeles and New York City.

 

Paul Waddell is a painter and performance artist living and working in Los Angeles. He graduated in 2005 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Waddell has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. His most recent exhibitions include Ponding Purple Grass, Night Gallery, LA (2012); Moving In, Honor Fraser, LA (2012), Grand Re-opening, Human Resources, LA (2011); I like Massachusetts..., MEME Gallery, Cambridge (2010), The life of a house cat, Waterloo Centre for the Arts, Waterloo, IA (2010). Waddell's work has been reviewed in the LA Weekly, Artslant, Notes on Looking, A Righteous Transfer!, Time Out Boston, Big, Red & Shiny, and Inter Magazine.

 

Erich Bollmann is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Bollmann has previously organized exhibitions such as, So, Sangfroid at Pieter and Berenstain Bears at C-Annex Space. He has shown his work at Commonwealth & Council, Dan Graham, and Workspace among others. Bollmann is a founding member of the Bradley Manning Prayer Club, and is working on his first book of poems.