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L.A. Deck documents a multi-year project in which the artist Daniel Newman collected an entire deck of playing cards one-by-one over a period of time, on the streets and in the gutters of Los Angeles. L.A. Deck was exhibited in the show 52 PICKUP: Daniel Newman at General Projects, Los Angeles. Newman’s show opened on Leap Day, Saturday, February 29th, 2020 and ran until mid-March 2020 when the statewide “stay at home” order was issued in the state of California.

NYC Deck documents a multi-year project in which the artist Daniel Newman collected an entire deck of playing cards one-by-one over a period of time, on the streets and in the gutters of New York City.

Daniel Newman was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1978. He graduated from The Cooper Union in 2002 where he studied with Vito Acconci, Jonas Mekas, and Hans Haacke. His artwork has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. His work takes many forms including drawing, collage, painting, audio, video, and printmaking. He is also a prolific bookmaker and has produced countless self-published zines. In 2010 he was shortlisted for the Art Book of the Moment Award by Art Gallery of York University in Toronto, Canada.

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An asteroid, volcano, tsunami or alien army draws near and the camera cuts away to pan across groups of people looking towards catastrophe. Intermittently montaged amidst the progressing apocalypse, each clip lasts for a few seconds. All peoples in the world—that is the movies’ extras—look up and expect to die; this is all the movie demands its audience to know. These extras work partly like an index finger: they direct us to look at something. They proceed to tell us how to look [unblinkingly] and how to feel [scared, adrenaline-charged].

Greg Curtis pulled stills from such fifteen-or-so-year-old disaster movies. His/this book’s photographs slice still images out of these moving films, to focus on these extras, spectators-of-their-own-deaths. The camera rested on their faces for less than a second in the movies, but Greg’s still slices allow more sustained looks. Main characters embrace each other and their deaths (heroically), but extras run away from ground zero or stare upwards. Extras gaze at the cataclysm with their bodies angled upwards, like your own body when you watch a movie screen. As you look at these extras in the movies, your body echoes theirs in pose. Also you are grouped like them, each of you one of many other bodies.

Paperback, full color, 116 pages
ISBN: 978-1-947322-90-5
Cover Price: $40.00

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The Semi-Tropic Spiritualist Guidebook brings together images, texts, excerpts of performance scripts, and printed ephemera from the Semi-Tropic Spiritualist’s previous exhibitions. The book is organized as both a record of the project’s Test Sites from 2012 to 2018, and as an idiosyncratic guidebook to California’s spiritual history and geography. This full-color book accompanied the 2018 exhibition “What Can The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists Do For You?” at General Projects and Outside Gallery.

The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists Symbology Divination System is a tool to help you access your own deepest questions and reveal internal truths. Using the tools that we have made available for anyone who whats to join us, we have developed a method of exploring your own innermost self through learning more about how our Symbols relate to your own life.

Semi-Tropic Spiritualists began in 2012 as an ongoing series of performance works, objects and illustrated texts by Los Angeles-based artists Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg . Their works explore the history of spiritual belief and metaphysical practice in Los Angeles through the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, an organization that created a campsite meeting place outside the city limits of Los Angeles in 1905. Spiritualism has described itself as a science, a philosophy and a religion. The artists are interested in this system as a model for examining ideas of faith and skepticism, belief and charlatanism, as well as for the development of a space dedicated to investigation and the search for knowledge.

The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists have exhibited their installations and performance works at Richard Telles Fine Art , Klowden Mann , The Vincent Price Museum , and Chime & Co. in Los Angeles; Shangri-La, Joshua Tree, CA; and Llano del Rio, CA among other locations. Their work will also be part of the upcoming exhibition Totenpass at Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, in October 2018. Both artists received their MFAs from CalArts in 2008.

Paperback, full color, 126 pages
ISBN: 978-1-947322-93-6
Cover price: $45.00

Today, we’re looking at PARROT 21 – Pre-symbolic by Brian Ang.

Onset of mechanical reproduction transformation. Haphazard administrative visible imagined incorporated morphology aesthetics. Metaphysical greasepaint. Generations of science theory nature pleasure process time space age. Prose forms postures. Stratification. Emphasizing this word and this sentence in history.

Saddle-Stitched chapbook, 20 pages
Matte finish, opaque cream, 70 # text (104 gsm)
Dimensions: 6.125” x 9.375” x 0.125”
ISSN: 2169-3811-21

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