THE COMPANY

MARGO VICTOR

Featuring the Los Angeles premiere of

THE ROTTEN RIOTOUS WEST

October 10 – November 8, 2009
Opening Reception Saturday Oct. 10, 6-9PM

The Company is pleased to present Margo Victor’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, featuring the premiere of The Rotten Riotous West. The film was shot in California’s Mojave Desert, and completed by special invitation while in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts’ Art & Tech program. Victor’s meticulous editing and sound mixing of the film’s footage creates a breathless, hypnotic vision of a contemporary western. The protagonist, a gender-bending gunslinger played by Jenny Shimizu, is a lone figure in the desert landscape. A duel transpires with an unseen enemy, although her revolver is directed at the viewer. Scanning the surroundings and becoming aware of her vulnerable state, the outlaw’s courage is not enough to guarantee her survival.

Three large-scale paintings from 2009 inspired by The Rotten Riotous West will be on exhibit in The Company’s annex. Victor begins with a traditional landscape, and then obliterates the idyllic scene with bold, aluminum-colored strokes. This methodology of building-up-only-to-demolish combines her interest in austere aesthetics and often disturbing tropes of the unexpected. By producing powerful gestures of silver to hide these landscapes, she creates a surface that simultaneously eradicates parts of the original and creates an ordered framework for thought and discovery. Victor’s works quite often begin at a traditional starting point, but by the time she completes her process, the points become mere traces of the original.

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